Too bad they already made the movie

Dear reader,

With the arrival of the new year, I've picked up a new hobby. Sure, sure, I really ought to be doing something useful like learning Thai or figuring out how to teach but, instead, I'm cooking. Specifically, I've enrolled in a 150 hour night class at the Phitsanulok vocational college. We meet every day. It's serious. And by serious, I mean seriously awesome. My favorite dish so far is gang masaman gai, or masaman curry with chicken, but the most amusing was blaa dek mamuang, which translates roughly to catfish clouds with mangos. It's sort of like catfish that's been minced and then whipped to the texture of cotton candy, and then deep fried.

Here's my friend and colleague P'Add. After bringing me along to her painting class at the vocational college, she continued her streak of benevolence by deciding to enroll in cooking class with me. I'd be lost without her.


And here's me, chopping the fins off my first ever whole fish.


It turns out that there are a lot of very basic procedures in Thai cooking that I, having only the knowledge of an amateur American kitchen-user, am totally inept at performing. For example, deep frying anything, or using a mortar and pestle. That last one is especially unfortunate as traditional wisdom holds that the better you are at using the mortar and pestle, the better wife you make. And, due to my fair-weather vegetarianism, I am also totally inexperienced at cooking meat. The teacher is pretty forgiving of my kitchen dysfunctions, but I did get reprimanded for washing the pork too slowly.

Here's that fish, and a companion, a little later. This is the first thing I've ever deep fried!


I'm learning lots about Thai ingredients and such. This is the shopping list for gang kiew wan gai, or sweet green curry with chicken. Please note P'Add's helpful translations. And also the last ingredient, congealed blood. Note of caution should you travel here: cooked blood looks dangerously like dark tofu, so much so that one could innocently consume it for quite some time until being informed that it is, in fact, congealed chicken blood.


And here's us shopping for supplies at the market. I still miss Whole Foods, but this definitely helps ease my homesickness. Also at Whole Foods you cannot buy an entire pig's head, so really, Whole Foods-0, Thai market-1.


The final product: the most delicious green curry I've ever eaten. Perhaps I have to say that because I spent so very long pounding out the fresh curry paste with the pestle that my arm was sore the next day, but I think I am only a little biased.



Tonight we cooked sticky rice and shredded pork. Tomorrow is a spicy salad with glass noodles. If you tell me your favorite Thai dish I'll learn how to make it and cook it for you when I return.

Okay, I should sign off, dear reader, before I get any more unbearably Julie&Julia on you. I just wanted to keep you abridge of my daily life. I hope you're doing well. And happy belated Martin Luther King Jr. Day! I tried to explain to my students that Monday was a holiday celebrating the life of an activist who fought against racial discrimination, but this prompted one of my students to start calling another (more tan) student "black" in a taunting way. I tried to correct them, but I think something was lost in translation.

Yours truly,
R