The Gili Island Cooking School

For a bit of fun I thought I would try the cooking school on Gili Trawangan at Sweet and Spicy.

As I said it was a bit of fun.

You get to cook five dishes but eat six.

Sweet and spicy cooking class

It was good for me being a nutritionist seeing how food has been bastardised to suit the Western Palate. Loads of MSG (salt) and loads of other things that just are not healthy but it was fun and for two girls in the group it looked like their first cooking experience. Including stirring something in a pot!

Green sticky rice balls – the green dye was banana flavoured!

We made some green sugar balls in sticky rice…. I think they call this food but I could debate that.

We also made gado gado (frozen vegetables with a chilli peanut sauce).

My favorites were definitely the chicken Lai (recipe from a Lombok village) and the steamed fish.

For all the herbs we used it lacked the same dynamic taste sensations that other countries have in their foods – that or the herbs were old and had lost their kick.

Flaming HOT!

The most fun by far was flaming the chicken.

I had a scary kitchen incident growing up and we accidently torched my friends kitchen when cooking popcorn. The fat caught on fire, then exploded. I ended up with stitches in my leg (after diving through a window to escape) one girl ended up in hospital with concussion and the girl closest ended up with nothing as the flame died down pretty quick! Oh that’s right. She threw water on the burning fat. An absolute no-no.

Anyway getting comfortable with flames in the kitchen was cathartic and fun.

Would I recommend it – sure. It was only 350,000 (35USD) and you got to eat the food. Times were at 11am, 4pm and 9pm.