Good Bye Ubud and Hello Seminyak

Today we took a Balinese cooking class. Our driver Tata picked us up and we stopped at the market. We tried a few new fruits, salak (snake fruit), mangosteen, and rambutan (red spiky fruit). They were all very good! We also tried some pastries such as a banana cake, sticky rice, milk cake (Tata’s favorite) and rempeyek (a peanut cracker). We also enjoyed these. We walked through the butcher area where they had chicken, duck, and beef. Next we stopped at some working rice fields. We walked through them and saw people harvesting the rice and then hitting it on a basket to remove the rice. Tata mentioned this process would take two days for the field they were harvesting. After harvesting the rice from the fields the outer shell must be removed. It used to take a person two days to remove the outer shell from one kilogram of rice, but now they have a machine that does a kilogram in 5 minutes!

Next it was time for the main event: cooking😃. Our chef teacher was our driver’s cousin Wayan, he owned the whole operation. There were the six of us plus two other couples, one from the Philippines, and one from the Netherlands (Dad had great fun talking to the couple from the Netherlands!) in our group. We made two different sauces and both started with garlic and chilis. We made 7 different dishes, most not too spicy. We also made an awesome dessert called Klepon Cake—boiled green rice dough with palm sugar in the middle rolled in coconut- so good! After cooking we were able to eat what we had created and a delicious feast was had by all😁.

After lunch it was time to go back to Ubud and say good-bye to James and Heidi as they were heading north on their own. We then headed to Seminyak for our last few days in Bali. We found our AirBnB after a crazy car drive in lots of traffic. After settling in we went to the Double Six beach, had dinner at La Plancha and watched a beautiful sunset.🌅Read more