In-Depth Post #3

 

Hello. Welcome to my third In-Depth post of 2022. 

These last couple of weeks were more relaxed than the previous week, however a lot happened, and I have a lot of mistakes to learn from. The first task I had was working on the second aspect of my project, which is researching Thai culture. I learned numerous facts about Thailand and Thai culture. For example, did you know that Thailand is a Buddhist country with over 40,000 temples, with approximately 30,000 that are still actively used? I learned many fun facts like this over the past couple weeks. Having a better understanding of Thailand will help me learn about Thai culture because I will have a strong foundation of information that I can reference while learning about the country and it’s cooking style. 

My meeting with my mentor this week was short, but detailed. I emailed my mentor and asked to arrange a meeting because I was feeling confident with Pad Thai, and I was hoping to challenge myself with a new meal. I wanted to learn how to make red curry (because my family told me they wanted me to make it for them). I never made curry before, so I was hoping for advice and nuggets of wisdom that I could use when cooking. He told me about curry paste, which is the main ingredient in curry. It gives curries their colour, flavour, and spice. He told me that making curry paste requires a mortar and pestle, which is used to crush and mix ingredients together into a mush/ paste. Unfortunately, I do not own a mortar and pestle, so I needed an alternative. My mentor told me that I could also use a food processor, but the downside is that the food processor can become permanently stained by red peppers. I don’t want to ruin the food processor, so I guess I must buy a mortar and pestle. Besides the paste, curries are relatively simple. All one must do is mix the curry paste with coconut milk in a saucepan, then add the other ingredients like meat and vegetables. 

What went particularly well during your mentoring sessions? 

Something that went well during my mentor meetings was going to the meetings with a plan or goal. For my first meeting, I wanted to learn the basics of Thai cooking and about Pad Thai. This week’s goal was to learn about curry. Going to the meetings with a goal helps to give the meeting direction and structure. Sharing my plan with my mentor also assists in conveying my progress to my mentor. 

Something else that went well was going to the meeting with recipes and my cookbook. Bringing the recipe, I plan on using to cook is helpful because I can discuss the steps of the cooking process with my mentor. I brought a recipe from the website https://hot-thai-kitchen.com/, which was incredibly useful because the recipe also had an attached video. The video has a chef going through the steps of the recipe. The only downside to having a video is it makes my mentor and I hungry. 

What three strategies could improve the quality of your mentoring interactions?  

What is the action plan for implementing each of the three strategies? 

The first strategy to improve my meetings is getting prepared for the meeting beforehand. This means having the page in the cookbook bookmarked or the website already open to the page with the recipe. This will keep me from flipping through the cookbook for the right page, thus making the meeting more efficient. 

To implement the first strategy, I can bookmark the pages I want to discuss beforehand. I can also write down questions I have, so I don’t forget them by the time I meet with my mentor.  

The second improvement I can make is focusing more on communication. When I talk to my mentor, I find myself not communicating well. I often need to rephrase my messages and he doesn’t always understand my questions. To improve my communication, I will get comfortable talking to my mentor and I will clearly state my ideas. I will also share my ideas more openly because until now I have mostly kept my thoughts to myself. This will keep communication between my mentor, and I smooth. 

The third improvement would be to meet with my mentor more regularly. Meeting with my mentor more regularly would help me to get more comfortable talking with my mentor. It would also allow me to ask him more questions. To implement this strategy, one way to do this would be by having a scheduled time for meetings. Another way to meet regularly with my mentor would be by scheduling the next meeting at the end of the current meeting. Planning our meetings in person would be more efficient because we can discuss the best possible time to meet. This would also make the meetings more focused and organized.  

I cooked one major meal over the last couple weeks. I once more cooked Pad Thai, but I also made red curry. However, to continue to challenge myself, I made the Pad Thai without a recipe. On top of cooking without a recipe, I also tried cooking by myself for the first time. Cooking solo taught me that the most important skill for a solo chef is time management. One must be able to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. One must be able to stir food, moderate the temperature, add spices, and a variety of other tasks all at once. At one point it got super stressful because I had to both rice and red curry on the oven. I had to constantly switch between stirring the rice, checking the red curry recipe, and moderating the heat of the oven. Thankfully I was able to turn the heat down and cook slower, which helped to keep the food from burning 

To make red curry, I used store-bought red curry paste. I used store bought paste because it was my first time making red curry and I wanted to know the basic steps before making it on my own. I used the recipe that was attached to the red curry paste. It said to mix the paste with coconut milk in a large saucepan. Because I was cooking by myself, I assumed that a saucepan was the same as a frying pan. 

…they are not the same thing. A saucepan is a pot, and a frying pan is a normal pan. I didn’t know this, so I used a frying pan to make my red curry. It didn’t turn out well. Most of the curry had evaporated by the time I was done cooking it, due to the large area of curry that was exposed. So, in the end I had a frying pan with a thin layer of curry covering it. I am not satisfied with my curry, and I will make it again soon. I now know that a saucepan is a pot, which should make my red curry better in the future. 

My goals for the next few weeks are to learn how to make red curry paste, to buy a mortar and pestle, and to make a better red curry. 

One question I want to learn the answer to is: 

How do you regulate the spice a dish has? 

 

Here are some pictures of my cooking. 

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