Thai Orchid Cookery School

Before leaving Chiang Mai, I spent the last day at Thai Orchid Cookery School learning how to cook! This was way, so much, too, too fun. Not only are you learning a skill and creating something with your own hands... you get to eat it after! There is something so satisfying about that.

Now I have VERY little experience cooking, but  taking the one day class made the process seem much less daunting. Having someone show you step by step is so much better than trying to figure it out from a book.

At Thai Orchid, you choose 5 dishes to create: an appetizer, a soup, a stir fry dish, a curry, and a dessert. I started with Chicken Satay as my appetizer.

We marinated the meat with curry paste, salt, pepper, coconut cream, oil and condensed milk.

Chicken Satay after grilling. We made the sauce and side salad from scratch too.

For the soup I made Tom Kah Gai, or chicken in coconut milk.

kaffir lime leafs, so potent!

to release the flavor, you need to tear the stem out of the middle

chopped up all the veggies

I thought these straw mushrooms were so cool!
The stem and cap are actually hidden inside!

The ingredients are then put into a coconut cream base.

Tom Kha Gai

Next, we took a break from cooking/eating and visited a local outdoor market to learn more about the produce and ingredients we were using.

Ingredients for the soup I made can actually be bought in a fresh bundle per serving.

Thai food uses 3 different kinds of ginger.

And even more types of rice!

fresh coconut cream, straight from a coconut.
So many of the recipes had coconut cream as an ingredient.

Fruits I'd never seen before.

When we came back to the school, it was time to make our stir fry dish. I chose to make Pad Thai.

5 ingredients for 5 different tastes. Fish sauce,  palm sugar, curry paste, tamarind paste, and ground peanuts.

The amount of each ingredient you put in depends on your taste.
I like sweet and salty, with minimal spice.

Assemble all the ingredients together and heat in a wok accordingly.

Pad Thai

For the curry dish I choose Yellow Curry with Chicken, the least spicy one. (I'm a wimp when it comes to spice).

We made the curry paste from scratch!

We even had the experience of grinding it all together,
 though it's just fine to buy the curry pre-made from the store.

Yellow Curry with chicken and potatoes.

And for dessert, super easy Mango Sticky Rice. Just steam the rice and mix the cream in!

This was a great experience that I would highly recommend to everyone. The school made cooking easy, super fun, and accessible. They give you a book with all the recipes at the end and I have real confidence that I'll be able to make these dishes at home! 

Sharing our creations together! I'm no longer a cooking n00b.