My interest in cooking has increased after few years living abroad by myself. From a girl without any cooking knowledge and now a young lady who is so enthusiastic in baking and cooking. What on earth has happened that transform me into a cooking mama?! I am curios too! hahahaha
I can still remember the first time I baked my cake was at the age of 16 when my classmates came to my house. The so called chocolate cake was topped with lots of strawberries. The cake wasn't a failure but the texture was still too hard to be eaten. However, it was too edible! This gathering was actually inspired by the butter cookies that we baked during the home-economics class. I didn't learn much during that class since all the dishes we learnt were completed in a group of 4 or 5 person. People who have better cooking skills must have larger opportunity to take over the cooking job so that we can earn more credit for ourselves. The rest will be standing behind or help around with cutting and preparing ingredients (I was one of them). Besides that, since my grandma and dad are both good cook, the opportunity to learn cooking is extremely small. (Started to miss my grandma dishes now :((((
And so after living abroad, cooking has become part of my life. When I feel uncertain, stressful, sad, fretful and angry, baking makes me feel happy and it also helps to relieve my stress. Because the feeling of dumping everything into a bowl and whisking is so much comfortable (Will you think I am mad?).
After taken breakfast in the hotel, we then went straight to the local market to wait for the person in charge which is the chef. The market is almost same as the one in Malaysia which is separated into wet and dry market.
Sticky-rice making in process.
This is the chef who is explaining the ingredients and spices that use mostly in Thai cuisine. He explained that spices such as tamarind, ginger and lemon-grass are widely used in Thai cuisine as there can bring out the taste of the cuisine.
I am so proud of myself that I actually know quite well about the spices! wahahaha seems like studying abroad isn't a wrong option.
Had chicken rice while waiting for the other group members. Taste so good!
We spent the whole morning and afternoon in the market and Thai cookery school which is from 10am to 2pm. Altogether we learnt 4 dishes - 2 appetizer and 2 main course. The cooking school is located inside a private residential area. The environment is pretty good and there are all semi-detached house.
Open kitchen
Everyone will have their own cookery tools and equipments
Tom Yam Soup
Kway Teow (Noodles) with Stir fry Vegetables and pork
Thai Red Curry
Mum's Thai Red Curry
Stir fry Vegetables and meat
We eat once we have finished prepared a dish. After finish eating the appetizers (Kway Tiao and Tom Yam), we already felt full ==///
All ingredients were being prepared by the school
Showing her cutting skill once in a life time
After that, we were sent back to the market to meet our local tour guide and heading towards to Royal Flora Garden.
The garden is damn too big to walk around so we decided to take the train instead of walking. One thing really funny was that the driver who is also the guide was speaking in Thai even the people on the train were non-Thai.
I was teaching Fat to do some posing which can make your legs look longer while waiting for the train!
This is the only palace we stopped by since the weather wasn't that pleasant.
About 3.30pm, we then left the Royal Garden and drove to Chiang Rai. The journey was taking forever to arrive. Since there was no highway, the driver could only drive in the small alley that making the whole journey taking forever!! And the car was damn cold, I felt like I should have wore long sleeve and pants rather than just shorts and T-Shirt.
Stopping halfway at the hotspring.
We were staying at Wiang Inn hotel. We took superior room for 2 and it was quite spacious.
The Night Bazaar is just a few minutes away from where we stayed.
I realized that I have no pictures for the food that we ate on that day = = What we had were just the Thai Chicken rice and beef soup noodles along the street as we couldn't find an authentic and proper Thai restaurant. There were a few western cuisine you can try it out but we were just craving for Thai food, that's why food stall was the best choice :)
Well, that's all for today! XX