I was in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with my mom and dad having dinner at a restaurant in a hotel, when I saw a flyer for a Thai cooking course. I grabbed the flyer and read through it and the more I read the more it sounded good. I saw a picture for mango sticky rice, my favorite, and I wanted to learn how to make mango sticky rice. I was like, “I want to do a cooking course!” So I asked my mom if we could do it.
She wasn’t sure at first. She said “Maybe,” but she kept the flyer and looked at it again later. Then she called the cooking school to ask if there were any spots left. My older sister Coco and I were in the swimming pool at our hotel, the Elephant Camp Maerim Resort, and we heard her talking on the phone. When she hung up, she told us we could go to the cooking school the next day. I was super-excited and super-happy and couldn’t wait.
The cooking school sent a van to pick us up at our hotel. When we arrived, they told us to sit at the table and they had a laminated menu showing different things we could learn to cook. For example, there were pictures of Pad Thai, fried rice and Pad Kra Praow, all stir fried, and we had to pick one of those we would cook. I went for Pad Thai. Did I mention that was another reason I wanted to take the cooking course, so I could learn how to make Pad Thai? It’s my best friend Stella’s favorite food.
Then we picked one appetizer, out of Laab, Som Tum and spring rolls, and I chose spring rolls. And we could make one soup, so I decided to make Tom Kha. For dessert, of course I made sticky rice with mango. I forget which curry I learned.
At the market, we went to a stand where they had fish sauce and oyster sauce and other things. Our teacher told us about different vegetables and my mom got us freeze-dried strawberries covered in sugar.
Back at the school, they gave each of us a red apron to wear, and a tour of the garden. She showed us eggplants and basil and different other things.
“This is ginger,” she said, holding up some ginger, but I already knew what ginger was, since at home we use it to make ginger tea sometimes. “And that is a ginger tree,” she said, pointing to a light-green bush with thin leaves that reminded me of bamboo leaves.
They laid out welcome snacks: Lime, ginger, peanuts, onions and coconut sprinkles with a little bowl of sauce on top of a little pile of leaves. They told us to fold the leaf in half and then fold it again so it made a little cone almost like an ice-cream cone, then we put in some lime, some ginger, some onions, some coconut sprinkles, and if you wanted some sauce too. It was delicious, sweet and sour and a little spicy all at once. I loved it.
To make spring rolls, we chopped up the different ingredients first. Even though I’m nine years old, they let me chop things with my knife just like everyone else in the course. Then we put the ingredients on top of thin rice paper and rolled up the spring roll and kind of pinched the ends. Then the man put the spring rolls in a big pan with oil and told us, “I will show you how to decorate your spring roll, OK?” And we put the cooked spring roll on a bed of chopped herbs for decoration.
I always liked Pad Thai, but cooking my own Pad Thai for that course, it tasted even better. When my mom asked me how it tasted, I said, “Awesome!” And it was. I loved that cooking course–and can’t wait to cook more when we get home.
