COVID-19: DAY 41 SHELTER IN PLACE APR 26 2020

I have accepted that this is the new normal and I don't want to go back to how it used to be.  Today I feel resigned that this is life and we are facing a future so vastly different from the past.  

I have not been sleeping well.  I slept at 4 am today and woke up at 8.  I'm trying to stay awake and resisting the bed's call for me to take a nap so I distracted myself and made mango sticky rice from scratch.  If it was warm enough, I'd grow the mangoes myself.  I have plenty of time.

On our trip to Chiang Mai, Thailand last year, we took a full day cooking class at an organic farm where we learned to cook 5 different dishes, each person can choose the 5 dishes they would like to learn to cook.  On the top of my list was learning how to cook Pad Thai and Mango Sticky Rice. We were picked up by our local guide at our hotel and taken to the local market where the cooking instructor gave us an introduction to the most common ingredients used in Thai cooking.  Since I grew up in the Philippines, I was familiar with about half of the ingredients she showed, the other half, I was familiar with because I just like to cook.  She asked me, 'Are you a chef?'  My daughter answered for me and said, 'Yes! She is a chef'.  Ok, I'm a chef.  The kid sometimes has more faith in me than I do in myself.  I'll take that title, thank you very much.  

Zabb E Lee Cooking School Chiang Mai

Picking Butterfly Pea Flower Shoots

Learning to cook Pad Thai

The cooking class was a fun and memorable experience.  We learned about ingredients and made curry paste the traditional way, with mortar and pestle.  Even my husband, who really isn't much of a cook, enjoyed the experience and even used the skills he learned to whip up a Thai dish for us a few months ago.  

  

Today, I made Mango Sticky Rice for the first time since our trip. I should have used more butterfly pea flower to make the rice a richer blue/purple color.  I bought the pea flowers during that trip to the market because it was anew ingredient that I have never used before.  I also bought Kafir Lime Leaves but left it it Manila when I  checked customs and realized I cannot bring the leaves to the USA. 

Cooking this today really lifted my spirits.  I do not draw, I only play a little bit of piano and a sprinkle of guitar.  Cooking is my creative outlet, and gives me so much joy when the people I love get to enjoy the dishes I make.