Chiang Mai Miscellany, Part 2

Last post on Chiang Mai – finally! I’ve uploaded so many photos (377!) to my Flickr and it’s taken so long that it feels like the trip was ages ago. The trip was fantastic…but I’m going to be glad to go back to my regular food photos!

This final post will again be on various memorable food photos that didn’t make their own blog posts. This pork, chili and basil dish on rice, with a fried egg on top, was eaten at a tiny restaurant outside Wat Doi Suthep, the temple on the mountain overlooking Chiang Mai. We had gone there as a group of both us foreigners and one Thai visitor from Bangkok whom we had met at the workshop we were attending. She too had not been to that temple. Just before lunchtime, she started talking about how she wanted to eat pork with basil for lunch. And she went on and on and on and then we all wanted the same thing! We could already taste it! And when we ordered it at the restaurant, it was fantastic! Loads of salty fish sauce and hot chillies and fresh basil – and the egg on top! Wow!

That night, I picked up a bag of sliced green mango with a smaller baggie of salt and sugar and chili powder. I loved this non-sour green mango that reminded me of a crunchy guava and the chili mixture went very well with it – it was commented that it was like a Thai fizzy sherbet!

And this one is added to my long list of “I wish I tried that”! This pile of mee krob (fried rice vermicelli in a sweet and spicy sauce) looked so appealing. I suppose I could have purchased a bagful of this to take home (I saw it on the day I flew back).

Finally, I’ll end this Chiang Mai series with my Qantas breakfast en route from Bangkok to London. I had a horribly long stopover at the airport in Bangkok as this connecting flight was delayed. I was exhausted and ended up missing the first meal (I really didn’t want “supper” at 4am) and woke up just before this breakfast before landing in London. The fruit bowl was nice, as was the yogurt, surprisingly. The cooked meal was, quite frankly, awful.

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Lamduan Kaosoi

After reading such delectable recommendations from EatingAsia and on eGullet, I knew that I’d have to fit in a trip to Lamduan to eat their famous kao soi. I only managed to find that time on my last day in Chiang Mai, after a visit in the morning to the ruins of Wiang Kum Kam, the previous city to Chiang Mai.

We grabbed a table next to a fan and were presented with English menus. We each ordered a small bowl of kao soi, a total of 3 with pork and 1 vegetarian. The pork one was a revelation, much better than the version I had at buffet place. The focus was obviously on the curry rather than the coconut milk and it was deeply savoury and spicy but not at all hot with chili. On the side, your temperature can be risen with the addition of roasted red chili oil and little limes, raw shallots and pickled vegetables are the other traditional accompaniments. The noodles within the curry soup are egg noodles and the same are deep fried and used as a garnish on top. Both roasted pork and fried pork scratchings featured in the soup, the scratchings half crunchy and half soaked with the delicious soup.

To drink, I chose the longan juice, which turned out to be boiled dried longans with sugar added. These dried longans were sold all over Chiang Mai and I bought a mixed bag of them and lychees to take home. The chewy orbs are tasty eaten out of hand but when we get tired of them, I might boil up this drink.

The best part about having a small bowl of noodles is that there’s plenty of space in your stomach for other goodies. After a quick perusal of what’s on offer, I chose these shrimp fritters, tiny little red shrimp in a batter and served with a sweet chili sauce. Very addictive.

We also wanted to try their spicy Chiang Mai sausage. Long coils of it sat in the kitchen and orders were coming out fast. This one was full of herbs and chili and was the most spicy sausage I’d eaten on this trip (and I could make a joke here about eating a lot of sausage but this is a nice food blog, people). The sausage’s cross section shows us lumps of sticky rice scattered throughout the meat that gave a nice textural contrast.

For the four of us, we had ordered the sausage, the fritters, 4 drinks and 4 small bowls of kao soi and this came to about 200 baht altogether. That’s less than 4 pounds. Highly recommended! When in Chiang Mai, do make time to visit Lamduan. I only wish I’d have visited earlier so I could have had their kao soi more than once! They’re not open for dinner and it’s packed with locals for lunch but there’s plenty of seating and turnover is quick.

Lamduan Kaosoi
Faharm Road
Chiang Mai, Thailand

 

Thai Farm Cooking School

So, onto the actually cooking at the school! After the visit to the market, we had another 30 minute ride before we got to the Thai farm, where the cooking school is held. After a short demonstration on how to cook sticky rice, we put on aprons and straw hats (absolutely necessary in the sun!) before taking a short tour of the farm itself and saw how Thai aubergines, basil, Thai parsley, lemongrass, and other various fruits and herbs grew. As our teacher has a little paring knife with her, we also got to taste all the raw ingredients with which we would be cooking. I really found this to be one of the highlights of the class and it was the main reason I chose this course over the others held in Chiang Mai city.

