Thai Cooking

So we have spent 2 days traveling up into the mountains and seeing some outdoor thing, so whats next. Well we found a very well recommended Thai cooking class online. We got picked up at 8 am and headed over to a women's house. On the side of her house was a covered porch and there were already 8 cooking stations just like you would find on Iron Chef. We met the women that would be leading the course, Yui. Yui is a really cool, eccentric woman that wants to spend her life teaching others how to make traditional and yet simple Thai meals. She says that she doesn’t even like most of the restaurants in Chang Mai because they are not fresh and do not use simple ingredients. She taught us that Thai cooking is about using what you have and what is fresh, as opposed to a set recipe.

I should say we "TRIED" to start the day at 8am!!! Someone decided to run right into a glass door!!! Nice Nicole!

We found it pretty damn funny!


Anyways, so for just about 30 US dollars for the next 6 hours we learned how to make Thai dishes. I have to tell you that I had more fun and learned more at this cooking class than I have had in Thailand so far. She would teach us about different ingredients and tell us how to get the ingredients in the US.
First she would demonstrate how to prepare the dish. We would then taste her dish to know how it was suppose to taste and then we would go make the exact same dish. The first 3 dishes we made were so simple, it was just silly. And the dishes I MADE tasted better than most the ones I have ever tasted in the US. I was just amazed.

Our first dish was Pad Thai. And I can’t even describe all the delicious flavors we had in our pad Thai. If you ever eat Pad Thai in the states with ketchup on it, send it back!!!
2nd up was Chicken with cashew nuts. It had to be the simplest dish we made all day. It didn’t have more than 6 ingredients and took about 5 mins to cook. Yet it had the most unbelievable flavor.
3rd up was Green Curry with chicken. MY FAVORITE!!! I actually made a better green curry than most of the green curry I have ever had!!! How unreal, to think that you can cook your favorite dish half way around the world. Yui taught us that there are 4 immediate tastes to a good curry. Creamy. ??? Salty. Heat. Good thing i have a cook book to remind me.
After we finished the curry we went with Yui to a local food market. She took us around the market and showed us all the ingredients we were working with. She also taught us what was and wasn’t available in the US and showed us what was normally imported to China. We started our market visit with a bag of Thai iced tea. YUMMM!!!

Others felt the need to use the ice tea bag for other purposes!
Did you know that Thailand has its own type of garlic. Yep regular garlic and Thai garlic are much different.
And did you know that people actually use cow blood balls. I don't know why and don't care to ask. But here you go!
And did you know that there are lots of different type of basil. Traditional basil that is sweet. Lemon basil, that smells more like lemons than lemons do. And royal basil that has hints of purple in it. Nothing really exciting about eggs. Except that in Asia they have "1000 year old eggs" (the pink ones)which are actually just eggs that have been buried in the ground and fermented for about 2 years. I took this picture because the sign here displaying the 1000 year old eggs says and i quote "Horse Shit Egg's". So go ahead. Enjoy!
We walked around with her and just explored the rest of it. Here are dried fish waiting to be sold. And if you can’t see them, there are more flies and ants on these things than you would ever want to eat.

Random Asian vegetable.
Last up at the market. I thought this was rather cool. This rubber banded group of herbs and vegetables is actually a soup kit. You can just drop by the market and pick up one cheap. Kinda the Campbell's soup of Asia thing.
Back to cooking...
4th up we made another favorite of mine, Tom Yum Koong(shrimp). I love just about anything served with coconut milk and this dish was great. We even put shrimp heads in the dish to make it more traditional and they added some extra flavor. BTW, presentation is everything…
Finally, we made some vegetable spring rolls that again were very simple and we finished off our meal with sticky rice with mango's.
So as i said, an awesome way to spend your day. 30 bucks for a full days of food, pretty well worth it.