(and woman too)

Martin Yan is a Davis resident, so this post title seemed appropriate.  If you don’t know who he is, the title won’t make sense anyways.  Google it 🙂

While visiting Chiang Mai we did a few of the touristy things you would expect, visiting the Night Bazzar, touring the city and temples, and Thai massage (owie).  We also decided to take a Thai Cooking Class together.

The class started with a short walk to one of Chiang Mai’s bustling markets.  There our hostess Apple was filling us in on all of the ins and outs of picking the right bits and pieces to make a good Thai dish.  It was like drinking from a fire hose, but great information.  She gave us a few minutes to walk around the market after the lesson was complete.  And thankfully, we did not have to try to buy anything on our own.  That would have kept us there all night.

Market in Chiang Mai

Upon our return we broke into groups according to the dishes we had chosen to make.  We were all given a large cleaver and a block of wood (aka: cut board).  The teacher then walked us through the misen plas for our first dish – in my case Pad Thai.  After a little slicing and dicing it was time to put the coals to it (so to speak).

It took our teacher about three and a half minutes to cook the meal.  She poured it on a plate and said.. “and then you eat it” – and proceeded to do so.  So we all started to cook.  And it went quite well.

In about two and a half minutes (I used tofu, so no waiting for the chicken to cook) I had Pad Thai.  And it was good.  And it was easy.  Almost too easy.

Moments later Janine appeared with a dish of food.  Hers was good too.  We inhaled both dishes and began to wonder… were we paying way too much for Thai Food?

We each made another dish, this time a soup.  A bit harder, but nothing that would qualify as difficult.  And yet again, it was really quite good.  And personalized to our preference of spice types and level.  I vacuumed mine up.  Janine was starting to hit the wall.  Our boy was taking up precious stomach space.  Oh well, more for me!

But as the evening progressed, so did the complexity if the dishes.  While I have 100% confidence I could pull off Pad Thai unaided, the confidence level starts to fall with each dish.  Another factor was the quantity of food.  In addition to “snacks” and drinks, we cooked and ate four courses.  By the end we had both eaten so much we could not see straight, let alone cook.

So we took our cookbooks and walked off into the night (Night Bazaar actually) to try to walk off the impending food coma.  The experience was pretty satisfying, and we both felt like we learned something.  We might even try something like that again.

And so we did.  At our third stop of the trip, we were staying at the Komeneka at Tanggayuda – which is the home of the Komeneka cooking school.  So we signed up to cook again… this time Balinese cuisine.  The experience was not much like learning to cook Thai cuisine, but it was similar in that it was a lot of fun.

We won’t bore you with the details, but we will include a few differences.  We were up at 0-dark-30 in order to make it to the market by 7am.  Despite it being an “off day” the market was multiple times larger than the one in Chiang Mai.  And this time our personal guide, one of the staff cooks, helped us buy a few of the items we would actually be cooking with (although no one had quail eggs 🙂 ).

It turns out we were the only two people in the Balinese cooking class.  And it was being led by the Head Chef.  That meant a lot of personal attention.  And this time we got smart.

We told Putu straight out that there was no way we could finish all that food after having their delicious breakfast (a true story), and insisted that we set a third plate for him.  It worked out pretty well.  We rolled out of there full, but no food was wasted.  This turned out to be particularly critical, as we both decided that the desert course – Balinese Crepes – was the big hit.

Would we take another cooking class?  It turns out we would.  We took one just a few days later in Jimbaran.  While it was not as much fun as the prior classes, we again learned a few things, and we had a nice meal.  And this time it was free.

It remains to be seen whether or not we will be able to apply any of our new-found cooking skills.  But our eating skills were really coming in to their own.  By the end of the first two weeks we were shoveling down food like nobody’s business.  Even the monkeys would have been impressed.