5/14/2013: As we were finishing up breakfast outside our apartment with Joe and Val, Jordan showed up in a tuk-tuk. We said goodbye to Joe and Val as they headed to the airport, and welcomed Jordan to Thailand - his first stop (besides a brief stay overnight in Bangkok) on a three week vacation. Jordan and Devon ended up staying at the same hotel I stayed at when I first arrived, so Ariel and I hung out there and caught up with Kai, the girl at the front desk, while Jordan and Devon got settled. We made plans for the following day, and Kai scheduled a Thai cooking class for us later that evening.
In the meantime we all got foot massages and then ate some lunch. Jordan and Devon scoped out the old city afterwards, while Ariel and I napped after staying out too late the night before.
The van for the cooking class picked us up at the hotel and drove around for 30 minutes picking up other people and then dropped us off at the "school" that turned out to be about a 10 minute walk from the hotel. Our instructor was "Fon," a cute Thai girl that has been working at the school for a month. We first walked to a local market where Fon described all the different standard Thai ingredients (different types of rice, vegetables, meats, etc.). All the vendors seemed slightly annoyed by the tourists that had little interest in purchasing their goods. We wandered back to the school and went out back into the garden, where Fon went over some more ingredients like Thai basil, Thai chilis, and Thai eggplant. The best quote was when she was discussing the medicinal benefits from one of the plants - "in case you get the itchy…"
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| Our instructor Fon on the right |
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| Our meal options |
Our table consisted of the four of us, plus a British couple, and two Canadian girls. We had some choices regarding what dishes to make, so we picked "mains" and "soups," and we also got to make some curry. Ariel and I chose to make Pad Thai, although Fon claims it's not as popular a dish with Thai people as it is with tourists. We all gathered around a table, each with our own cutting board, and Fon directed us on what to cut and how to cut it. Once we had all our ingredients prepared, we manned our stoves, and Fon shouted orders at us - "add your veggies!" "now add the chicken!" "Keep stirring!" "More fish sauce!" Few people ever added enough fish sauce. Fon says fish sauce is a major ingredient in Thai dishes because it adds saltiness, but most of us were creeped out by the unlikely pairing of the words "fish" and "sauce." She would come around to each of our stations, taste what we were cooking, and then add a healthy splash of fish sauce to it. The pad thai turned out great, so I guess she knows what she's doing. Once everything was chopped, the rest was a blur - the cooking part went by very fast, and without Fon yelling at me to do the next step, I would have ruined my meal.
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| Expertly prepared pad thai |
After finishing our first round, we went back to the cutting table and prepared our curries. We had the choice between red curry, green curry, massaman curry, and khao soi. I picked khao soi, since it's been my favorite dish in Thailand so far. We all chipped in and cut up different spices, and a few people had to grind the peppers with a mortar and pestle.
Once the curries were mashed into a paste that met Fon's standards, we set them aside and worked on our soups. I'd chosen to make Tom Sab (described as "hot and sour soup in local style" in the cookbook we got). It includes a lot of ingredients that you can't actually eat, they just add flavor - lemongrass, galanga root, and kaffir lime leaves. Those are added to boiling water, then chili powder is mixed in along with some wood-ear mushrooms and chicken. It was pretty spicy, but pretty tasty. The trick is avoiding all the things you're not supposed to eat, otherwise it's chewy or a really strong flavor. Before making the soup, we made our curry dishes, so I learned how my favorite dish khao soi is made.
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| Khao Soi |
The khao soi curry flavor is simply the red curry paste mixed with curry powder. That gets heated up in the wok, then add a bunch of coconut milk and the veggies and chicken and noodles, and it's good to go. I was disappointed to find out that the main instructor had taken out the pickled veggies that typically come with khao soi because many of the foreigners don't like them. I was hoping I'd finally learn what kind of veggies they are, but they weren't in my dish. And Fon said there might not even be an English word for that type of veggie. Anyhow, the khao soi was good but not as good as at restaurants. The Tom Sab was spicy but tasty, although by that point we were all very full and couldn't entirely appreciate the soups. Overall, it was lots of fun, and we got a nice cookbook to take home.
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| Chopping |
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| More chopping |
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