Thai Cooking Class: Part 2

Of course the best part of the cooking class was the actual cooking! It was kind of a challenge to get good pictures because it was a little dark in the kitchen…but here are the highlights!

We started off with Tom Yam – the popular and delicious hot and sour soup of Thailand.  In order to be called Tom Yam, it MUST have Kaffir lime leaves, galangal, and lemongrass.  After that, it’s pretty much up to you, but without those three things, it’s a different soup.  I also have some chiles in mine…

Add the vegetables (you can add whatever you want; I used Chinese kale, Napa cabbage, baby corn, mushrooms, carrot, and tomato)
Stir in some Tom Yam paste (which is made from chiles, lemongrass, cilantro, sugar, lime leaves, and galangal).  You can make the past or buy it pre-made in a jar.
That’s all it takes for basic tom yam.  You can also stir in just a tablespoon of coconut milk, and it changes it into a creamier, heartier soup.

Delicious!
Next, we made vegetable stir fry with cashews.  It was just a basic vegetable stir fry, flavored with a little sugar, golden mountain sauce, and soy sauce, and we added toasted cashews at the end.
Massaman curry is my absolute favorite.  It has red curry paste and curry powder, so it’s a fusion of Thai and Indian flavors.  It’s often made with beef and potatoes, but since this was a vegetarian class, we just used the potatoes and some tofu.
We made a lot of food and took a lot of notes!  
Green curry with sweet potato.  This steamed up my camera lens!
Fresh spring rolls.  I love these!  The wrappers were basically huge squares of noodles – just not cut up.  They were much easier to work with than the dry wrappers I usually get.  We also made a fabulous peanut sauce to dip these in (with coconut milk, red curry paste, tomatoes, and ground peanuts – it was some of the best peanut sauce I’ve ever had, and I’ve tried MANY recipes!)
My beloved Som Tham!  First, you crush up some garlic, fresh hot chiles, peanuts, lime juice, and sugar in this HUGE mortar and pestle.  
Then you add some pieces of long bean and slices of tomato and pound some more.
Finally, you add shredded carrot and shredded green papaya, stir it all up, put it on a plate, and top with peanuts!
I am VERY excited to make some of these dishes in my own kitchen, whenever I end up living in a place that has one!

Cooking Schools In Chiang Mai

Taking a cooking class is an incredibly popular activity in Chiang Mai.  Every tourist office (where you can book tickets, excursions, classes, etc) has advertisements for cooking schools, and there are probably 20 cooking schools in town.  

If you’re looking for a great class, skip the tourist offices and contact schools directly. They are easy to find on Google, and a lot of them distribute brochures to guest houses and restaurants around the city.
 Ask them who will be teaching the class and the experience they have, how many students are typically in the class, and how many different recipes you’ll be making.  Steer clear of classes with more than about 5 students.  I’ve seen HUGE classes go to the markets, and it doesn’t look like you learn much of anything.

The girl I was meeting suggested May Kaidee’s, because she’s vegetarian and loves the restaurant (there are branches in Chiang Mai and Bangkok). The class was a little bit more expensive than some of the others, but we got to make 12 different dishes, and because there were only 3 people in the class, we could all ask a bunch of questions and have them answered. I enjoyed the class, but unfortunately don’t have anything to compare it to.
If I were going to take another class, I would seriously consider A Lot of Thai because I’ve heard great things about it.

Thai Cooking Class: Part 1

When you travel, the world seems to get a lot smaller. It’s amazing how common it is to bump into acquaintances or friends of friends, even in far-flung locales thousands of miles from home. It turned out that a friend of a friend from college was going to Thailand right around the same time I was. She ended up in the south, and I ended up in the north, but this week she happened to be traveling around Chiang Mai, and we took a cooking class together.

I have been complaining about our lack of a kitchen since the day we got here, so I was overjoyed to be cooking again. I got to spend about 5 hours learning how to make all sorts of great Thai dishes! The class was great because there were only three students, so we got plenty of individual attention from the teacher, a fun and energetic woman named Duan.

The first hour of the class was spent walking around the market, where we were introduced to different ingredients.   First, we got a look at the different chiles and learned about what they are used for.  The larger ones are mild and are common in stir fries.  The smaller ones are much spicier and are used in sauces and curry paste.  

