A small woman with blonde streaks in her dark hair is showing a class at Geylang Serai community centre how to make deep-fried fish with tamarind sauce.

The 20 or so bankers, teachers, housewives and retirees listen as she slowly lowers the fish into hot oil and advises: 'The gentler you are in the kitchen, the gentler it will be with you.'

The instructor with the quiet demeanour is Forest, wife of Mr Sam Leong, the 42-year-old globe-trotting corporate chef and director of kitchens for Tung Lok Group, and a cookbook author and TV celebrity.

While Mrs Leong's husband, famous for inventing cocoa pork ribs, creates menus for the group's restaurants in Singapore, India, China, Indonesia and Japan, she teaches heartlanders how to make Thai dishes such as green mango salad and stir-fried minced meat with basil.

Teaching cooking at community centres may seem a far cry from the life of a celebrity chef's wife.

Sure, the couple live in a two-storey penthouse near Jurong West with their sons, Yew Choong, 17, and Yew Jhow, 15, and where Mrs Leong, 38, holds cooking demonstrations for friends.

But she has a passion for teaching, and after qualifying as a People's Association trainer, now conducts courses in Thai cooking in community centres. She teaches at up to four CCs at a time, in courses that last three to four weeks.

'I don't just teach cooking. I teach how to choose ingredients and substitute ingredients and healthy food,' she says.

Her connnection with food and with people of all ages and walks of life may be explained by her roots.

She hails from Bangkok where she met her husband in 1988, after she was posted to work at a restaurant where he was her supervisor.

Her childhood home was one of thousands in a sprawling shantytown close to Bangkok's centre. She spent her first 11 years in a single-room wooden house with a tin roof. It was like a kampung in the middle of the city, she says.

The home, long since demolished, was in what is now known as the Sapan Kwai area, about 15 minutes away from the famous Chatuchak Market.

Her father was a chef in various Western restaurants but the pay was low and the work sporadic.

There were days when all that her family - parents, herself and an older and younger brother - had was rice and fish sauce. Sometimes, there was nothing to eat, she says.

Her mother focused on looking after her elder brother, who was mentally handicapped.

So supervised by her father, she began cooking for the family from the age of five. She woke up at dawn to start the charcoal stove, cook the day's rice in a big pot, boil water and offer food to monks. The family had plumbing and electricity, but no fridge or TV.

Her two brothers would still be in bed while she worked.

'The men did not have to wake up that early, it was their privilege,' she says.

Dinner was the largest meal and was usually raw vegetables dipped in prawn paste, soup and a simple meat dish.

Her father taught her to shop and cook - skills she is grateful for - although back then, she saw it as a chore. 'The first time I used the wok was to fry a fish, when I was five. I was scared of the hot oil so I threw the fish in and the oil splashed on me and my dad,' she recalls.

'I learnt that when you are gentle with something, it will be gentle to you, and when I am teaching, I remind my students of that,' she says.

When she was 11, the family moved to what she still calls the two-room 'cement house' near Don Muang airport. Her parents, both 62, live there today.

She was a good student in school. But when she was 17, she could not get a place in one of the hotly-contested subsidised universities.

So she tried for a place at the Hotel and Tourism Institute, run by the Tourism Authority of Thailand. She did well enough in her entrance exams to get a place.

Located in Bangsaen, near Pattaya's beach resorts, the institute was a more affordable option, but her father could only manage to pay some of the fees. 'He told me the rest was up to me,' she says.

She worked up to five nights a week after class, waitressing or helping in kitchens, and managed to pay her fees for the two-year course.

As part of her post-graduation attachment, she worked as a dessert chef in the Lok Wah Hin Chinese restaurant in the Novotel Bangkok, where she met rising culinary star, Malaysian-born Sam Leong. He and his father, Leong Mun Soon, were employed there as a team after having made their reputation in Singapore and Malaysia.

She married Sam Leong, had two sons, and moved to Singapore in 1993.

Lonely and traumatic

There were many trying moments after Mrs Leong, then 20, and her two young children moved here, into an HDB estate.

At one time, seven people stayed in the three-bedroom rental flat in Bukit Merah. The couple and their children shared the home with Mr Leong's Cantonesespeaking mother, elder sister and younger brother.

All the adults except Mrs Leong had day jobs. While they were away, she coped with raising the two boys, one under a year old and the other aged 2 1/2.

'I was lonely. My life totally changed. I felt the... trauma,' she says, searching for the right word in English.

Her rapid-fire English - which has a Thai twang that gets stronger when she becomes animated - was not easily understood in Bukit Merah.

Her husband worked long hours and there were months when he did not take a day off, she recalls. 'I just had to learn and survive.'

She had lived under frugal conditions before but had never felt so shut off from the world.

Mr Leong says: 'I was 101 per cent involved in work and left everything to her.' His head was so wrapped up in food, he remembers having to ring her for his own mailing address.

He says he is lucky that she got on so well with his family in that tightly packed flat in the early years.

Slowly, she learnt to speak Cantonese and so could chat with her mother- in-law, easing the loneliness.

Mr Leong's older relatives had trouble pronouncing her first name - the one in her identity card - which is Aranya. They called her 'Aiyah'.

So she decided to use the English meaning of Aranya - Forest.

As the years went by, she picked up Singlish. 'I don't say, 'I went to the market'. I had to say 'I yesterday go to the market already',' she says.

