Sunday, January 27, 2008

Baan Thai Cooking School

Our last day in Chiang Mai, Ruth and I went to a cooking school. We went with one of the recommended spots out of our guidebook that also caters to vegetarians. There were 5 other people in our class besides Ruth and I. Our teacher was a cute Thai girl, probably 28 named Yam, but she told us to call her Yummy. After very brief introductions, we all went to the local market to get the food we needed for the day.. Yam pointed out all the different types of food at the available. It's hard going to a new country with all this new food and not knowing what any of it is just by looking at it.
After about an hour at the market, we went back to our school. Yam brought us out a Thai "welcome snack" to wait on while she prepared stuff. This includes many different ingredients - coconut, dried shrimp (or without for the vegetarian), ginger,lime, shallots, chili peppers, and roasted peanuts. You take a type of green leaf and you fold it so it kind of is in the shape of an ice cream cone. Then, you put all those above ingredients into it - soooooooo good.

After that, the first thing we made was papaya salad. This dish includes papaya, garlic, chillies, tomato, green beans, peanuts and some sauces. You are given a mortar to use to pound it all together. You can choose how many chilies you want to put in it for spiciness.
1 = somewhat spicy
2 =spicy
5 or more = Thai spicy
I went with 2 chilies. So, you put the bulk of the ingredients into the mortar and mash away with a heavy pounding stick. That's it! Put on a dish and it's done! We also made spring rolls to eat with this dish as well. It was good, shocking that I can actually cook in fact. After that, we made mango sticky rice - which is just soaking sticky rice in coconut milk for an hour and then putting mangos on top. We did that now to make sure the rice was soaking while cooking more.
While the mango sticky rice was sitting, we moved on to make curry paste. This involved mashing just a bunch of red chillies, shallots, garlic, Thai ginger, lemongrass (which actually smells like lemon!), lime, coriander and tumeric root in the mortar. We took turns passing the mortar around and mushing the stuff together because your arm gets really tired after a while. She said there's a rumor in Thailand that a good Thai wife makes a lot of noise as the pestle (stick that you mash with in the mortar) - hits the mortar. A bad wife is quiet about the process. Once the ingredients have become smooth and fine, it's finished! We used the curry paste to make the next dish, my favorite Thai dish called Khao Soy. It's popular in this region of the country...not sure if you can find it in the Southern bits of Thailand.

You put the freshly made curry sauce, oil, and indian curry powder together in a wok. After a while, you add coconut milk, tofu (or chicken), and keep stirring. Then you put it over cooked egg noodles. It becomes likes a soup. Then, you put hard noodles over it when ready to serve. It was soooooo delicious.
Afterwards, we ate our mango sticky rice. Yum! The school was a lot of fun and it was nice mingling with the other students. There was a guy from Corning, NY who currently resides in Hong Kong. A French couple currently residing in Jakarta and a Malaysian couple (that actually live in their country). It was nice to talk to others who are "ex-pats" living in Asian countries and hearing their challenges and experiences. I enjoyed comparing it to my own experience here in Japan. We all got along well. In the evening, we went shopping in the markets with Tamo and said goodbye.

The next morning Ruth and I headed up to Chiang Rai but with a few complications. We had intended on taking an 11:30 bus up North. We were unfortunately barred from this when all buses were full until about 3:30. So, we sat in this coffee shop for 4 hours because unfortunate for us, the bus station isn't central at all so we had nowhere else to go. Here's a photo of what it was like there - we did a lot of reading, writing and listening to our ipods before finally getting on the bus.
The bus ride went smoothly aside from a weird stop we had. The bus pulled over, a police man came on and shouted something in Thai. We couldn't understand him but saw lots of people pulling out their ID's. Well, if you know anything about traveling in 3rd world countries, it's not very uncommon for foreigners to be bribed to pay a lot of money. I thought that is what was going to happen. I was really nervous searching for my passport. Luckily though, that didn't happen - instead one man was removed from the bus and we were back on our way. Here's a photo of Ruth and I on the bus - happy we're on the bus and I was happy we weren't bribed.
This was December 30th. The next day was December 31st, New Year's Eve. We had wanted to be hiking on this day but since we got into Chiang Rai a lot later than expected, we couldn't get the reservations made in time. So, we had to settle for booking it for January 1st. After making our booking, we just had some dinner out on town and went to bed. I'll write about New Year's Eve next blog.

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