One Year Away

Penny

I have added some pictures to the North Thailand album.  Enjoy!

Joe and I love Thai cuisine and decided that a Thai cooking class would be great way to spend a day.  We registered for a cooking class that promised to teach us how to make green curry paste, green
curry chicken, springrolls and other Thai specialties.

Before going to the cooking class, we made a stop at a local market and an organic farm where the Thai instructors showed  us typical ingredients used in Thai cooking.    We finally learned that the green vegetables in our green curries are two types of eggplant; Joe and I thought that it was some sort of pea and green tomato!

The most difficult part of the class was making the green curry paste.  We had dried spices and fresh ingredients such as garlic and green chillies that we had to grind into a paste using a mortar and pestle.  The sound of 10 people pounding their ingredients into a fine paste was almost deafening but lots of fun.  The paste was used in the green curry chicken that we made.  Using coconut milk as our base gave the curry a rich and creamy texture.

The next dish we made was fried chicken with basil leaves.  This stir fry requires lots of fresh herbs that give it its fresh taste. That was followed by a shrimp Tom Yam soup.  The soup is loaded with ginger
and lemon-grass.  The soup’s special ingredient is the Thai chilli that we added.  Thai chilli is an oily and very spicy chilli mixture.  The instructors came around to add the Thai chilli to our soups.  We were asked whether we wanted farang (foreigner) or Thai spicy.  Most of us went for the farang spicy…  Unfortunately, at lunch when we had the chance to eat our creations, we came to realize that farang spicy was still too much for us.  Most of the soups went untouched.

After lunch it was springroll and desert time.  As we rolled our springrolls, our instructor kept on repeating "I said springrolls not pillows"!  Trying to make pretty round and same sized springrolls proved to be tricky!  Finally, we finished off the class with some bananas in coconut milk.  Thailand is not famous for its deserts and in the Thai language there is no word for desert so the outcome was somewhat disappointing.

We promise to put all of our cooking skills to good use for friends and family when we are back home…  But be warned,the meal will be traditional.  This means eating with your hands or with a fork and spoon only –  think of it as if the spoon was your fork and the fork was your knife.

Course Details:

Provider: The Chiang Mai Thai Farm Cooking School www.thaifarmcooking.com– we booked the class via our guesthouse

Cost : 900 Baht

Duration: 1 day – you are picked up at your hotel/guesthouse at 9am and you are dropped off at 5pm