Cooking in Chiang Mai

What a fun day! We did the standard tourist thing here in Chiang Mai and went back to school for a day (so much more fun than Home Economics ever was!).

We joined a great bunch of people at the Pad Thai cookery school and started off with a trip to the market where we were introduced to several different Thai ingredients, from fresh herbs to shrimp paste. Then the cooking began. We had a crazy teacher who loved posing for photos and kept referring to her students as ‘very sexy’… All the teachers wore pink bunny ears for the day and had us in fits of giggles all day!

The menu for the day consisted of pad thai (for breakfast), spring rolls (brunch), tom yam goung soup (lunch), green curry, chicken with cashew nuts and rice (dinner), finished off nicely with my favourite, sticky rice with mango (dessert). All in all, a very greedy day. One of the more exciting moments was stir frying the chicken and cashew nuts over an enormous flame – enough to singe the eyebrows – but my proudest moment was creating almost-perfect spring rolls from scratch. Although I guess if they look too good no one would believe your culinary mastery and you may as well buy them from M&S. Must remember to make them look a bit shoddy next time…

We came away stuffed, and in possession of a certificate and recipe book so we can impress you all on our return!