Thai Cooking Class

I love the food in Thailand. It is so delicious, cheap, and there are street vendors selling it to you every 5 meters. Some of my favorite foods here are rice sausages, juicy fried chicken and fish, roti and bananas, the pancake man’s fortune cookie batter fried on a skillet to make a tortilla shape, folded, and then stuffed with blueberry filling, bananas, and chocolate, mangos and sticky rice, gyotza (fried potstickers), Masaba (roti filled with dry yellow curry), cantalope boba drinks with tapioca balls at the bottom of the cup, fried bananas, pad thai, khao soi, sticky rice and meat with chili sauce, skewers of pork, pineapple, and peppers, spring rolls, waffles shaped like fish filled with strawberry, chocolate, coconut, or blueberry filling, mango cheese cake, coconut crackers, little coconut cakes, fried dough balls dipped in yummy sauce, real fruit shakes, Ovaltine drinks (I’m totally serious), pancakes with egg in the batter, chicken with cashews, tomato macaroni like you’ve never had it before…the list could go on and on. This food is everywhere you go! And you can usually get any item for about 30 cents.

So this was a long introduction, but my point is…I’ve gained 10 pounds. Okay, that’s not my point, but I thought I’d throw that out there anyways. My point is that I am going to be really sad to leave all this food so I decided to take a Thai cooking class. Me and my friend Dani spent a day learning how to cook six Thai dishes. We were picked up in the morning and taken to the local market to buy ingredients (Thai’s normally go to the market everyday to pick up the ingredients for their meals that day. They hardly have any food in their cupboards). Then we went to a women’s house. Outside of her home under a tin roof were about twenty gas burning stoves (Thai don’t use ovens), a bunch of counters, mats to sit on while you pound curry, and some sinks. It was a great outdoor kitchen. We learned how to make Masiyana, yellow, and green curry, sweet and sour chicken, pad thai (noodles with sauce, peanuts, lime, bean sprouts, and egg), chicken cashew nut stuff, Som Tum (papaya salad), Khoa soi (noodles in coconut soup—a northern thai specialty), ground chicken with basil leaves (“A Thai’s favorite dish”), mangos and sticky rice, steamed banana cake, and some other stuff. We ate all the food we made, it was ridiculous and I could hardly move when I got home that night. She gave us a cookbook so when I get home, I am going to start cooking Thai food. Yay!