Le Book d'Art: FOOD: Cooking course

If ever you"ve wanted to do a cooking course then it's your chance if you come to South East Asia. There are a lot of cooking courses here which offer half or whole day cooking courses in town or on the farm. I recommend doing a whole day cooking course on the farm because you get to cook about 5 dishes you can chose from their programm and you get to learn where the main ingredients actually come from. So if you love Thai food you should definitely visit one of Chiang Mai's cooking schools. The whole day cooking course on the farm cost 1000 THB and you get a cooking book written by the school at the end of your lessen. I did the one of Smart Cooking in Chiang Mai. I was picked up by mini van (this is so typical in Thailand) at my hostel in the morning at around 8am and then we picked up the other cooking students. When we were complete we were a group of 11 which was just right. We met our cooking teacher at a local food market where she explained us the main Thai ingredients they use cooking. Afterwards we took the train to the cooking school which was about 15 minutes from the Old City where she showed us where they actual grom the vegetables. Then she introduced us to the dishes we were going to cook. We had to choose one dish each from the 5 categotries - main dish, soup, curry paste, appetizer and desert. Don't worry of not finishing eating your food you cook because you cook small portions. It wasn't as difficult as I was expecting and you learn that cooking is actually easy. You just have to know what goes well together and which spices you use.
So at the end I was very surprised how tasty the food was I cooked and could hardly imagine that it was made by me.
These are the dishes I chose:

- vegetable coconut soup with chicken
- stir fried chicken with cashew and rice
- green curry paste in coconut chicken soup
- papaya salad
- boiled banana in coconut milk

Enjoy cooking!

- AJ -