Cooking school is an interesting experience.  Now, I am at least a competent cook, though by no means a great one, but one feels a lot more competent when one is able to make half a dozen dishes from scratch in the course of a few hours.  That is the experience I had today at Grandma’s Thai Recipes, a charming teaching school where the lessons come with a huge meal (mine had six courses, which I will detail shortly), and leaves you with an excellent recipe book personally made by the instructor, “Jip,” the daughter-in-law of the head of Legacy Institute.  The cooking school is popular on Trip Adviser, apparently (according to the other two students in the class, a couple of cosmopolitan young adults from Canada who are clearly part of the same sort of travelers as I am–interested in global cultures, avoiding places that are too touristy or too wild, with a taste or laid back and environmental friendly cultural experiences). The cooking school even has its on website:  http://www.grandmasthairecipes.com.

Six dishes were on the agenda for today’s students, and we prepared and cooked the majority of the dishes ourselves from scratch, and at least prepared the rest of them.  The six courses were divided into what could best be called lunch and dinner (they were certainly filling enough to be two meals).  The “lunch” portion of the cooking class consisted of three dishes.  First we made (and ate) Som Tam (a very tasty Green Papaya Salad) out of papaya, carrots, squeezed lime juice, fresh green chili peppers, peanuts, and Thai garlic seasoned with fish sauce (for saltiness) and palm sugar (for sweetness, both common in general for the dishes).  Besides this dish we made Tom Yum (a very spicy Lemongrass Soup) as well as Pad Thai with chicken and tofu (tofu that, surprisingly enough, actually tasted good, grilled up in a wok stir fry style).

After a nice break during a rainy afternoon, in which our teacher took care of her baby boy (Owen, who was one of the first people to greet me when I arrived in Chiang Mai), her two daughters decided to come out and enjoy the company.  Mango fruit was passed out to all (except me, declining for allergies).  It was suggested that I should travel the world with an epi-pen due to the severity of my mango allergy, but honestly, I have no idea where or from whom I would get such a thing.  Moving right along, the three dishes we made for the “dinner” portion of the meal were tasty as well.  We made red curry paste from scratch (a very entertaining process), made fish cakes by hand from scratch as well, and also made bananas in coconut milk.  We used some of the spare coconut milk to make the red chicken curry, a very tasty dish, which I made sure to be sweet as well.

All in all, the five hours spent there were well worth it–the pace is laid back, the food very tasty (to personal specifications), the process very thorough of making good food from fresh ingredients from scratch with a lot of humorous stories and jokes from the instructor.  If you’re in Chiang Mai and you’re looking for a cooking school that actually lets you cook and doesn’t do all the work for you, and doesn’t hurry you through more dishes than you can possibly remember, and that leaves you with instructions and a recipe book for your later cooking, Grandma’s Thai Recipes is the way to go.  You’ll leave full and happy, and having gained a great deal of insight into how to cook authentic Thai food.