If you ever find yourself in the Helms Bakery area of Culver City, do yourself and your colleagues a huge favor and stop on by Tea Forest. Not only are the staff some of the nicest people in the history of ever, this place is filled up with some serious yum.

After a long, hard day of animating I usually need a break and head on down for an Iced Green Tea. All of their iced tea selections are super tasty, and they offer some unusual teas such as Earl Grey or Mugicha. I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t tried any of their hot teas yet, cause hey, it’s summertime. But they have an expansive offering of hot teas, with 5 or more varieties each of Green, Black, Oolong, etc. on the menu. They also offer coffee, for those of you who like that sort of thing. Ooh! The Green Tea Frappe is also a thing of beauty, comparable to Coffee Bean’s Green Tea Ice Blended, and I think just a tiny bit better. And don’t overlook the boba milk tea selections. Super yum, and it tastes like they use actual brewed tea instead of the creepy powdered stuff.

As for treats, man do they have some yum sammiches. I’ve been for lunch several times, and the food is always fresh, high quality, tasty, and above all, very reasonably priced. They also offer some baked goods in the form of muffins and cookies and other diet breaking awesomes.

I really suggest this as a nice, calm place to take a break or have a lunch. They don’t mind you hanging out and doing your thing, and like I said, super nice! Beats the pants off Starbucks any day.

We picked “Revisiting the Wok” which not only promised to teach us some delicious wok recipes, but also the proper care and cleaning of the new wok we got to take home with us! Our class was taught by a great guy, Chef Jet Tila.

He’s NPR’s Thai Food Correspondent, family restaurateur, and owner of America’s first Thai Market. He teaches at multiple cooking schools in the area, including Sur La Table. Don’t let that innocent, charming smile fool you. This guy is as funny and boisterous as they come. Our class was a fairly quiet and low key group of people: two mother/son pairs, three young couples including Firat and I and our friends Kevin and Lindsay, and three individuals. Besides the Chef, there were two sous chefs assistants and a couple guys in the back on dish washing duty.

The class started with a short lecture of The Wok Commandments, about the proper order of ingredients no matter what type of dish you’re making. This was followed by a 20 minute demo on how you approach chopping the different types of vegetables (“the veg”) and aromatics that most commonly appear in wok cooking. Typically it was cutting things on the biased for a “sexy cut”. Then we returned to our tables to talk through all 6 recipes and discuss some of the ingredients we might be unfamiliar with.

After that, we broke into pairs or 3s and picked the dish we were going to make. Firat and I got Tom Kah Gai soup, which I had mentioned earlier as being one of the reasons for picking the class. We started from scratch with the stock, and I could immediately pick up on which ingredients my previous attempts of the soup had been lacking. Namely, galanga instead of the common ginger, kaffir lime leaves which I’d lost hope in finding, and chili paste in soybean oil which offers an amazing depth of flavor without heat and adds that signature red oil on top of the soup.

In the midst of the cooking portion, Chef Jet would randomly call out “2 Minute Demo” for odds and ends. Mostly for cutting new ingredients, such as making a Pineapple bowl to serve the pineapple fried rice in (Firat’s favorite). Also, after finishing our prep work, we’d individual season our new woks, removing the plasticy coating with a salt rub over heat, then a quick scrub under plain water, followed by reheating on the burner to dry.

At the end, everyone served up their food buffet style and discussed their dishes. Firat and I are proud to say that almost everyone complimented our soup first. Some of our favorite dishes were Fried Shrimp Cakes, a mix of minced shrimp and pork with garlic and ginger, pressed into patties, coated with panko and fried. There was also an excellent Korean cellophane noodle dish (chap chae?) that was really tasty. They poured some complimentary 2 buck chuck wine with our meal, then we left with recipes and woks in hand!

What Gwen learned:
-Ive denounced kikkoman american soy sauce. Buy a chinese, a thai, and a Japanese version and have all three in your pantry to really alter the flavor and authenticity of the dish you’re making.
-Never use soap in your wok.
-When making Thai food, absolutely no kosher salt is required. Only season with fish sauce.
-Shrimp cakes are delicious.

What Firat learned:
-Woks are covered with a thin, layer of plastic when you first purchase them.
-I don’t like cabbage in Tom Kah Gai soup.
-Shrimp cakes are delicious.

Would we go here again? Absolutely! But more importantly, we’d seek out classes specifically taught by Jet. He promised us all a tour of his market, and restaurant recommendations by email whenever we’d like. An all around extremely knowledgeable fun “edutainment” guy.

www.newschoolofcooking.com
www.chefjet.com