Mmm...Unbelievable!

I look so professional.

Ladies and Gentleman, I can cook Thai food. Oh yes, I went to cooking school today. It was awesome. I got picked up at 9:00am, and after we had everyone in the truck, we stopped at the market and finally, I had all of the weird-looking fruits and vegetables explained. There are so many vegetables here that I've never heard of, and I'm pretty sure they have a couple not even Whole Foods would carry. There are 3 types of Thai eggplant, for example, that I had never seen before this trip. Also, the pumpkins look weird and strangely enough, the Thai word for pumpkin is the f-bomb. That's right, people, the f-bomb. Our teacher was so funny, he made jokes all day long. It's really clear that he loves what he does.

Me and Gary, from England.

I started off with tom-yam soup (or hot and sour) soup. It was more hot than sour--my eyes were watering like crazy--but it was pretty good. I would eat in again. It paled in comparison to the paneang curry that came later, however. That stuff was so good. It was a curry that was orangish-yellow in color, and it tasted really, really great. I ate more of that one than anything else. I also made sweet and sour vegetables, pad thai, and the whole class made papaya salad, spring rolls, and mango with sticky rice. The papaya salad was the only thing all day that I didn't like. It's not the kind of papaya you're thinking. The young papaya is green and tastes like a cucumber. I'm not a fan of what results when the whole papaya salad thing is mixed together, though. It's popular here--I just saw a man ordering one on the street while I waited for my smoothie.

The mango and sticky rice deserves its own paragraph. Man, that stuff is good. It's not dessert how we think of it, but it is yummy. I did not know this, but sticky rice is actually a whole different kind of rice from non-sticky rice. Go figure. You have to soak it in water for at least 4 hours, and then you steam it over a pot of water. I had no idea. It's cool, but I only like it in the dessert--I'd rather stick with regular jasmine rice for eating with other foods.

I would definitely list this day of cooking in the top 3 things I've done so far in Thailand. The other two would probably be trekking (for the experience, not because it was pleasant), and seeing the demonstration for Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. The best part of the class is that I got a cookbook with all of the recipes we did and twenty more we didn't do, as well as pictures of all of the vegetables and fruits with their names in English and Thai, so I can just take it to the market and point at what I want. I made a lot of notes in the book as we went along so I can remember what he said as well. God, it was so fun. I got a little carried away at one point smashing my garlic, though. It looked like a particularly hard clove, so I brought the side of my knife crashing down on it on my cutting block, and I sent pulverized garlic flying everywhere. Oops. At least I didn't cut off my hand or something.

Cooking the sweet and sour. BIG FIRE!

Holding my sweet and sour vegetables. The last dish.