These are fresh wheat noodles, which are used in my beloved Khow Soi
This is hand-pressed tofu.  It’s nice and firm, and I wish I could find stuff like this in California!  The yellow tofu is colored with turmeric.
We bought a bunch of vegetables to use in the class:
Here, Duan explains different rices.  White basmati rice is most common, but there are also brown and red varieties. Sticky rice can be either black or white. A lot of people buy sticky rice in Thailand and don’t understand why it doesn’t work when they try to cook it.  Apparently it has to soak overnight first.
Tons of spices!  
Green papaya, jackfruit, and banana flowers (the big purple things).  Green papaya gets shredded for som tham, jackfruit is commonly used in desserts, and banana flowers are thinly sliced and used in soup or stir fry.
Thai shallots (on the left) are much smaller than the ones typically available in the US.
Their garlic (on the right) is much smaller too.  Fried garlic is a common garnish, and they don’t peel the cloves first.
A comparison of galangal and ginger:
There are a few different kinds of eggplant, and they’re all green: long thin ones, small green and white golf-ball sized ones (that are commonly found in green curry and some stir fries), and tiny pea-sized ones that are crunchy and incredibly bitter).
The markets usually have big tubs of live fish…

and a lot of them end up stuffed with lemongrass and grilled.
Check back for another post on all the things we made!

Beverage Love

Thais are serious about beverages (and with good reason – it is so hot that if you’re not drinking all day long, you’ll end up severely dehydrated). Along the main street in our neighborhood there are at least a dozen little stands that make coffee, tea, and other delightful drinks.  Look at all the fun, colorful options here!

This one has some coffee and a lot of tea, with Nestea being the substance of choice. I think I’ll pass on that (but this stand is Mike’s favorite).

You can tell by the cans of Carnation milk that this stand’s main focus is coffee.  I don’t know how many cans of evaporated and sweetened condensed milk are consumed in this country on a daily basis, but it’s a huge number.  I almost never see people drinking black coffee; it always has lots of milk and sugar!

Before we came here, I didn’t really pay attention drinks other than water (OK, and coffee, and beer – just the essentials).  To me, they were a waste of calories and I would rather have something I could chew on.  But then I fell in love with Thai iced coffee, and after that I figured I should give all the other drinks a chance too.  Now I probably spend as much on drinks each day as I do on food (two or three dollars).

Thai iced tea with milk has a nice pretty orange color and tastes like tea with an infusion of wheat.  It doesn’t sound particularly pleasant, but trust me, it’s good.  It’s really creamy and not too sweet – very refreshing on hot, humid afternoons.

Check out my mansion!

Before we came over here, I didn’t really think too much about where we would live. I was sure we’d just find an apartment or something, but I didn’t really have any idea what to expect. 

When Mike signed up for the TEFL course, the school recommended a hotel that rents rooms by the month. It’s comfortable and close to campus, plus it has AC – what more do you need?  This is a little peek at where I currently call home!

There is clearly no equivalent to the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) here.  The elevator only has buttons for floors 1, 3 and 5, even though there are six floors in the building. Plus, it stops on landings between floors, so wherever you get off, you have to walk up or down a half-flight of stairs to get to a floor.
I don’t have any pictures of our room because it’s a mess…but it has two twin beds shoved together to make a king, a TV (with a couple English channels!), a desk, and a wardrobe.  The bathroom has hot water and a Western toilet (yay!) but the shower head just sticks out of the wall so you the entire bathroom gets soaked when you take a shower.

My favorite part is the view off our balcony.

This makes me feel like I’m living in the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse! (Which, by the way, I still can’t believe they switched to Tarzan’s Tree House…lame, Disney, very lame)
It’s really nature-y out there!  So nature-y, in fact, that we hear the most bizarre bird calls and songs I’ve ever heard in my entire life.  There’s one that sounds like one of those squeaky dog toys, and another that sounds like a rusty gate closing. There are also dozens of roosters.   It doesn’t matter if it’s 2 AM, they feel the need to serenade the world all night long!  

We recently discovered that the place across the street costs half as much per month, so we’re moving very soon.  Fortunately, we’re not leaving the neighborhood because I’ve completely fallen in love with it!

More Noodles I Can’t Live Without

I saw a cart on our street ladling out steaming bowls of bright pinkish-red noodle soup,  and asked the lady making them (in Thai!) what it was.  (“What’s this?” might be one of the most useful phrases I’ve picked up so far).

The answer, it turned out, was Yen Ta Fo.

The unique color comes from the sauce that is stirred into the soup. It is slightly sweet and slightly tangy, and can vary in color from natural looking tomato-sauce red to almost flourescent hot pink.

The soup itself has rice noodles, kale, slices of fish cake, fish balls, fried garlic, and fried wontons.  It’s a nice, filling lunch but it isn’t too heavy.  I’ve been trying this whenever I see a cart that makes it, and while some versions can be a little bland, I really like all the different components that are mixed in.

My new favorite noodles!

