Monday, 20 January 2014

A Thai Cooking Class

One of the great pleasures of living in Chiang Mai is the quality of the food to be found in literally hundreds of little spots around the city. Sarah and I want to make sure that we are able to continue eating this kind of delicious food even after we leave so, with that in mind, we took a full day Thai cooking class last week. It is called Grandma’s Thai Recipes and is run by a lovely woman named Jib (most Thais have nicknames which are nothing like their real names but are much easier for farangs to pronounce). Jib and her family own a restaurant which operates at the Lanna Golf Course just north of Chiang Mai and it was there that we spent the day cooking. Jib only does private lessons so we were the only students that day. She even came to our building to pick us up.
Jib allowed us to choose up to 8 dishes to cook (and afterward eat) so we chose the following: kau tang ta Tang (rice cakes in peanut sauce), som tam (papaya salad), gai pad met mamuang (cashew chicken), kau pad (fried rice), pad preeawan (sweet and sour stir fry), kao soi (yellow curry), tom yum (lemongrass soup) and sticky rice. Some of the other cooking classes are done in a classroom type setting where each student would have his/her own station. However, our lessons took place right in the kitchen of the restaurant on a busy Friday. There were positives and negatives to this arrangement. It was interesting to see the real chefs preparing food for customers but I felt constantly like we were in their way. Nobody seemed to mind our presence though and, like most people we’ve met here, made us feel extremely welcome.
At the risk of hyperbolizing and sounding boastful, I believe that the food we cooked was better than any food that has ever been cooked in history. Of course Jib played a small part in our success by showing us exactly what to do every second of the day. Seriously though, she was a wonderful host and we had a great day. There’s no way we would be able to remember everything she taught us but a detailed recipe book comes as part of the course. The process itself was often fascinating and they even still use an oversized mortar and pestle (I haven’t seen those since grade 10 science class) to grind the various ingredients into paste. Jib was thoughtful enough to tell us we could use a food processor for this procedure back in Canada. She also told us that a Thai kitchen should be noisy so the pounding of the pestle and the smashing of the garlic are just normal noises. 
Six hours is usually a little longer than I like to spend in the kitchen, but on this day it was definitely worth it. 
Until next time…….. 

 Click here to see all the photos from our cooking day.
 Click here for the link to Jib's Cooking Class 

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