ken hom eat your heart out!

I can't believe that it's Friday already! For me, it's just under an hour until Saturday now. I have had 2 thai cooking classes and now an expert at making:

- phad thai
- thai green chicken curry
- roast duck red curry
- chicken in pandan leaves

The cooking classes have been really good fun. Yesterday was a little bit intimidating, mainly because I didn't really know what to expect. I got picked up, taken to the city office for registration and then we were all driven to Sompon's school which is 25 minutes drive outside the city. We all strapped on our beautiful aprons and got started on some vegetable carving. It's much harder than it looks :)
The general format of the day is as follows:

- sit in classroom
- watch chef explain ingredients and cook dish
- go to workstation and cook dish
- eat own dish

For some reason, the last couple of days I have suffered from severely poor short term memory and as soon as I got back to my workstation couldn't quite remember the order of action. Which veg to chop first, which ones to finely chop and then what order they went into the pan. Luckily, Sompon's lovely ladies and slightly camp guy were on hand to shout out instructions and give us all a helping hand. No one set themselves on fire and no one really messed up :) Well, no one would know anyway as everyone ate their own food...

Today, Sompon himself taught us how to make pad thai and thai green curry. He was a very good teacher and of course, there was much cameraderie in the classroom. The only problem that I have with these classes is that there is far too much eating involved. Every day there is one soup to start, some sort of appetizer, 2 main courses and a dessert. This morning I made sure not to eat any breakfast just so that I wouldn't feel quite as stuffed as I felt yesterday. It didn't really help...

After the cooking class, I arranged to meet up later with 2 of my classmates for a beer and then to check out the deep fried insects. I wasn't entirely convinced that I wanted to try any, but I wanted to be there when they did :)

I will have to post some pictures when I get back to London, it was really quite revolting watching them eat. I could see them concentrating hard not to think about what they were eating. In the end, I tried one thing - some sort of worm that looked like an oversize maggot. It didn't taste of much really, it was just really crispy. After that, I refused to try the others. This little vendor had crickets and this really really disgusting water beetle that was huge. One of the guys had this and said that apparently it was ok. Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck. He can take all the street cred for trying it. We all went on to this amazing teak house restaurant afterwards to eat some real food which was pretty fantastic. With beer and cocktails, we ended up spending 300 baht each, a small fortune by Thai standards I guess but in GBP it works out to be less than a fiver. Not exactly breaking the bank.

Tomorrow is my final cooking class. Not sure what I'll be cooking up - but I'm sure it will be good and it will be easy. Thai cooking is fantastic - all the work is in the preparation. After that, it's all just chucking all the ingredients into the pan and cooking for 5 minutes. I love it!

Sunday I will probably be going to Doi Suthep (mountain with temple on) and then it's off for a two day trek in the wilds of northern thailand.