2Flowers growing next to us at the pool at breakfast
The first order of business was to go to a local market to learn about coconut cream and milk, curry, and Thai spices. We first learned about coconut cream and milk. We found out they are the same thing, they just add more water to the cream to make it milk. They let us watch while they made it in a machine, and they let us taste the coconut. It was pretty interesting. Our teacher then taught us about red, yellow, and green curry paste. We found out that they are all the same level of spicy, but green is made with green chilies, yellow and red is made with red chilies and yellow had turmeric added. You can add these tiny peppers to adjust the spiciness to any of the curries. We then learned about the different oils they use, the sugars, and the sauces.
The coconuts used for making coconut cream and milk at the market
We found out that Thai food is actually pretty vegetarian and vegan friendly and they have options for making it those ways. After that, we wandered the market for a bit, taking pictures of all the new food and fruit and flowers. I wish we had markets like these in the US, but we’re too afraid of germs, and not all of the things in these markets are kept sterile.
After the market, we drove out to the farm and we proceeded to pound out our own curry paste.
Making your own curry was pretty labor intensive, but only in terms of the pounding, but in terms of ingredients, it’s pretty easy actually. I plan on making my own when we go home… It will be much cheaper than buying it. After making the curry paste, we proceeded to make our curries. I did a green curry with chicken, and Cody did a yellow curry with chicken.
My green curry
Cody making his curry paste
Me making my curry paste.
After curry, we moved on to our soups. Cody did the traditional Tom Yam soup with shrimp, and I did the well-known coconut milk with chicken soup. Finally, we made our meat/veggie dishes. I did basil chicken, and Cody did fried chicken with cashew nuts with vegetables. We then broke for lunch to consume everything we had made, and everyone sampled everyone else’s dishes.
There was also red curry with chicken, Thai vegetable soup, sticky rice, and papaya salad. We all sat around eating and getting to know each other. There were four people traveling together from Quebec and a couple from somewhere near Berlin. We talked a lot about Korea, the US, and what we had learned about Canada from all of our Canadian friends, and the people from Quebec kept telling us that everything we knew was wrong. They were a bit pretentious and kind of fit everything our Other Canadian friends had said about people from Quebec.
After lunch, we got back to work. We made our desserts, which were bananas or pumpkin cooked in coconut milk, or sticky rice with mango. I did the sticky rice, and Cody did the bananas in coconut milk. Everyone was stuffed at this point, so they put our dessert in take-out bags for us to eat later. We then made our noodle dishes (which we also took to go) I made Pad Thai, Cody made stir fried big noodles, and there was also the option of spring rolls.
The cooking school then took us back to our hotel and we went straight to the swimming pool to cool off. We ordered happy hour Caipirinhas, and Pina Coladas by the pool. After the pool, we checked out the hotel shops and had the hotel tailor try his hardest to sell us clothes. We weren’t sure, but were tempted, so we headed back up to our room to enjoy our cooking school leftovers. After we finished, we decided we did want to hand-made clothes and so we headed back down to the tailors. Cody ordered a suit and a new dress shirt, and I ordered a Thai skirt and a Chinese-style shirt.
After we finished, we headed out to wander Chiang Mai a little bit, and we found an internet café, and then we found a street food called a Rotee. It’s dough made really thin and fried on one side, It’s then often filled with banana and egg, or just banana. I’ve read that sometimes it’s just the fried dough. We had it with banana and egg in the middle the first time, and the dough was folded around it like a square envelope and the package was cooked on both sides on the griddle.
They then pulled it off the griddle, cut it into 12 pieces and drizzled it liberally with condensed milk. It was delicious.
We took our Rotee back to our hotel and turned in for yet another early morning with Flight of the Gibbons.
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