The best part of cooking--eating what you have made!


Mango sticky rice--my favorite Thai dessert.

I don't know why I hadn't thought to do it before now, but I finally took a Thai cooking class, and it was great fun. For $25, my friends and I took an all day class at a home in suburban Chiang Mai, in which we made 6 dishes and pounded our own curry paste with a morter and pestle. We all sweated quite a lot since we made the curry paste from scratch; the other students in the class had bought theirs at the market, so they just watched us and laughed at our effort. It was immensely satisfying, though, to understand the effort that goes into the art of Thai cooking and the amount of ingredients necessary to acheive the distinct flavors. Our cooking teachers were great Thai women (perhaps a little TOO good looking, though) who spoke excellent english and could even crack jokes (humor is very difficult in a foreign/second language). Now when I get back to the states, I have a new Thai cookbook to use and many implements/pots/woks to buy in order to recreate what I learned.