Saturday, March 08, 2008

Over Cooked

Day 164
Chiang Mai to Baan Thai
Time: 7 hours
Distance: Across town
Avg Speed: slow and low

Chris is the guest blogger today. Leslie is taking today off.
Leslie and I made the big split today. We hadn’t really spent time apart in 5 months and she was a little too excited to get rid of me this morning. I had a day of cooking at the Baan Thai cooking school planned and she had a day of laundry, internet, and bicycles. I think I had the better end of that deal.
I was picked up this morning for our class. It was an international scene with a couple of Germans, a couple of Americans, a Swiss, a Chinese and a British student. Our teacher, Kim, was a little Thai gal who new her way around a wok and spices. We started out talking about the staple of the Thai diet…rice. There two main types of rice eaten here, jasmine and sticky rice. Jasmine rice is the rice that Americans are used to seeing and eating. Sticky rice is a rice that is cooked differently and ends up being as it sounds, sticky. We then got our little shopping baskets and went to the market. There we talked about noodles, tofu, rice, fruit and vegetables. There are a handful of different noodles eaten in the Thai diet: egg noodles, rice noodle and a noodle called glass noodles made from mug bean flour. We spent a lot of time on the different vegetables here. There are three different gingers here as well as three different eggplants and three different basils. It was eye opening. After the market portion of our class we went back and started cooking our menu. The class went all day and we would prepare each dish from the raw ingredients all the way to the cooking and dishing of the food. The food was amazing, the group got along well and the teacher was great. I am still floating on a cloud from all the good food we ate.
Here is the menu that we cooked today, in the order we prepared it.
Stir Fried Prawn with Curry Powder(kung phat pong ka ree)
Spring Rolls (pho pea thod)
Papaya Salad (som tam)
Yellow Curry Paste (namphrik gaeng phet)
Chiang Mai Noodle with Chicken (kao soy)
Deep Fried Banana (gluay thod)
After we would prepare each dish we would eat it, comparing and tasting each others, taking notes and enjoying each morsel and spice. The day ended with the deep fried banana, which was sliced banana coated in coconut, flour and sugar served over ice cream. It was a delicious day and was a real treat spending time in a Thai persons home learning how to cook their dishes.
Yum yum
CK

2 comments:

JennSean said...

AWESOME!!! Please feel free to send any sort of recipe to my email!!!
-JH

Anonymous said...

Hi. If you are interested in cooking Thai food try
www.thaifoodtonight.com
It's got about 30 recipes each one with a cooking video to go along
Good if you like to try cooking Thai food at home
Cheers