Eat your heart out Patrick McDarrah

This is a specially dedicated post to our favorite food lover. We have been collecting pictures in Thailand of our favorite dishes, and we just completed a cooking course in Chiang Mai with Emalie Gainey!! Emalie is visiting us from Boston, and we get to travel with her for 2 weeks. 

In Northern Thailand people love to have this for lunch. Khao Soi has flat egg noodles in a curry and coconut milk broth with crispy noodles on top and lime, shallot & chillis on the side.

Green Tea Thai style. Condensed milk and over ice..

Spicy papaya salad is another favorite here. I learned to make it in our cooking class with a mortar and pestle. We frequented this resto for the couple of weeks we spent in Chiang Mai, and they served it up with a piece of boneless fried chicken. With a cold ice ginger lemon on the side, you're good to go. 

In the North of Thailand we finally found sticky rice. We were starting to think it wasn't Thai at all! We often got it at the street market (around .30 for a single serving). I liked to have it with Massaman curry, which tastes more like an Indian curry and has meat, keffir lime leaves and potatoes. 

Jackfruit is so good! That's dragon fruit below.

One night we went to Korean BBQ where you pick all your own food and cook it yourself at your table. The food selection was interesting to say the least. Pork wrapped mushrooms, seasoned meats and green noodles among other things.

Emalie Gainey! And a new friend we made, Erica, from Tahoe.

Before we get to the cooking class, I'd like to share that Matt made me eat bugs. And a couple of our friends too.

Charlotte was an ambitious bug eater..

For our cooking class, they took us to the local market to show us the ingredients we would be needing, but the actual ingredients came from the cooking place's own organic farm outside of town. Without really planning it, we did this class on Thanksgiving. This was appropriate because all the food you're about to see we ate between 11-3! We were stuffed.

Cooking class welcome snack - ginger, shallot, peanuts, toasted coconut, lime juice and syrup wrapped into a betel leaf. The leaf was bitter but actually really good.

First dish for me was pad Thai. We were told that locals rarely eat this, but Thailand is famous for it, (at least outside of Thailand) and it's delicious. It is tricky to cook in the wok as it is burns easily. On the bottom left are my chopped ingredients - the tofu has egg on the outside which is why it's yellow. 

Matt's first dish was pad see ew, which uses the wide, flat rice noodles. Sharon's fave! I got a kick out of us cooking barefoot. I love that you're rarely expected to wear shoes in Southeast Asia.

Emmy made cashew nut chicken stir fry, and the unusual ingredients you'll see below are red chillis, 'ear' mushrooms (on the right) and baby corn on the bottom.

Next up were spring rolls & salads. Matt and I actually made the spring roll mix for the group.

The spring rolls were pretty easy to roll up and then we fried them. For salad course, Matt and Emmy made spicy chicken salad. That plate has Thai mint and something similar to cilantro along with scallion.

I made the spicy papaya salad. They use green papaya or young papaya instead of a ripe one for this salad.

Next we made our curry pastes. This was hard work as the chilis have to be really smashed up with a stone mortar and pestle. We were told a food processor wouldn't work because it doesn't extract the oils. On the plates below you can see chilis of course, as well as turmeric, ginger, coriander, ginseng, garlic, & green onion. On the bottom right the finished pastes clockwise are Massaman, green, Panang (red plus peanuts) and red curry.

 

Here is my Panang curry with coconut cream & keffir lime leaves (mostly garnish). Emalie made green curry but I didn't get a good picture. 

The last courses (we were so stuffed at this point) were soup and dessert. I made coconut milk soup (otherwise known as Tom Ka), Matt and Emalie made Tom Yum, a sweet & sour soup (bottom left). Top left is Matt's red curry Khao Soi. Someone gave us their sticky rice & mango to share and it was really tasty. The sticky rice gets boiled in coconut cream and sugar and salt and topped with sesame seeds. 

 

All three of us made deep fried banana for dessert. Rice and wheat flour mixed with water, sesame seeds and shredded coconut to make the batter.

Food extravaganza! They also gave us a cookbook (coming your way Alexandra) and I think we will be able to make many of these things at home. 

xx ELM