Oh, and they’ve recently changed the format of their courses and on any day, you can choose the dishes you’d like to cook from this menu.

I chose to make the green curry paste and hence the green curry with chicken,

the tom yam with shrimp (the shrimp heads were added at the beginning to make a broth – nothing goes to waste),

and the green papaya salad (som tam – so refreshing with a dressing of garlic, chili, fish sauce, lime juice and sugar) and we had these first dishes with white rice and sticky rice for lunch.

There’s a bit of a story with the curry paste. At the market, we were shown some fermented prawn paste, a soft, dark pungent paste that’s similar to the Malaysian belacan but not exactly that. We were told that it’s normally added to all curry pastes but that we weren’t going to use it as many foreigners did not like it. What?! I made it a point to purchase a little bag of paste at the market (it was only 5 baht) and added it to my green curry paste with the guidance of the teacher. It gave it a wonderful flavour and a slightly darker colour as well.

After lunch I made pad thai (so fast to cook that there was no time to take step by step photos – no ketchup in this recipe!)

and mango with sticky rice (so much easier than I thought it would be! It’s sticky rice mixed with coconut cream and sugar). As we were stuffed from lunch, we packed these up into plastic bags to take back with us.

By this time, it was almost time to go home and we were all given some lemongrass tea and a little recipe book with all the recipes from the menu. I’m already being pestered to cook pad thai at home and that is what I plan to tackle this weekend.

I highly recommend this school – it’s nice to get out of Chiang Mai a little when you’ve been there almost a week. You will, of course, be expected to know basic cooking skills such as using a knife though instructions on stir-frying with a wok are given. A one day course costs 900 baht and starts at 8:30 to 9:00 with a pickup at your hotel and a dropoff time of about 17:00.

Thai Farm Cooking School
Office located at:
2/2 Ratchadamnoen Rd., Soi 5
Chiang Mai, Thailand

 

A Visit to Ruamchook Market

I’d heard that cooking schools in Chiang Mai are a dime a dozen and after getting a recommedation from Boots in the Oven, I signed up for a day’s course at the Thai Farm Cooking School. After being picked up from our respective hotels, we’re first brought to Ruamchook Market, a medium sized food market about 20 minutes drive out of Chiang Mai. I adored this market – favouring it to the markets in Chiang Mai. There’s a slower pace to the market that allows one to slowly walk from stall to stall at one’s own pace, without the crowds pushing against you. We only had about 10 minutes for a quick lookaround though and I’m showing the few food photos I managed to take.

Alongside the usual market offerings of meat and fish and dry goods, there were vegetables galore,

pink preserved eggs,

and lots of ready to eat, prepared foods.

But the most interesting stall was this one:

Highlights included fried silkworm pupae (through the power of pseudo-sign language, I bought some of these – crispy on the outside and a little chewy on the inside…),

fried black shiny beetles,

fried giant water beetles (each was about 8cm long!),

and um…these things.

Can’t tell what they are? Click on the photo for a closer look and the answer.

Um, no thanks.

 

Chiang Mai Miscellany, Part 1

I may have gone slightly overboard with photo taking during my trip to Chiang Mai and I thought I’d share some of the other food highlights that didn’t make it into their own blog posts.

These fish ball noodles were my first lunch in Chiang Mai and gave an indication of the good things to come. At only 30 baht (50p), this was a generous bowlful of rice noodles, a variety of fish cakes and fish balls (all with different textures), and morning glory. While the broth was very soothing, I was looking for something a little more exciting and punched it up with the various condiments on the tables. A little of that chili powder and wow!

This was a steamed sticky pancake filled with pork and peanuts, topped with both coconut cream and fried garlic. The skin was like that of the dim sum dish har gow and while the peanuts weren’t apparent, the whole combination just sang in my mouth. I had this at the Nangnual Seafood Restaurant’s lunch buffet, part of a trip organised by the workshop I attended. The manager there took me under his wing and pointed out all the northern Thai specialties that I absolutely had to try and helped me with which garnishes to eat with them – and the garnishes are the most complicated part!

Still at the lunch buffet, I tried their full spread of dips and raw vegetables, again another typically northern Thai spread. Click on the photo for labels for each item.

On the last day of the workshop, we were brought to the Chedi Chiang Mai, an extremely beautiful and expensive hotel, for a dinner reception. The highlight of the meal was this banana flower and chicken salad – both meaty and refreshing at the same time.

Not Chiang Mai related but I just wanted to direct you to my latest Shoot and Eat entry on Canteen at Londonist!