Learning to cook Thai-style

One day while Mum and Dad were with us, we signed up for a Thai cooking class, at a cooking school run by one of our favorite restaurants.

First up, we chose what we wanted to cook from a 'menu' - we were conscious to choose things that we thought we would be able to replicate at home e.g. not the delicious green papaya salad (although if anyone knows where I can get green papaya or green mango in Auckland tell me quick!) .  Between us we chose a red curry, green curry and a mussaman curry, a pad thai, a tom yum khung and a tom kai.

Embarking on our trip to the markets

Our chef-teacher was a wonderful small Thai lady called Oi, who first led us off on pedal bikes to the local market.  The fresh-market for Koh Phangan occupies one street in the main town of Thong Sala.  We had briefly looked at this street and its multitude of stalls in passing, but had not really engaged with what was on offer.

Oi talked us through all the fresh ingredients we were buying - the various species of eggplant (pea sized and up), many herbs, how to pick kaffir limes leaves, chillies, pickled turnip, various varieties of mushroom, fresh tofu, prawns, bamboo shoots, tamarind, cane sugar and so on.

Mum selecting from the seafood

Identifying new vegetables

White eggs, brown eggs, pink pickled eggs, quail eggs

We also purchased many delicious fruits - most of which we had been eating every day anyway.  Every morning our day starts with a platter of 3 or 4 fresh tropical fruit.  Our long time favorite, mango, is a staple, but also papaya, pomelo (kind of like a enormous sweet grapefruit which you eat one segment at a time), juicy pineapple and also the less exotic rock melon/canteloupe and very sweet watermelon. 

We newly identified dragon-fruit which we have been eating regularly but calling by the wrong name (red outside with a white flesh dotted with tiny black edible pips), and we also tried mangosteen for the first time - which has become a real favorite of ours.

We also bought and tried some banana wrapped in sticky rice and steamed in banana leaves - delicious, particularly with mango, and a great gluten free dessert for mum !  Another delicious desert we have tried here is mango and sticky rice with coconut milk - divine.  

Our regular fruit lady with mounds of papaya, melon and dragon-fruit (the red ones)

I had assumed we would be making the curries from the individual spices, however this was not the case.  The markets sold large mounds of pastes for each of the curries made in this part of Thailand.  Oi did provide a recipe for the pastes though, should we wish to prepare from scratch at home.

We returned to the kitchen and prepared all our ingredients, for our 3 individual dishes.

Following Oi's lead in preparing the ingredients

Pad Thai - interestingly used fresh noodles (the flat white rice ones) and this gave a much better result than presoaking the dried noodles, which is how I have made it at home, as it avoided it all clumping together.  Oi gave us advice on things to substitute if you couldn't get various ingredients in our own country.  I wonder if we can get fresh rice noodles anywhere?

Red curry - made with the egg sized, and pea-sized eggplants.  The tricky thing with this was to use sufficient curry paste so as to have a good flavor, but without blowing your head off with the chilli.

Tom Kha (similar to Tom Yum but with coconut milk), really tasty with lemongrass, galangal, fresh coriander root and kaffir limes.  I made this one without chili so that the children could eat it - and it was still really good and went down well.

Quick-cooking in a smoking hot wok.

Once the ingredients were prepared we moved to the woks in the kitchen and started to cook.  The fierce heat meant that this took no time at all, but that we were sweltering, on a day that was already about 35 C outside, let alone standing over a high flame !  The trick here was to get them all into the wok in the right order at the right moment so that they were perfectly cooked once it was served.

Feeling quite proud of our colourful, aromatic creations we sat down to a large glass of cold water and a shared meal.  It was delicious, we enjoyed it thoroughly, although the curries were a bit too spicy for some.  The children had helped a little too and they thoroughly enjoyed tasting our creations as well.

Look what we made !

Delicious !

There was so much food - each of us having made three dishes that served 2 people !  So we took home takeaways (in Thai style - clear plastic bags tied at the tops with all the air inside with an elastic band) and it fed us all for another couple of meals !

The cooking was interesting and the food delicious, and almost the best bit was our tour around the markets which has given us the confidence to shop there more,  and it has much better produce than the (revolting smelling) supermarket.

I have recipes for the dishes we cooked which I am happy to share with anyone, once we get near a scanner, as the list of ingredients is formidable, or I could take a photo for you.  Or perhaps we will be cooking up some Thai meals on our return !