chaing-mai cooking class

Our last day in Chaing-mai we signed up to take an all day cooking class, the first and best in Chiang-Mai :)

We started off at the local market. We had each selected an item we were responsible for finding at the market. Kor got bananas, Lo - limes, and me, I got eggs. We found our ingredients, learned a little about Thai plants and foods, then headed to the cooking class.

These are the meals we prepared:

-Rice noodles... wide noodles with some veggies and tofu, my favorite!!
-fish in a red curry paste with some veggies/spices and wrapped in banana leaves to be steamed for 15 minutes
-yellow curry and potatoes and tofu - mmm!
-soy bean meat substitute (actually really good) with cashew nuts and veggies (this was the overall favorite)
-banana in coconut milk dessert with sugar and palm sugar
-spicy shrimp salad - SPICY!

almost everything called for clam sauce and this fish liquid that is made by taking fish, sugar and salt and sticking it in a barrel for 9 months and then the juice that is produced is used for cooking! sick! and delicious :) all at once. The class worked like this... We would watch a demonstration performed by one of three people (the cooking teachers, all of whom were very funny, our group was laughing constantly throughout the day), then we would be sent to our outside cooking stations where our carefully portioned ingredients sat ready for us to prepare the dish. actually, it was so well organized that it was difficult to mess up anything (although Kor did manage to burn his fish). the chefs were walking around yelling instruction at us the whole time, so everything turned out quite well because if you started to mess it up they'd quickly made a save and turn down your heat or add some coconut milk or something.

we would make one of the dishes, go eat it, make a few more things, eat them together for lunch, make some more... dessert... that was how the day went. I was stuffed by the end of the class, and very pleased with my cooking skills :) if only I always had someone to prepare every ingredient for me and give me instruction along the way. the biggest challenge with replicating our meals in the US is probably simply finding the ingredients. But I do believe the cook books we were given offer ideas for substitutes when you cannot find pea eggplant or other obscure Thai ingredients at Safeway. I took the leftovers from four of my six meals with me, and gave them to a little girl begging on the side of the street... I didn't stick around to get her review however.

I definitely recommend the cooking class experience. It was a total blast and a great way to experience authentic Thai food that you know is prepared in a safe way :)