Phil was most excited to try all of the food in Thailand while he was here. Jeff and I love to eat, so it wasn’t really a hardship for us! We all signed up for a cooking class on the Sunday that Phil was here, and we are so glad we did! It ran from 9 am until 2 pm, so we had a full day of cooking and eating.
First, we were taken to the market, and given explanations about Thai produce.
The round green things above are Thai eggplant! even the very small pea-looking things in the bag. Eggplant is used in green curry. Yum!
At first, we were all skeptical about this cooking class. There were so many options of dishes to choose from and our cook informed us that we all could choose different dishes to cook. It ended up working outgreat!
For the first course, I made pad thai and the boys made cashew nut chicken with rice. Then Jeff made stuffed cabbage soup and Phil and I made coconut chicken soup. After we made these two dishes, we sat down with the class to eat them!
Course 1: My chicken pad thai (on plate), and coconut soup with chicken
The boy’s cashew nut chicken was the winner here. I added too many baby shrimps to my pad thai and it gave it a pretty overpowering taste. I am not a huge fan of fish sauce, and they seem to add it liberally to every dish here!
Baby shrimps smell like cat food. Too many of them in pad thai make for a less desirable dish...
Fish sauce on the left, and oyster sauce on the right
After we ate our first round of food, we made some mango sticky rice for dessert later. It was much different than the mango sticky rice we made in Vietnam. You still have to soak the rice (it is a different type of rice than the normal stuff we would buy for dinner), but in Thailand they add a sweet coconut sauce to the cooked rice and pour a salted coconut cream over the top and serve mango on the side. Below: the rice steaming an a bamboo basket, and making the salted coconut cream to top the dessert. The green things in the pan are pieces of Asian vanilla leaf to give it flavor!
I prefer the rice we made in Vietnam (there was rum in it!), while Jeff preferred the Thai version. Next we made fresh spring rolls, and then Phil and I made green curry, while Jeff made Khao Soi. We made our curry paste from scratch- hence the photo of Phil getting an arm workout with the giant mortar and pestle.
This cooking class had definitely been one of the major highlights of our time in Thailand. If you are ever in Chiang Mai, check out Zabb-E-Lee’s cooking classes!
Our instructor's name was Art. This captures his personality perfectly! He was great! Below: green curry that Phil and I made. We ate it with rice. On the right is Jeff's Khao Soi (red curry) with his spring roll, and mango sticky rice in the to-go box. We poured the coconut cream (in the little baggie) on top of the mango and rice.
That night, Phil picked up some shirts he had tailored in town, and then we headed to the Sunday night market. It was pretty much the same thing as every other night market, except on a different street!
Phil left us the next morning (tear), but someone had to get back to the real world! After seeing him off to the airport, Jeff and I made our way outside of Old City to an AirBnB where we spent the next week in Chiang Mai!
-Cara
Cheers Phil! Thanks for coming to meet us on the road. Love you!