On our second day in Thailand...

...we made delicious food!

Turns out there was a great cooking school about a ten minute walk from where our hotel was in Silom, Bangkok. We registered for an afternoon class, and met the teacher and our classmates for the day at a local, open-air market (which was only a minute walk from our hotel!).

Above is our eccentric, ostentatious and humorous teacher, Lucy. He was telling us about the basic ingredients used in Thai cooking while filling baskets full of the fresh ingredients for us to use in the class.

We walked back to Silom Thai Cooking School and prepared the ingredients. When we were finished, Lucy arranged them in the basket pictured above. It looked so vibrant!

Here's where we did all of the cooking.

The first thing we did after preparing the ingredients was sit on a little bench with a coconut shaver on the edge. We took coconut halves and shaved the coconut meat into bowls. Although Thai people generally just buy coconut milk these days, it was neat to see how to make it yourself. After shaving the coconut, we added a little water and squeezed the pulp dry. The resulting milk was very sweet, and could be used for making sweets. However, we were going to be using it for main dishes, too, so we repeated the process with the coconut shavings one more time and combined the liquid for a milder taste. I was surprised to learn that coconut milk is used in many dishes and is an important staple of Thai cooking.

In this picture, you can see the preparations for Tom Yum Kung, hot and sour prawn soup.

Yum! The soup turned out to be so delicious!

Now to prepare the ingredients for Pad Thai, my favorite Thai food!

Man, I was happy. Savory, nutty, fried noodles with prawns, veggies, spices...I'm drooling at the memory!

Above is Northern Chicken Salad.

Chad is grinding down the ingredients to make green curry paste.

We brought the ingredients outside, fried them up with a little oil and coconut milk, and out came this:

Delicious Thai Green Curry

Last was dessert. Bananas with steamed coconut milk and palm sugar. By this point --as you might imagine--we were getting quite full, but how could we stop eating when we had this yummy dish as a finale?

Bellies full, our class huddled up for a group shot. With a New Zealander, Korean, three Austrians, four Americans (including ourselves) and a Scotsman, we had quite a diverse group. It was fun getting to know them while we cooked!

Overall, we cooked 5 dishes, eating in between each one. In total it was about a 4 hour period of cooking glory, and it turned out to be one of our favorite things about our trip.