Since I spent most of the day chilling at the hostel, I signed up for an evening cooking class to make up for the lack of activities. The school I chose was called Baan Thai, one of the many located in the city. After recruiting a few others to join me on my foodie adventure, the four of us were picked up in the evening and driven into the city.
The building for the class was in a quiet alley in Chiang Mai’s old city, and the place was decorated with all kinds of fun antique signs and handmade pottery, including this welcoming little elephant at the door.
We sat down and picked out 4 dishes out of a list of twenty (if you take the day class, you actually get to make 6 dishes, but 4 is plenty to eat already), then headed out for a stroll through the quiet valleys of this beautiful neighborhood.
Our destination was the local market – a busy square of about 20-30 vendors under one roof, where you can find the freshest fruits, veggies, and various internal organs @_@
Our guide Nok, a cheerful. and funny girl whose motto was “spicy is sexy,” gave us a great tour of the market and showed us the different spices and ingredients we would be cooking with.
After returning to the school, we donned our sexy aprons and got right to work!
While we were away, most of the ingredients were already prepared for us. My first dish was the pad thai, probably the most famous noodle dish everyone has ordered at least once at a Thai restaurant. The ingredients were simple:
We diced these into the appropriate portions, and added the secret ingredient – dried shrimp!
Add the chicken and rice noodles, and our preparation is complete.
Nok first demonstrated the proper steps for cooking pad thai. It was really very easy – first cook the chicken and other ingredients with oil, then put everything aside and scramble the eggs, add water and boil the noodles, mix everything, add some sugar, fish sauce, and oyster sauce, and you are done!
My concoction was a bit sweeter than I intended, but I still finished every bite 🙂
Next up is tom yum soup. This one comes with a few more ingredients, which can be bought as a pack (either fresh or dry) at the market.
There’s not much to cooking this, since all I had to do was put everything into boiling water, then add some shrimp.
Ta da!
Dish #3 was my favorite to make – papaya salad!
First you slice the papaya and carrots into thin slices…
Then you smash the cut up peppers, garlic long beans, tomato, green eggplant and peanuts in the mortar. This was FUN.
Lastly you add in the papaya and carrot slices and mix everything up.
I ate some of this before I remembered to take a picture. It looked better fresh 😛
The last dish was most difficult and according to my cooking classmates, my best work. I made some panang curry from scratch! Since the curry requires a lot of ingredients, we were all given different tasks.
Mine was to smash some garlic on the elephant’s back.
The next step was to chop large chili into tiny little pieces (by hand! You’d think that they have some kind of machine for this :P). How did I do?
Since the chili’s still not in paste form, we brought out the mortar again. Now this is hazardous work. Can you imagine getting that stuff in your eyes?
The final step to the perfect curry is adding coconut juice, which we squeezed from cut up coconut fruit wrapped in cloth (yes, we all washed our hands). The boys were called to the task to get every last bit of juice out 🙂
The curry paste is ready!
Even though I was fully stuffed by this point, I still finished every grain of rice, because it was THAT GOOD. 😛
Food adventure was a success, and we also got an awesome cookbook with all the dishes that we prepared and more to take home. So next time someone has a potluck, I will be bringing some awesome Thai dishes (hopefully)!
To add on to the amazing food adventure, when we came home all stuffed and food coma’ed, we found the entire hostel sitting in the courtyard drinking beer and having a barbecue. Did I tell you this was the most awesome hostel ever?
My day of relaxation actually turned out to be quite exciting, given that not many people can say they attended a Buddhist housewarming ceremony, watched the presidential election, and learned how to cook all in the same day. But Chiang Mai is such an amazing city that the adventures will only get more interesting! 🙂
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