Day 49 - Food Playground Cooking Class

Chicken Satay with peanut sauce, fried egg noodles and a coconut dessert

Today we attended a cooking class offered by a company called "Food Playground". Our teacher however made clear that this course was not about playing with food at all. We were a group of six people, working in pairs. What a hazard that the other girl from Australia had graduated in summer, like me, and was now also on a sabbatical journey with her mother, like me (almost). But even more breathtaking was that the woman that asked my father by entering the class: "Are you from California? You look familiar!" - was right!! My father and her (she lives in California) haven't seen each other in 14 years, and now they meet in a cooking class on the same day in Singapore. How small the world is, actually. It's unbelievable!

Our cooking plan today was Chicken Satay, Char Kway Teow and Kueh Dadar. We learned a lot about Singaporean kitchen, especially that the well-known Singapore Fried Noodles or Singapore Fried Rice are not Singaporean at all. Our teacher told us that even she experienced the severe poorness in Singapore (and she is a young mother of two children 10 and 12), and that this poorness and need can be discovered in the culturally correct food. We learned as well that things like carrot cake aren't really a cake, and actually have nothing to do with carrots - it's just the direct word-by-word translation.

These cooking classes are not only educational and fun, but also bring housewives back to work who cannot do a full-time job due to their family commitments. I believe it's really valuable and important not to learn from a professional chef, but by true experiences from housewives. Good thing!

Another selection of herb teas from a Chinese medicine shop

In the evening we attended a university guest presentation dealing with neurological marketing which was pretty interesting. How the brain works, how it reacts to different sorts of ads, how it reacts different to differently edited versions of the same ad. Even interesting to experience the different university behaviors from Switzerland over Japan to Singapore - the most relaxed atmosphere until now.

JUST GREAT - THANK YOU