Day 116 - Chiang Mai

Another early start this morning as we are off to Siam Rice Thai cooking school. We've taken the advice of a few reviews and are skipping breakfast as whatever you make throughout the day you get to eat. One of the ingredients that he showed us he rubbed over my arm which stained it yellow ... it was tumeric!

The owner of the school picks us up and takes us to a local market where he goes through a lot of the ingredients that we will be using today and explaining what it is best to use each ingredient in and how we can recognise them. We are then taken to his home and get to chose what we want to cook, in total we will be cooking 7 dishes each, a soup, appetizer, salad, stir fry, curry paste, curry and a dessert.

To begin with we are shown our own chopping board and Pot the owner went through each ingredient and showed us how to chop it correctly before we gave it a go ourselves. I made the chicken and coconut and Si made spicy soup with basil. We then moved onto the stri fry and both decided to make the chicken with cashew nuts as did the majority of the group and we got to try a bit of flambe luckily we both still have our eyebrows!

After we'd made these 2 dishes we got to sit down and eat them both of which were really nice. We had a short break after our food and it was then time to make the curry paste, curry and salad. We were all shown which ingredients you use for the different curries and how to mash it all into a paste using a pestle and mortor, we had to take turns doing it as you got well bad arm ache after a while! Lots of red chillies went into the paste that me, Si and 2 of the other people were going to be using for our curried and the other guy was making a green curry ... he put 30 green chillies in it! Once the paste was done we then got the chop and prepare our ingredients and then throw it all in the wok to make the curry. Once it was done we plated the curry up and moved onto the salad ... fairly idiot proof lots of veg and a bit of seasoning and all done.

Once the 2 dishes were complete it was time to eat again, Si had hade a Panang curry as he'd never heard of it before and I made the Masaman curry which was the mildest thing on the menu ... it was still too spicy for me I did my best but them had to cool my mouth down on my salad. Feeling the fullness of 4 meals we decided to get them to put the rest of our curries in a box for us to take home and have later.

Another short break and we are all given a chunk of carrot and are told that we are going to carve it. First he tells us to make a small circle in the middle and we were off to a bad start cause mine didnt even look like a circle! We had to cut slightly into it with the knife and then go around the outside of the cut at an angle to carve the shape into it. After the circle we had to do petals, then carve the middle out of the petals and cut around the remaining carrot to make it look like little stems in between the petals. Si's turned out better than mine even though he thinks his was rubbish but we took a picture of them both so they can be judged! The instructor kept telling me I was doing well so Si called me the teachers pet ha!

After another break giving us time to admire the carrot flower it was time to do the last 2 dishes of the day our appetizers and our desserts. I had chose to make spring rolls and Si Pad Thai (Thai noodles with veg) both were very straight forward, chopping veg and putting in the wok with some noodles, even rolling the filling into the spring rolls was quite easy but then he told me that I had to deep fry it .. in a wok! He showed me how to do the first one and it looked very simple but then it was my turn and everyone was watching cause I was the only one doing spring rolls. I splashed oil everywhere and nearly burnt me and Pot the guy teaching us but got there in the end :) Our desserts were very basic to make mainly sugar and coconut milk, I chose to add banana to mine and Si ddecided to have sticky rice with mango on top.

Plated up again and we got to sit down and sample our final dishes, my spring rolls were very nice but very filling so I only had one and boxed the rest up, Si did the same with his Pad Thai and just had a little to sample what he had made. The desserts were very nice and very sweet and a nice end to the masses of food we cooked and ate today.

We let our food settle and thanked Pot for teaching us thai cooking, we each got a certificate and a little receipe book to take away, I bought a little apron for 100baht (£2) and Pot told us that their friend makes the aprons for them and all the profits are saved to send their son Peter Pan to school when he's older.

We are then taken back to the hostel and are both still stuffed so we collapse on the bed for a while until it goes dark and then get a tuk tuk to the train station to get a refund for our train tickets. Good job we booked the return flights as when I went into the station there was a sign up saying 'no trains today' so seems the tracks are still dodge.

After the train station we got the tuk tuk driver to drop us off at the sunday market, it is very popular here and they even close one of the main streets in the old city from one end to the other simply for the market to take place. When we arrive at the market we cant believe how busy it actually is, its so busy that there is even one way traffic. We followed the masses and had a gander at the stalls but were quite surprised that there were no stalls selling knock offs but that is probably due to the amount of tourist police roaming the market.

We walked from one end to the other and unfortunately nothing took our fancy so we will probablt do a bit more shopping when we get back to Bangkok. Back at the hostel and we were slightly hungry so we got Si's Pad Thai and my spring rolls warmed up and shared them between us, Si demolised over half of the spring rolls and I have to admit his Pad Thai was much nicer than the one I had tried in Samui so think we'll be doing a spot of thai cooking when we get home!

We ended the night watching the Manchester United match and then watched the Liverpool one, the crazy host is a Liverpool fan so Si was supporting the other team but she jumped up and danced around when they won ha!

After the footy and it was time for bed, we are up very early in the morning for the day I have been looking forward to for the whole trip ... we're going to be elephant owners for the day :p