Cooking The Thai Way

If you have talked to anyone who has travelled to Thailand, their stories of dodging tuk tuks flying down Khao San road and the stunning golden temples will be in all their pictures, but when the subject turns to the food there are no picture that can portray the taste of a Pad Thai from a noodle bar on Khao San Road! The local food is definitely a highlight of any Thailand trip.If you have been outside in the last 5 years then you will have seen the how the traditional English curry is slowly being ebbed into the background and replaced by a wave of Thai delicacies.



Living in Brighton it is hard to move without going into a Thai Restaurants, pub or Thai take-away and even with this huge choice everyone is packed to the rafters with happy diners. Human nature dictates that we naturally explore the world and when we find something we like we bring back. From India we brought the Tikka Masala, from China the Dim Sum and now, from our Thailand experiences, the Thai Green Curry!With our love of this eastern food it is no wonder that the Thai people have created a fantastic way of giving us a skill we can have forever and so if you go on a Thailand trip be sure to take a cooking course as it will give you more than just a new dish to impress you friends with.



In 2001 I travelled to Chiang Mai as part of my Thailand trip, where there was an impressive array of cooking courses. With luck on my side I blindly chose the smiling face of a man named Lop who took me under his wing for the rest of the day. His cooking school included a half day with a small group of international tourists and our Thai guide. We spent the morning following our guide through the local market where we were given the rundown of Thai etiquette and detailed explanations of what to look for when choosing you ingredients.



He gave us tips on how to tell if these weird and wonderful looking vegetable where ripe, and how to pick the one with the most flavour. We chatted to the local sellers, (with a little help from our guide), and felt very accepted in an alien environment. It is one of the most memorable days of my entire Thailand trip.With our bags full of lemon grass, eggplant, chillies and other local vegetables I had never seen before, we headed to the cooking school. Driving down a dirt road on the out skirts of Chiang Mai we came to a Thai style wood hut surrounded by paddy fields which was our setting for the afternoon.



Throughout the afternoon we cooked a number of different dishes from Pad Thai, green curry to a beautiful sticky rice and mango dessert. After each dish we would stop to sit round a communal rickety wooden table to taste our triumphs and compare notes - a true Thailand travel experience. Some of our dishes where a little more successful than the others, but all with a fantastic aroma and delicious taste!At the end of our lesson we went away with full bellies, a recipe book of all our dishes and a sense of satisfaction that we could replicate a little piece of our Thailand trip when we got home, and impress some of our friends too.



I still cook some of the dishes from the book now almost 10 years later and if you travel to Thailand be sure to take half a day out for this truly fun and memorable Thailand experience!