Thai Cooking School

Today I took an excellent full-day Thai cooking class with Asia Scenic Cooking School a bit north of central Chiang Mai. Meow our guide (yes that's her real name!) was fun and professional. With a tip it was about fifty bucks. 

After being picked up in a minivan at my funky guesthouse, HeyHa, we drove to a local market. She showed us and explained the rice, vegetables, and noodles used in various Thai dishes. Most of the ingredients I was familiar with but they had some unusual things like pink eggs. The eggs got their colour from being soaked in ammonia. Who in the world thought of that one? 

There are too many arcane tidbits of information that I learned to explain them all here. In general, Thai cooking is basic. Besides having the correct fresh ingredients, the most important things are getting the portions right, and the sequence in which they are cooked.

We drove to a "farm" where we toured the herb and vegetable garden where Meow patiently explained them all. There were six people in my group and we made a seven course meal. Five of the dishes we got to choose. She taught each course as a group even though we had different dishes. She would ask us each how spicy we wanted each dish before we prepared them. "How sexy are you feeling?" she would joke. If you wanted a lot of spice then you were very sexy. I always had a tonne of chillies in my dishes so I was called Sexy Man. My Leo ego loved that one even though I'm sure she says that to all the boys.

While preparing our desert, I was the only one whose dish did not have a banana. "Sexy man has no banana" I had to joke. That got a good giggle out of the ladies in my group. For the desert I picked sticky rice with mango because the other two deserts, banana in coconut milk, and deep fried banana seemed too straight forward. Good choice! I don't like rice that much to begin with but this dish was interesting. Cooking sticky rice is a time consuming process involving many steps. The most interesting part was obtaining the colour of the rice. A liquid extract from a pretty flower she showed us in the garden looked like blue food colouring. Adding a squeeze of lime instantly turned it purple! 

The highlight for me was making my own curry paste by hand. Together we made the base for red and green curry. Being one of the two guys I was lead red curry masher with my rock mortar and pestle. I wore my sunglasses for safety from the random chilli spray. From the red curry base I made Khaw Soi curry, a northern Thai specialty.  From this you make the "must try" food of Chiang Mai, Khaw Soi Soup. The tasty soup contains egg noodles and is garnished with deep fried noodles and a sprinkle of herbs. I also made hot basil stir fried, chicken spicy salad, the local Tom Sab soup, and a spring roll as a group. We were left with a well designed cook book that easily explains all the dishes on the list as well as tech support! We were encouraged to email her in the future if we had any cooking questions as there was a lot of information to ingest besides the food.

How was the food? Great! Tasted like Thai food to me. One of my dishes used two different types of basil which I enjoyed along with fresh mint and coriander, all from the garden. This is the way food should be. Simple, local and fresh.

I was a little bit ill before I started the class. The night before I was eating everything in sight at the massive outdoor weekend night market in the heart of the Old City. My stomach was doing flip flops and I had some flu like symptoms so that probably explains why I was, without exaggerating, putting three times the amount of chillies in my food as everyone else. Antibiotics took care of the illness later. 

Tomorrow I'm renting a scooter for two days to explore the region. Tonight I'll probably take a taxi to Nimmanhaemin Road for a nightcap. The couple that manages the HeyHa guesthouse described it as the hipster area and is full of bars. Should be a hoot. I'm imagining happy Asian twenty somethings with strategically messed up hair and designer T-shirts (wearing backwards baseball caps of course) joking with each other beside absorbed glowing faces glued to their smart phones in a moody sidewalk bar.