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Post date: 15-Dec-2009 14:52:53
From that first kick of chili in your Pad Thai to the coconut warmth of Tom Kha soup, there is no doubt that Thai food is bursting with flavor. After a few days of eating Thai food, Colin and I were ready to learn how to make it ourselves. We signed ourselves up for an afternoon of cooking with May at May Kaidee's Thai Vegetarian and Vegan Cooking School. Since Thai food is already delicious without meat, we didn't really need to take a class that included meat. Once you know the basics you can always deviate however you please. Our teacher, May is 32 years old and has two vegetarian restaurants and cooking schools in Bangkok, and one in Chiang Mai. She's also in the process of expanding her business into the United States.
Colin and I spent 3 hours with May and our two classmates from the US and Germany. We cooked and ate 13 delicious dishes. Of course it helped that we had assistants who chopped up all the ingredients ahead of time for us and who did our dishes too. It would have been great if the class had included shopping for the ingredients too.
The first and most important thing that we learned how to make was red and green chili paste with a mortar and pestlle (Colin and I are finally going to buy one as soon as we get home). The aroma of the freshly crushed garlic, lemon grass, chilies, lime leaves, galangal, onion, garlic and cumin powder were delicious. I didn't know what galangal was until we took this class. It's similar to ginger but it's larger and you don't peel the skin off it like you usually do with ginger root. The best part of the class was that we would cook a dish and then immediately eat it. Colin's favourite dishes were Pad Thai and spring rolls and mine were Green Thai Curry, Tom Kha, and pumpkin hummus.
Here are a few of our dishes:
Chinese Cinnamon Tofu Soup
Tom Yam Soup
Spring Rolls with Peanut Sauce
Pumpkin Hummus
Mangoes, Banana, Coconut and Black Sticky rice
Colin and I visited the Suan Lum Night Bazaar where we could have paid to have fish bite our feet as a "massage." You put your feet in a tank with hundreds of tiny fish and they supposedly only eat the dead skin off the bottom of your feet. Sure they do. I am sure it's quite sanitary too. I think I'll stick to the Thai massage.
The only purchase we made at the night market was this for 35 Baht:
You can view the rest of our 94 pictures here:
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