We only had about 10 people total in the class and our teach was excellent. The course started and our group was taken to a nearby local market. The teacher was only there to show us where the ingredients were coming from as they already had everything stocked back at the school. Once we returned, we were shown their garden and all the homegrown herbs and ingredients. (Since I can't remember the teacher's name, he will be known as 'J' in this post). J took each herb/leave/root from the garden and let us smell it and get familiar with what we would be using for the day. There were many different types of herbs he handed out I had never heard of before. I didn't know there was such a thing as normal basil and hot basil.
After seeing all the ingredients we would be using for the day, we were handed a menu with all the options of the days courses. There were so many! We got to choose one option from each category and there were seven categories! All I could think about was how I would manage to eat all of this food. But before we would start cooking, J served us a plate with a leaf, and random bits of ingredients on it. He told us it was for luck before we began. You mix all the ingredients on top of the leaf, fold it up and eat away. I expected it to taste very funny because it was a mix of nuts, a sweet sauce, shallots, chilies and a couple of other. It tasted so yummy though, I ended up having three of them!
The first category to choose from was a stir fry. What I liked most from this school is that everyone could choose something different. It wasn't a group decision on what would be cooked. I chose something familiar, pad thai. I always get this back home when Jeff and I go out to the thai restaurants and have wanted to learn how to cook it. Turns out, it's not really that difficult. I realized that there are no measurements taken in this class. J kept telling us to add the ingredients based on our feelings. If we felt we wanted more of something, add a little more. J gave us a general amount but then we would take it from there. As easy as the pad thai was to make, I accidentally added too much water and mine was a little runny. Once our stir fry was done, we took it back to our cushioned seats and chowed down.
Next up was a choice of salad and I chose glass noodle salad, which is actually kind of spicy but sooo good. It's a mix of noodles, vegetables, chilies and minced chicken and served cold. I'd never had this before so it was a weird combination to me at first but I rather enjoyed the flavors and having noodles instead of lettuce for a salad.
We got to make our soups next. Tom yum soup is an incredibly popular soup in Thailand and very spicy. I had been to chicken to try it for a normal meal incase it was too spicy but decided this would be the perfect time to make it. If I didn't like it or couldn't eat it, I had a lot of other food to eat for the day. Since we could add more or less of what J told us to, I added only two chilies. But then he came around adding chili jam and that really spiced up the dish. If I got close enough to the pan, the inside of my nose would burn! As expected, the dish was too spicy for me but was incredibly tasty. J even complimented me and said that's exactly how Thai tom yum soup is supposed to taste! I picked the shrimp out of the dish and ate those with a little bit of the broth. Some of the items in the soup are only to flavor the broth but you don't eat them.
The spring roll was next and I was so excited! I love spring rolls anywhere and anytime. My dad's side of the family are Filipino, so we always make a similar dish called lumpia, one of the main differences is that we add meat to our rolls. We cooked the vegetables down and let them cool first before taking and wrapping them. Once everything was set with the oil, we fried them up and got to enjoy them. The only bummer about this part is that we didn't get to make the sauce that's used for the rolls.
The hardest part was up next. We chose our curry and curry paste we wanted to make. J told us we were making our own paste instead of using the pre-made paste. The class was broken down into smaller groups based on the types of paste we would need for our curry. J handed us our ingredients and told us to chop everything up as finely as possible and then put the ingredients in the motar for smashing. Once my group chopped everything up as small as it would get, we went to work on the paste. We smashed and twisted and pushed and scraped and still our paste was to grainy. After 45 minutes of switching people and smashing and getting J to help us, our paste was finally done! Whew, it certainly worked up some sweat.
I chose khaw soi curry because I had never heard of it and the description J gave us made it sound delicious. It's made with noodles instead of being served with rice like most curries. It's also not as soupy. Once again, I didn't add as much paste as J suggested and the dish was still quite spicy but edible. I loved this curry! I can't wait to make it when I return home because other than that class, I couldn't find khaw soi curry served anywhere I went to.
Last but not least, our dessert. Once thing I have been curious about since arriving in Thailand was how rice and mangoes went together. I had seen the dish served at my favorite Thai restaurant back home but have never tasted it because it didn't make sense to me. So I chose it for my dessert to find out what it was all about. I certainly was not disappointed. It's meant to be a dessert and once the sticky rice is cooked, it's mixed with coconut milk until the rice soaks up all the milk and looks like normal rice again. The mango is cut up and a sweet coconut sauce is poured over all of it. Lip smackingly delicious and I couldn't believe it took me two weeks in Thailand before I had it. It's served everywhere you go and at all the food markets and street stalls.
I had such a fun experience doing this! I love cooking and being able to try some new Thai dishes I had been afraid of trying. Everything I made was enjoyable, except the soup but only because it was too spicy for me. When I make it back home, I'll skip the chilies and just add the chili jam. At the end of the class, J gave everyone their own recipe books to take home with them and all of the recipes are listed on the Asian Scenic Thai Cooking School website. WHEN I return to Chiang Mai, I will most certainly take this class again and choose different dishes.
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