A Lot of Thai

This day's schedule was much more relaxed. I was taking an all day Thai cooking class with the aforenamed school. I was to be picked up at 0915 so I could have a leisurely breakfast. It was bowl of müsli: oats with fruit (apple, pineapple and banana), yoghurt and a drizzle of honey. I accompanied this with a coffee.

There was a mischievous kitten at the hostel. Here it's trying to bat my camera's lens cap.

Yui and her husband Kwan run highly recommended cooking classes at their home in Chiang Mai. The class size is limited to 8 or 9 meaning that you get personal attention. When I was signing up for the class, my mouth watered just looking at the list of Thai dishes that we would learn to make.

Here are the cooking stations ready for us students to follow Yui's instructions after watching her demonstrate at her station.

The first dish we were taught was fried rice, in this case brown rice. White rice can also be used.

I found that I need much more practice in slicing the lemongrass and the kaffir lime leaf. Thin slices of about 1 mm are required, otherwise the fibre is apparent when you eat the result. It's also a matter of economy; you want maximum extraction of the taste from the herbs. For a practiced cook, the cycle of slice and shift is effortless, but the result of a lot of practice. I had a few pieces that weren't cut through.

Here are the ingredients mise en place ready to cook. The pumpkin is a nice touch I hadn't seen before. Also notice that Thai garlic is used. This is smaller but more pungent than the more commonly seen Chinese garlic. We didn't need to remove the skin because it is thin.

And here is my result. It was yummy. Because the ingredient quantities had already been measured for us, there was little chance of us failing unless we didn't pay attention to the ingredient preparation, the amount of heat, or the cooking times.

Our second dish was papaya salad. Here Yui is demonstrating slicing the green papaya. In the old days, julienning the papaya was done with nothing more than a sharp knife, first making many tightly spaced longitudinal cuts, then shaving off the strips. Nowadays you can buy a zig zag tool for this.

Substitutes for green papaya include green mango, or even granny smith apples or hard pears.

The sweet-sour-piquant dressing of lime juice with flavours is what makes this salad work. We used garlic, fish sauce, palm sugar, and chilli. In addition to the papaya, Yui's recipe also includes long beans and tomatoes. Roasted peanuts and dried shrimp add a bit of crunch.

And here is my result. Wow, I have to count those potent Thai chillis carefully. What I put in was a bit eye-watering for me and might be too much for my dinner guests.

Next up was red Panang curry with chicken. Yui explained the difference between coconut cream and coconut milk. For the first stage coconut cream is used and gently heated until it "cracks", that is, oil separates out.

Then the Panang curry paste is stirred in, followed by the meat. When the meat is almost cooked, coconut milk is added, then the palm sugar and fish sauce. The decorative herbs come last.

Then it was time for, not a lunch break, since we had been eating our own creations all the time, but a market break. Some of the group stayed behind to make curry paste from scratch, while the rest of us visited a local market. We were taken there in the signature combi van you see in the second photo.

This is not food but floats for Loi Krathong consisting of flowers on segments of banana trunk.

I recognised many types of produce from my SE Asian childhood. Here are Thai eggplants. There were too many more pictures of produce than fit here.

These pink eggs are just a variation on Chinese century old eggs, they have been dyed pink to differentiate them from normal eggs.

I have to admit I went a little overboard when I spotted red bean dessert and chendol dessert at the market and bought a plastic packet of each. They were a bit too sweet for my taste though. Either that or I prefer subtler sweet things now.

Back at the hot stoves, the next dish was Pad Woon Sen, stir fried glass noodles. Glass noodles are more delicate than the usual rice noodles so need less frying time. Here is are the ingredients mise en place. Also a tip, when frying the egg for rice, it's done before the rice, but for noodles it's done after the noodles.

Just before tucking into my result.

Finally the last two dishes, fried bananas and stuffed cucumber soup. The banana pieces needed to soak in the batter for a while so we prepared the stuffed cucumbers while waiting.

The stuffed cucumbers in soup. The core of the cucumber isn't wasted, it's cooked in the soup.

The tasty banana fritters. My batter was thicker so the fritters were more chewy. An important lesson was understanding how the quantities affect the result. For example I put less curry paste in so my curry was paler and less piquant. A good cook adapts.

Yui is an amazing lady and teacher with a great sense of humour and very sensible attitudes to food and life: Cook good food, eat healthy, and enjoy variety. She has appeared on cooking shows and taught in places as far flung as Brazil. Have a look at all the smiling faces in her gallery here.