Flavour Frenzy

Yesterday I finally did something I've been meaning to do for ages (and in doing so crossed another item off of my Wanderlist) I took a cooking class!

Chiang Mai has countless cooking schools but I went with one called Asia Scenic and was highly impressed. The day started with our instructor, Sue, taking us on a tour around a local market. She showed us various items that are frequently used in Thai cooking and bought some ingredients we would be needing for the day.

So many types of rice!

Local market

After touring the local market we hopped in a van and headed about 20 minutes outside of the city to the cooking school's little 'farm'. Sue showed us around and identified all the different plants, vegetables, herbs and spices growing at the farm. I recognized things like chillies, coriander, lemongrass and eggplant, but some were completely new to me: kaffir lime, galangal, tumeric... practically everything was incredibly flavourful, just trying a bit of something on the end of your tongue would send your taste buds into a frenzy.

Sue teaching us about the different plants

Then it was time to get cooking. Each person got to make five dishes. I made:

Pad Thai

Spring rolls

Khao Soi, traditional noodle dish from Chiang Mai

Coconut milk soup

Dessert: deep dried bananas

I'm not much of a cook so I was pretty proud of myself that everything turned out alright (although we did have some help). The dishes sound and look complicated but when you start from scratch you're able to see that it's really not as tricky as it seems - just time consuming! 

We got to eat everything we made so we stuffed ourselves silly. It's hard to pick a favourite dish but I think Pad Thai is the one I'm most likely to try making at home.

It was such an enjoyable day and the food was deeeelicious - the course was well worth it!

Frying my spring rolls!

The students hard at work

Fellow chefs