Last week while Jen was feeling sick I went to a second cooking school--this one attached to our favorite vegetarian Thai restaurant, called Mai Kiedee's. This time there were only 3 of us in the class, so it had a great informal feel and we got a lot of personal attention.

As before, we started with a local market tour. Here's some of the produce:

And our instructor explaining the different types of Thai eggplant. (The very small ones in her right hand were new to me: they've got a quite sour flavor and so are often left out of curries made for westerners).

I had to take a picture of some of their mushrooms. Straw mushrooms laid out on the table (so-called because they grow on the top of straw), with a large bag of oyster mushrooms behind. They also had a lot of fresh wood-ear (also called mouse-ear!) mushrooms which looked delicious.

One of my favorite parts of the market were the fresh noodles. This bag contains a single, long uncut rice noodle. We cut it into several foot-long lengths to use as the wrappers for our fresh spring-rolls.

Here's my ingredient basket as I left the market and headed back the the restaurant to cook. Look delicious, huh?

We cooked for about 5 hours in a small upper-story of the restaurant. We made Tom Yam and Tom Kha soups, stir-fried vegetables with cashew nut, massaman curry and Khao Soi (a kind of curry-noodle soup), green curry, fresh peanut sauce, Thai pumpkin soup, the restaurant's (delicious) signature "pumpkin hummus", fresh spring rolls, papaya salad, and mango with black sticky rice.

Here's the end product of all our cooking!


We did our best to eat as much as we could, but didn't make much of a dent (especially because we tasted so frequently during the cooking process). As before, it made us excited to go home and cook!