September 24-27
A bit sad to be flying solo again, but excited for a few more days in such a cool city! With quite a few days, we were planning on relaxing a bit, getting our post cards cranked out, catching up on the blog, and cooking Thai food! And we were successful on all of those things except getting caught up on the blog. I’m losing steam on this a bit. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…
Our first night in town we popped out for food and found the Sunday market that we were hunting down last week with Ken and Janine.
And, of course, found some delicious food:
The next morning we were off to the Chiang Mai Thai Cookery school. This is the same school that Michael took a class in 14 years ago when he last visited Thailand, so that’s cool. Our first stop for the class was the market.
The market sells these little bundles to use in soup. It is the right amount of kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, ginger, and everything else you need to season your soup. I thought it was clever to sell this way.
The below is a Kaffir lime. Michael has cooked with the leaves before, but I had never seen the actual fruit. It’s too bitter to use for cooking, but you can zest the skin for soaps and candles and such.
Then it was off to class with an Irishman named John and a woman from China named Sateen. The woman teaching the class was named Garnet and she was the most delightful human I’ve ever met. I apologize in advance – you’re getting a lot of photos of our food that we cooked. It doesn’t all look that professional, but we did it and it tasted awesome. If it does look professional, then it might be a photo of Garnet’s example dish.
Here is the hot and spicy prawn soup:
I’m not sure what I’m so excited about above. I may be teasing about how Michael’s dish turned out.
Here are our fish cakes.
The first plate is mine and the second that looks like someone was murdered over the plate was Michael’s. I think the carrot flower gives me an unfair advantage. That and my superior plating skills.
Plus we made green curry with chicken:
I think my curry was the first one again, but I’m not really sure any more.
And we made Pad Thai:
And spicy pork salad called larb:
And we finished with a delicious water chestnut and coconut milk dessert:
We were planning on coming back the next day for a second class, but we had such a great time with Garnet that we changed our plans to come back the day after that and have round two with her.
The next class was shared with two guys from the US. They both were huge value adds to the day. The one, Brennan, is a baker so he had great cooking knowledge. And the other guy, Kyle, had just finished living 3 years in Cambodia, so he knew some of the local language and had a lot of interesting things to say about Southeast Asia.
Day two we had Chicken and Coconut Milk Soup, Red Curry with Fish, Vegetable Stir Fry, Crispy Fried Noodles with Pork, Banana Cake, and Papaya Salad.
Plus we had another great day with Garnet!
We don’t have a picture of the stir fry, but here is Michael easily executing the dish:
I’m a little less comfortable with the wok:
We ate a little less on our second day of cooking, so we were able to go check out Wat Phra That Doi Suthep after class. 
The temple is about 10 miles outside Chiang Mai and is up on a mountain, so there are incredible views of the city.
Plus they had orchids in crazy colors!
After visiting the temple, we walked over to the chocolate factory, a place Janine found for us earlier that week while reading up on Bangkok.
We ordered two types of chocolate lava cake and demolished both of them. There are no pictures of the food.
It was really good. Plus the view of the river was beautiful and just far enough outside of the old city to be calm and peaceful.
And that’s basically it. The rest of our time was spent relaxing, wandering around the city, eating, and detoxing. We had a few great runs around the old city and got to check out the cool gates and walls. Plus we got in cheap massages and cheap haircuts. My haircut is one of the best I’ve ever had and was under 10 bucks!
Plus we got to see this guy who was trying to videotape the pigeons at their level. It was a ridiculous sight and he chased them around for a very long time.
We were well rested and well fed by the time we left Chiang Mai. It was definitely one of our favorite cities in Southeast Asia and we will definitely be back! Now off to Bali!