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Published: January 9th 2008
Thai Market
Lots of interesting food stuffsThe last thing we decided to do in Chiang Mai was to do a Thai cooking class. It was excellent and we had wished we had done it on the first day of our trip. It gave us so much more insight into Thai culture and food. The food is amazing here and is one of the reasons to go to Thailand. The other thing is that they don't use much dairy - they use coconut milk instead of cream or milk and thus it was great for Heather's lactose intolerance.
The cooking course started with a trip to the local market. This was an environmentally friendly trip with baskets for our produce rather than the plastic bags. Thailand has a hug plastic bag and straw probelm. They give you a plastic bag with everything and it causes massive problems with sewage blockages etc. There is also a big problem with minimal receycling happening. Plastic bottles are everywhere. On our dive trip (see later) we must have gone through 50- 60 plastic bottles that day from water. Not a single one will be recycled. Now many of the travel companies are giving tourists shoulder bags that say "no plastic
Egg plants
Multiple varieties of egg plant... bags please" and are trying to make it an issue for tourists to be aware of.
Anyway, back to the cooking class. Our guide/chef for the day was excellent. He was really funny and made everything seem really simple. One of the things I liked in the class was that whilst we were cooking someone put all of dishes out by our stove. This invisible person also washed our dishes and tidied up. If this were to happen automatically with cooking I would do lots of it!
We started with Chicken and cashew nuts. It was so good and so easy to make - we plan to make this often at home. We then made a Coconut soup that I didn't love, but Heather did. We also made a Spicy Thai Salad - vermicelli noodles and chilli +++.
THe afternoon meals were awesome with Red Chicken curry made form scratch. As you can see from the photos the main ingredient was red chili peppers. these were mashed into tiny pieces and actually the dish didn't end up being too spicy. We also made deep fried fish fritters which I was very dubious about. However, they
Fancy a chili?
hot hot and hot! were great. This involved mixing tempura flour with eggs, fish, chili and red curry paste before deep fat frying it in a wok. I nearly burned half the room with my well known clumsiness. We all survived and couldn't finish all the dishes. My only complaint was that we should have had a 2 hour break in the afternoon so we could come back hungry ready to finish off all the food!!
Once the cooking course was over we (and our full bellies) headed for one last Chiang Mai temple - the oldest one in the city- that had been rebuilt after an earthquate in the 1600s. The tallest one in the city and surrounded by elephants. We also found a reclining budha - not the largest one on this trip but impressive nonetheless.
After our fix of culture we headed for our 2nd Thai foot massage of the trip. I forgot to mention this in the first blog. We very quickly decided that a massage along with the food was going to be the highlight of Thailand. So for less than 10 dollars we headed for another foot massage. When i say foot - it actually
Anyone for some rice?
white, brown sticky...to name but a few... went all the way to our hips - including some very tight IT bands and quads from our long flight. The lady kept laughing at my faces that I pulled as she pressed my aching muscles...it was good though. Especially after a long day of cooking!!!
We ended our CHiang Mai stay with a drink with a Canadian student whom we had met on our trip to Thailand's highest moutain. He was doing an international development degree at Uof C and wanted Heather to answer some questions on eco-tourism in Thailand. It was interesting to talk to him - and as we had suspected Thailand unfortunately has become more about the tourism and less about the eco. I do feel that companies such as the Lonely planet could do more to educate the average traveller - for example the problems with elephant riding in Thailand don't make an appearance in the book. The issues with the long neck tribes does feature in the guide book - but very much hidden in a lot of text. For Thailand to remain as beautiful as it is and to be profitable for tourism will need much work over the next few years.
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