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Published: July 30th 2008
Happy Cooks
6 meals later, there was no way we could eat again for at least a day.Saturday was one of the most anticipated days of my time in Northern Thailand - a cooking class with Wes at
A Lot of Thai Home Cooking School in Chiang Mai. Being adventurous, we decided to walk to the cooking school, completely passing the street and having to call for a ride from a gas station. But it was good that we got in a 30 minute walk, because we were about to eat a LOT of food!
The class started with introductions. Yui would be our teacher for the day, and we were going to be preparing 6 dishes total. Our first dish was started right away - chicken and cashew stir fry. I realize I'm soon going to become redundant when I say that the food came out soooo good, but it really was good. Yui roasts all the cashews herself, and there's something about the freshness of all of her ingredients that makes a huge difference in the taste. At least I assume that it's the ingredients, because if not, I'm just a really lucky first time Thai cook.
After the cashew chicken came a trip to the local market where we explored all of the fruits, vegetables, meats and rice. We
Yui at Work
Yui gave great tips - how to crush garlic with a knife, or crack open an egg with one hand - that really enhanced the experience and helped us feel like more accomplished cooks. learned about different kinds of rice: most importantly how to tell sticky rice from regular rice. We saw a wide array of desserts for sale. Whole fried chickens that are missing most of the good meat and are used to feed dogs. Coconut milk fresh off the press. And all of my favorite fruits - rambutan, custard apples, mangoes... Wes and I even tried durian for the first time. It didn't smell as much like feet as I expected, but it was not a pleasant aroma. The fruit itself was ok, but so mushy that I couldn't make myself love the consistency. Ah well, I guess I can't like all fruits!
Post market we launched into Pad Thai. I have to admit, this was my least favorite dish, in large part because I'm pretty sure I overcooked my noodles, causing them to get a little rubbery. From there we moved onto green curry. This was by far my favorite dish of the day. Yui gave some great advice (which I hesitate to reveal here, as she has had problems with other cooking schools stealing her recipes and I don't want to give anything away) that made a huge difference
in how the curry came out. Again, I'm fairly certain the fresh coconut milk made a large difference in taste as well. Next up was to stir fry the ingredients for our spring rolls, and start steaming the sticky rice for our dessert.
The spring rolls were surprisingly easy, and I'm pretty sure I could even handle the deep frying at home. Yui gave us tips for how to drain the rolls after frying so that they weren't sticky and covered in oil when we ate them. While the rice continued to cook we prepared Tom Yum soup, which was just the perfect amount of spicy. We even learned tips for how to tailor the spice level so that we could have soup anywhere between mild and super spicy.
Finally, the crown jewel of my new Thai repertoire - mango with sticky rice! The sticky rice was mixed with salt, sugar and coconut milk, then we added mango to the top, and drizzled a salt/sugar/coconut milk syrup on top of it. Soooo delicious.
By the time Yui and Kwan took us back to the city we were too stuffed to even think about dinner. Alas, that meant
no dinner on the riverboat, but Wes and I were very content with what we'd already had for the day. We spent the evening wandering around the Saturday Night Walking Street Market to burn off some calories, and then headed back to our guesthouse for the night.
*Aroi Ma is Thai for very delicious. :-)
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Maaike
non-member comment
Pay back
No need to teach me how to cook as I will now be expecting you to cook me large amounts of Thai food! Yumyumyumyumyum.