Fun Cooking At Sunrice

Today is the last day of the term. What makes me very excited about today is not only because I’m getting back my results but also I am going to participate in cooking course at At-Sunrice located near Fort Canning Hill. It is also known as the The Singapore Culinary Academy & Spice Garden.

The chef that taught us how to cook was Chef Xihong, while the one who tested the sensitivity of our taste buds is Chef Dean. Well, this End-Of-Term activity started off with Chef Dean introducing us 4 types of sauces and food with different tastes to test our taste buds. Tested all 4 and but Samuel and Wuxi only tasted 3 as they are unwilling to eat the raw bitter gourd. The fish souce (made of fermented dried fish) is far too salty that it paralysed by taste buds for quite some time =)

The first dish we were taught to make is the Shanghai Dumplings. Looking at Chef Xihong making and kneading the dough as if handling kids toy, I first thought that making the dough is just as simple as ABC. Then she flattened the dough that has been cut into small segments using a traditional Chinese rolling pin, and added some fillings onto the flattened dough. Quickly she wrapped up the dough skillfully and a Shanghai Dumpling is done.

During the hands-on activity, things get so easy that we were asked to make the fillings by mixing some vegetables with given amount of soy sauce, vegetable oil, salt and sugar. However, we find it extremely hard to wrap the fillings nicely into the dough. It requires skills, Chef Xihong said. I screwed up my first one and took quite some time for me to pick up this skill.

While waiting our Shanghai Dumplings that were in the steamer to be cooked thoroughly, we learned how to make rainbow dumplings. Unlike the normal Chinese Dumplings shown in the picture on the left, the Rainbow Dumplings have different colours. We made green (colour from spinach juice) and orange (colour from carrot juice) Rainbow Dumplings, and this time wrapping up the dough with the fillings inside isn’t as difficult as that of Shanghai Dumplings.

Firstly I fold the flattened dough into half with the fillings in the middle, then wrap the dough up on both opened ends of the “dough container”. Then we cook them in hot water for about 10 minutes. My group (consists of Samuel, Wuxi and me myself) made the most Chinese Dumpling, amounting up to 33 pieces – each of us can have 11 pieces each! Others only managed to make about 3 ~ 4 dumplings each person.

Although the course fee of S$40 might seem to be very expensive, I’ve obtained lots of invaluable experience for this course… hmm, now I’m wondering whether mom lets me to make dumplings at home during the June Holidays =)

P.S.: I’ve got my results back! My average MSG is 2.13, yay! Yay!

My results are somehow quite good – I ranked 6th in class! However this mgiht not be the final ranking as there are some problems with other’s result which might turn them to be my greatets rivals overnight!

Argh, just hoping that I can stay in the Top-10 ranking =)