Today, Mr Leong says he is lucky that his wife almost singlehandedly ran the household and raised their sons, leaving him free to develop his cooking career. Both are now Singapore citizens.

She, on the other hand, admires how he managed to achieve his success despite being considered an outsider. The tightly-knit circle of Hong Kong chefs here found it hard to accept that Mr Leong could know Chinese cuisine as well as they did.

It did not help that he was an iconoclast, she says. Mr Leong stepped out of the kitchen to speak to customers, something unheard of in Chinese restaurants back in the early 1990s. He could converse in English with them and the media, which the Hong Kong chefs could not do.

'I don't want to use the word mafia, but there was something like that going on,' she says.

'They met every night to drink and chat. They thought he was arrogant because he was still very young and already a chef. He did not join in. He preferred to go home.'

Mrs Leong's own move into the cookery arena began three years ago, when, after making a meal for some neighbours, she was persuaded to conduct small Thai cooking demonstrations at home.

Ms Vanessa Ng, 24, a lawyer and a close family friend, credits her flair for teaching to her quiet determination and ability to empathise with others.

She adds that Mrs Leong and her husband seem to have a partnership that goes beyond words. When they cook for guests at home, their teamwork in the kitchen is 'flawless'.

'There's a connection in the way they interact that's deeper than what you would see in a married couple,' she says.

Indeed, Mrs Leong still waits for her husband to come home every night so they can go out - him to jog and she to cycle alongside.

'Everyone around here knows that the man who doesn't wear a shirt who jogs at midnight is him,' says Mrs Leong.

Meanwhile, she is now working on a cookbook - her second. Unlike the first, 2007's Cooking Classics: Thailand, which focused on dishes popular with non-Thais, her new book will feature dishes Thais like but others may find unfamiliar, such as wing bean salad.

'You don't see these dishes much in Singapore but they are very, very delicious,' she says.

She is driven to write and to teach, not by an entrepreneurial streak, but a need to connect with people.

'I don't want to do it professionally because I don't want to raise anybody's expectations. So I don't advertise.

'I do it for the passion. I don't think about the money. If I go out to work in a restaurant I'd earn more,' she says.

This woman from a humble background adds: 'There's lots of love and fun at the community centre.'

Love over a slow dance

Things might have been very different if there had been just one more chef's position open in the Thai restaurant at the Novotel Bangkok in 1988.

Mrs Sam Leong, then 19 and known as Aranya Buranate, was a fresh graduate of Thailand's Hotel and Tourism Institute. Her posting was to be at the hotel's Thai restaurant, but every position was taken.

So she was sent to Lok Wah Hin, its Chinese restaurant, where 21-year-old chef Sam Leong was her supervisor.

There, she worked on desserts, but also hauled garbage, made dough and chopped vegetables. Mr Leong noticed she could speak English and gave her a new duty: translator. He was on a short-term contract and it did not make sense for him to learn Thai, he says.

Mr Leong dated Forest, his translator-apprentice, secretly when he was a sous chef in Bangkok as staff were forbidden to fraternise.

To her, he was only a stern overseer.

'He was very strict, more strict than he is now, because as sous chef (second chef in charge), he had to ensure the work process was done correctly,' she says.

Mr Leong, in any case, had his eye on the attractive girls working at the hotel reception, not those slaving in the kitchens. The couple both agree on that point today.

His penchant for dating women gave him a reputation as a playboy, a label that later worried her father, a chef who heard things on the industry grapevine.

Today, Mr Leong says with a laugh that he was simply eager to settle down and find a marriage partner. So he was auditioning as many potential partners as he could in the shortest time. The wining, dining and gift-giving drained his bank account dry, he admits.

He noticed the translator/apprentice as a woman only during a staff holiday to Pattaya, at a disco. 'It happened during a slow dance,' he says.

Several months of furtive dating later - staff are forbidden to fraternise in Thai hotels - he popped the question in a somewhat unorthodox, yet uniquely Sam Leong way.

'Over a lunch break, he said, 'I want to take care of you',' she says.

To show his sincerity, he proposed they open a joint account immediately. She would see, and be in control of, his pay. It was his way of saying he trusted her completely and with her in charge of his money, she could make sure a family could be provided for.

Both went to the bank straightaway and she saw the toll his high-turnover dating style had taken on his finances. But she went ahead with the match anyway, she says, laughing.

He says he was drawn to her calm, gentle ways, especially her kindness to his father, who also worked in Lok Wah Hin in Bangkok.

Sam Leong was sous chef to his father, Leong Mun Soon, the chef at the restaurant.

Liver cancer was to take the elder Leong soon after the couple married, but while he was still working, he 'treated her like a daughter', says Sam Leong.

Father and future daughter-in-law had grown close because she had helped the elder Leong cope in a strange land. She translated for him, as he could only speak Cantonese and a little English. She made sure his pot of Chinese tea was filled and gave him food such as Chinese 'bao' or buns, as he was not used to the Thai food served to kitchen staff.

So when Mr Leong finally revealed who his fiancee was, his father was shocked - their secret dating had taken place right under his nose for months - but also very pleased.

Mrs Leong admires her husband's creative, often wacky outlook on the world, mixed with what she calls the lack of chef vices such as the usual smoking, drinking and hanging out with the boys till the wee hours.

'He is unpredictable but also practical. He adds spice to life,' she says.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Oct 6, 2008.