Mother Daughter Adventure chronicles V: Chiang Mai II- Food Frenzy

Chiang Mai is a pretty popular place to do all sorts of courses and training courses.  Cooking classes, massage classes, meditation retreats, elephant mahout camp, and the like are among the most common.  Mom and did a great cooking class for a day with Asia Scenic Thai Cooking School . We went to the market, we met great people, learned a lot, and cooked and ate a ton.  I took some food home.   

Market pictures:

Different qualities of rice.  Sticky rice rice is at the end!

Coconut Milk- nom ma praao

Mangoes- ma muang

All sorts of stuff in plastic bags- peanuts, sunflower seeds, chips, dried pumpkin

Let the overindulgence begin:

Meang Kum "Eat in one bite".  It's sort of like an appetizer.  Everyone does a little cheers and you eat it together. Chok dee!  (The Thai 'cheers'.  It means good luck.)

Spring rolls!  Who doesn't love spring rolls? They're not too tough to make, you just need a little finesse.

Roll- deep fry- present- ta dah!

Som tam- spicy papaya salad- a Thai staple.  This is a pretty spicy dish, so when you order it you can request the number of chilis you'd like.  I'm pretty good at eating spicy food by now, but still I can only really tolerate 2 chilis.  That's enough to keep you sweating more than you already are!

The lime trick- squeeze the lime over the spoon.  You definitely get more juice this way.

Um, classic.  Sorry Mom- but I had to!  This is priceless!  Getting directions when cooking desert.  I don't know if mom thought she could handle the directions or something, maybe she was nervous she'd mess it up.  Thai foods cook very quickly so if you cook something too long or miss a step while it's on the heat it might turn out quite different than you'd planned.

Time to stuff ourselves!  This was I think the third time we stopped cooking to eat.  It may not look like a ton of food- but we'd already eaten spring rolls or papaya salad, rad na (not pictured- rad na is a gravy noodle dish) or pad thai, and these are some pretty filling dishes!  Tom yam koong (spicy soup with lemongrass, galanga and shrimp), some kind of vegetable dish with rice, Kow soy or 'Chiang Mai noodles', and kaao neow ma muang (mango and sticky rice)  And to think, we only paid 30 dollars to learn about these things in the market, get instruction on how to make it, eat all this food with nice company, and get a cookbook at the end!  What a deal.

Another 'must do' for mom completed!