Chiang Mai: Thai Cooking School

We had a great recommendation from our friends, Ashley and Evan, to do a cooking class and signed up for Thai Farm Cooking School. The course took place on a local farm surrounded by rice fields. It was a full day experience that started at a market and ended at their family farm. We learned how to select ingredients, cook five dishes each and ate more food than our bellies could handle. We had to get rolled out of there! A few highlights:

The Thai market. On our ride out to the farm, we stopped at a local market to select and purchase our ingredients. Our instructor, MB, or "most beautiful" as she likes to call herself, walked us through the stalls describing produce, grains and the like. It was amazing to learn how to select the right ingredients when cooking these famous Thai recipes. We learned a ton about the different types of rice, the kinds of chilies that will give the perfect amount of kick dish and what questions to ask for the freshest ingredients. After we collected what we needed, we piled back into our buses and made our way out to the farm.

The food. I have to say, we may be destined to be Thai chefs. Our dishes were some of our favorite meals we had all trip. This is obviously a testament to how great the school was and MB's instruction, but we feel pretty confident we have a career on our hands. We made papaya salad, green and red curries, fried shrimp rolls and even coconut mango sticky rice. Don't worry, we have to cook book and you're all invited for a dinner cooked by yours truly.

MB aka Most Beautiful. She was our instructor for the day. Absolutely hilarious woman. It's hard to describe her because she is so unique. She laughs constantly, makes sexual jokes about almost every ingredient and has a way of making everyone take life less seriously. She was honestly such a highlight in our experience because she made us smile for 8 hours straight. Ahhhh shrimp lady!