     Thai restaurants in America are keeping a secret from you, and you deserve to know what it is. This is a dish that recently replaced Pad Thai as my I-must-eat-this-at-least-once-a-day-or-I-will-suffer-painful-withdrawals meal. It’s that good.
     The shocking thing is, I never knew it existed. I never tried it during my previous visit to Thailand, I have never seen it on a Thai menu in the states, and I cannot figure out why it’s not served everywhere. It’s Khow Soi: a delicious, coconut-based noodle soup.

     Yes, there are a lot of coconut based Thai soups you have probably tried, but this one is special. First of all, the noodles are soft, yellow wheat noodles, not all that different from fettuccini. The soup features soft tangles of these, PLUS (this is where it gets good) some crispy fried ones on top: a perfect yin and yang of textures. The broth has a red curry base, so it’s a little spicy, but nothing overwhelming. The coconut milk makes it creamy and slightly sweet, and the cilantro garnish gives a nice burst of freshness.

    When it is served, it comes with a plate of highly unappetizing looking shriveled greens, shallots, and lime. I was definitely taken aback the first time I saw the garnishes. Shallots and lime, I can handle, but the greens had no appeal. However, when it comes to eating, I want to do what the locals do, and they put everything into the soup. So with hesitation, I did too. Trust me on this – regardless of how those greens look, they are essential! They are pickled cabbage and they add a vital tanginess to the flavor mix in the soup. You will not be disappointed!
    The reason I love it so much is because, like the best dishes here, it combines salty, sweet, sour, and hot flavors with a mix of textures. Each bite features these in different proportions, so you never have that “okay, this soup is nice but I’m getting bored” phenomenon that often comes with, say, canned tomato soup.
    Next time you a) go out for Thai food or b) come to Chiang Mai (whichever comes first), try to hunt down a bowl of this!

Fun snacks

WARNING: There are photos of insect consumption in this post. If you have a weak stomach, move on!

I probably mention in every post that I love all the food options here – the carts are plentiful and cheap, and there are always new things to try.

When I saw the insect stand at the market, I was excited. I’d already been initiated into the bug-eating club with those grubs the other day, so the only tough part here was narrowing down which to try next.

Like these:

Or these (by the way, I thought mackerel was fish…):
Or these:

Oh hello there, grasshopper!  I decided on these, because the Japanese man who was next in line told me they were his favorite.  He looked like someone who knew his (edible) insects, so I trusted his judgement.
The grasshoppers were nice and crunchy – excellent sprinkled with a dash of soy sauce. The only tricky part is their hind legs. They have little spikes on them that can get caught in your throat if you don’t chew them completely.
I think next time, I’m going to try the crickets!

Happy Valentines Day!

I’m not sure how Thai people feel about Valentines Day, or if they celebrate it much, but I do know that 7-11 has had a little Valentine’s display up for a few weeks with various cards and candy and hideous plush roses. Although I’m usually not a huge fan of the holiday, I couldn’t resist picking up a little gift for Mike.

This card was wrapped in plastic and had a label that was entirely written in Thai, so I assumed that the writing on the card would be in Thai. I was kind of excited about that, but when I got it home and opened it up to write inside, I realized it was in English. Kind of a letdown, but I still think it’s adorable.

I love the sentiment on this chocolate heart, but I’m not quite sure what meaning they’re going for. Is it a “pick which one you mean and circle it” kind of thing? An “I love you because we’re married and I don’t really have a choice anymore but it’s your lucky day because I like you too” message? A clarification “I love you, but I’m too scared to say it, so I tell you I like you very much but I love you is actually what I mean”? Whatever it is, I love it I like it very much!

Sunday grazing

Sundays, when I don’t have to work and Mike doesn’t have class, are great days to wander around the city. We usually run across things we’ve never seen before, which is always fun. And because of our obsession with things food-related, we often end up grazing on street food all day long.  

On this particular Sunday, we found a Market near the mall. There was some great looking food I’d never seen before.
On the left are some delightful little creamy custards with corn, and on the right are sweet little coconut-coverd mochi balls (I’m not sure if it really is mochi, but that’s what it reminds me of).

Here’s a better look at the corn dessert.  It comes in a cute little banana leaf cup:

Really brightly colored desserts – I was intrigued but didn’t try any…maybe next time!

Waffles are a huge deal here.  In Bangkok, there’s a waffle stand in every SkyTrain station.  On our street, there’s a cart that sells all different flavors.  These come in all sorts of flavors…taro, pumpkin, shredded pork, coconut…
I love these cute little banana leaf boats filled with egg and other mix-ins.
Our random wandering also took us to the main stage of the Flower festival, where we saw some great dancers.

I think the best way to see a city is just to start walking and see where you end up!  What have you been surprised to find on a walk during your travels?