Taking Thai Cooking Lessons in Chiang Mai

After an exhausting day in the jungle on Thursday, the following day we relaxed, chilling out in our hostel lounge when we weren't taking lazy strolls to 7-11. In the evening we went on a pub crawl and randomly met two friends we knew from South Korea.

On Saturday we did a Thai Cooking Class in the evening, learning how to make several authentic Thai dishes, and getting soaked in the process as early Songkran celebrations began to sweep across Chiang Mai.

On Friday night we went on a little pub crawl around the old city.

As we were walking around, we spotted Christine and Lucy, two friends we knew from our time teaching in South Korea. We decided to hang out for the rest of the evening, continuing our bar-hopping until the morning hours.

The next evening, after another day of relaxing, we did some Thai cooking classes at Baan Thai Cookery School.

Before cooking though, we had to go get some ingredients, so our guide escorted us to a local market. Along the way, we became soaked as people were already celebrating Songkran, the Thai Water Festival.

At the marketplace, sampling various Thai ingredients.

Back at the cooking school, the first thing to prepare was a main dish of kai pad med ma maung him ma pan, or cashew chicken. Despite its long name, it was a pretty simple dish, requiring us to cut a bunch of vegetables and then stir-fry them with the chicken and sauces.

The finished dish.

Next, we made tom kha kai, a delicious soup made with coconut milk, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, mushroom and chicken.

To go with the soup, there were also poh pia tod (Thai spring rolls) to be made.

The soup and spring rolls together.

And for our last dish we made some spicy-hot curries.

My Panaeng Curry.

As someone who's never been very good at cooking, it was refreshing getting to make some very simple but tasty Thai dishes. Apparently there are full-day courses where you get to go to a farm and pick your own vegetables, which sounds fun, though we were really content with this shorter evening course.