9 Hostel, Chiang Mai, Day 3

As we are booked onto a cooking class tonight, we decide to take the morning and early afternoon pretty easily. I take it so easily in fact that I sleep for most of the afternoon, waking an hour before we are to be picked up. Apart from a meal for dinner we don't leave the room, and 4 o clock soon rolld round. We wait outside as the clock ticks slowly past the 4 to 4.30 pick up time we had, but we are eventually picked up and packed into a very busy songthaew.
The course is advertised as 2 to 8 people, so we are rather surprised when there is 11 of us. What is more surprising is I am the only male in the group. There is me and Amy and a solo traveller named Kathie from Germany, and the rest are a group of 8 Danish girls, which means I am the sole representative for men's culinary skills. No pressure!
We start with a tour of a big food market that definitely gets our stomachs rumbling. There is food everywhere. Fresh fruit is packed high and sold very cheaply, and the giant, colourful bags of curry paste make us very excited to cook a curry. We don't head into the meat section which resembles a warehouse with steel tables covered in all kinds of unrecognisable animals. Not the place to take a vegetarian. After a short time with our very excitable and funny host Mam, in which she buys some ingredients with us, we are back in the songthaew for a 5 minute drive to her house.
It is a lovely place, and after a short gap where they prepare and we eat sticky rice, we are at a table ready to go.
First on the menu is spring rolls. The filling is already chopped up and ready to go, which saves a lot of time and only really leaves us the wrapping and frying to do. These all go pretty well and leave us thinking it is actually pretty easy. We have the same feeling after cooking pad thai. This is the one that everyone who visits Thailand wants to learn how to cook. After prepping the ingredients we are shown how to make it. It is a quick, frantic dash as we mix and stir all the ingredients in a wok, but the end results are delicious. It all seems so simple, and also rather healthy (if you forget about the frying part). We manage to make it through without any disasters, and enjoy the meal we have just cooked.
After eating we head back down to cook our next dishes. We start by pounding our curry paste together. We have been shown the ingredients that go in (there is a lot) and are left to slice and grind them down. It is a hot and labourious task but the smells it creates really gets the belly rumbling. We then make dessert. Sticky rice has already been made so we just watch as the simple task of cooking the coconut milk and sugar sauce that the rice soaks up is made. It tastes lovely.
Now we are back at the hobs making curries and soups that we have chosen. They are both rather similar to make, and involve a lot of taste-testig and stirring, but the flavours that are created from the assortment of leaves and spice that we use are great.
Once everything is made, we enjoy what we can eat of our second meal, and it is again delicious.
It all seemed easy, but it always is when someone is taking you through it step by step. We are given a cook book to take home so hopefully we can find all the ingredients and recreate some of these dishes for ourselves.
All in all it was a very fun and very informative night. Mam, our host, was a great teacher and certainly kept us entertained by laughing wildly at her own jokes or stroking her pet squirrel (not sure that would past the food hygiene laws in England). It is a great way to spend our last day in Chiang Mai, and we fall asleep with bellies uncomfortably full of food we somehow managed to cook.Leggi altro