I know when I’m at home I end up making the same three meals and I cycle through them throughout the month. I can perfect those three things, but ask me to get creative by trying to make a new dish and we’re out of luck. We have tried so many amazing dishes on this trip that it would be a shame for me to go back home and carry on just making those same dishes! I have made it a mission to learn to make at least a handful of dishes when I get back, it’d just be better if they were actually good.
Italian and Thai food are my favorites back home, so you can bet I have tried to learn and retain the tricks that come with creating Italian and Thai dishes that actually taste like an Italian or Thai local made them. We were lucky enough to stay with an Italian family in Naples, Italy to learn a few of our favorite meals, but we had to figure out how to make Thai food when we didn’t have a host to show us how!
A couple minutes on the internet and we had a few options for cooking classes! The two trusty results we found were:
May Kaidee’s Vegetarian and Vegan cooking class
Starting at 1500 Baht
Four Hours
8 Dishes
Additional Raw and Cold Food Recipes
Thai Dancing
(Some other things that you can see on the website)
May Kaidee’s Express Cooking Class
1000 Baht
Two Hours
Cutting vegetables/ingredient preparation
3 Dishes + Peanut Sauce
1000 Baht
Six hours
Ingredient lesson and shopping at the market
Cooking 6 dishes and curry paste
Not a vegan/veg cooking class, but every dish can be made vegan.
Hands-on lesson with some of the other classmates
We recommend both them and they’re both great options for different reasons, but we decided to attend the Thai Kitchen Cookery Center Full Day class to challenge ourselves to veganize each dish (even though it wasn’t a challenge because they were so accommodating!).
Learning about traditional Thai herbs and spices at the market.
Browsing around the market finding ingredients.
Our day started at 9 AM by being picked up and taken to the market where we had a lesson on the different key ingredients in Thai dishes, and then we walked around the market to try and spot these key items.
Your professional Thai chefs
We went back to the van that took us to the kitchen to start our lesson! We had a few minutes to hang out and meet the other students while drinking tea or coffee and eating banana chips (the start of our face-stuffing).
Rolling our spring rolls.
Then we entered the kitchen to learn how to make spring rolls and your soup of choice. The cool part about this class is that within each course, you have five options of dishes to choose from, so everyone could be making different things! After making each dish, we brought our masterpieces back to the tables to eat and enjoy with each other, then back to the kitchen to cook more, and repeat!
Brought back our main courses to eat at the table with each other.
Marissa and I picked different dishes throughout the day so we could try making a variety of things.
I made:
Tofu in Coconut Milk Soup
Glass Noodle Salad
Green Curry Paste
Green Coconut Curry
Pad Thai
Mango Sticky Rice
Marissa made:
Thai Herb Soup
Papaya Salad
Red Curry Paste
Red Coconut Curry
Pad Thai
Mango Sticky Rice
All vegan, all absolutely delicious, all so filling. Let me stop yappin’ and show you!
Completed Spring Rolls and Tofu in Coconut Milk Soup
Glass Noodle Salad
And finally, Mango Sticky Rice!
Personally, I loved the authenticity of this cooking experience and I loved being able to control how much of what went into each dish from the amount of spice, salt, and the lack of animal products. Once it was established that we were vegan, they didn’t need reminding at all and it was an absolute breeze. Yes, there are people cooking animal products at the cooking station next to you, and call me crazy, but I swear I overheard more and more people asking to change their chicken to tofu or their fish sauce to soy sauce the further into the day we went, and that was pretty dang cool in my opinion!
Preparing papaya salad from start to finish.
Ingredients all laid out and ready to be made into glass noodle salad.
This was the perfect way to spend my Thanksgiving away from home, and I have a cookbook and a sliver of memory about how to do this again if I tried, and that’s all I could have asked for out of it!
Whichever cooking class you do is up to you, but I’m absolutely insisting that you take one when you’re in Thailand because it is such a great experience and skill to take home at the end of your trip!
Your chefs! (Featuring Shae’s friends from home!)
