Curries and Coconuts with Kok

After another delicious organic brekkie at the hotel, we were picked up by Kok from the cooking school at 8.30am, to go to the local market to get some stuff for our cooking classes.

Meandering through the isles full of veggies, grilled and fresh fish and swinging bags with meat (Bec suddenly walking at a cracking pace), we were told what ingredients we needed to make the curry pastes, the rice, phad thai and other delicacies we were going to cook later on. Kok made sure we knew the difference between a bag of salt and a bag of MSG - which looked dangerously similar.

The place we were going was an organic farm about 20 kms outside of Chiang Mai- bumping along in the 4WD speeding past motorbikes with 3 people on them (no helmets), skinny buffalos in the rice paddies, 20 meter high bamboo scaffoldings above signs saying "safety first!" and all on roads barely wide enough for our 4WD – let alone overtaking.

 

After picking our fresh ingredients from the farm, it was time to start pounding our ingredients into a curry paste, to show that we were "good husbands/wives" according to Kok. We made yellow and red curries, Tom Kha soup, papaya salad and stirfried chicken with basil, phad thai and mango with sticky rice. Despite taking the utmost care to remove some of the chili seeds, lunch was an exercise of coughing, sweating and inhaling cold air – all in vain! Very delicious though :-)