Cooking with KD

Today we had our first cooking lesson, provided by one of the lovely ladies who we work with. We made green curry, spring rolls and pad wun sen (mostly this was just with leftover from the spring rolls filling). The recipe for green curry is as follows.

Ingredients:
Kha (I think this is what it was called, it is related to ginger but not ginger)
garlic
shallot
rind from a type of lime (yes there are different types of limes... this was news to me) which is knocked down with a long bamboo pole from a tree by a neighbour (we didn't have any of this ingredient so had to go down the road to find one)
lemon grass (about 3X as much lemon grass as any of the previous ingredients)
paste made from tiny shrimps (and other things, not sure what this is called)
chillies (MUST be green -it is green curry after all) to taste
chicken
coconut milk
fish sauce

-Put the Kha and lime rind in a mortar and pestle -beat into submission
-add the lemon grass -beat into submission
-add the chillies -beat into a paste (if too dry can add salt here to draw out moisture)
-when the former are pastey, add the shrimp paste, the garlic and the onion (adding these together means that the shrimp paste won't stink)

-fry the curry paste with some coconut milk (apparently if you do this properly you separate the coconut milk and fry the curry paste with what is essentially the coconut cream from the top)
-add the chicken
-add more coconut milk (this would be the less fatty underneath bit)
-bring to a boil
-add eggplants, long beans and chillies that are "just for decoration" (also somewhat spicy)
-just before finishing, add Thai basil, lime leaves (from same tree as landlord lime) and coriander (if you have it, apparently not essential)

Serve with rice/roti/or croissant (one of the staff enjoys this little taste of Thai-French fusion) haha

We can't wait to learn more so that we can cook for everybody back home!!! Delicious!