Me & Mom Cooking School, Chiang Mai

If you're going to do a cooking school in Chiang Mai then this is the one to do! Me & Mom Cooking School. We searched around for a few but this seemed like the one we would get the most out of and boy, were we right!
Being the low season we had the class all to ourselves. Xie, our teacher, picked us up from our hotel (another reason we went with them). She was such a lovely person, we all immediately clicked and knew it would be a great day. The class was from 9am - 3pm so a full days worth of wonderful smells and tasting!

We began by taking a trip to the market where Xie taught us all about different grains of rice, what they were used for and how to prepare them. She went through lots of thai curry pastes, showed us the best sorts of sauces and spices to use in our cooking & we learnt how to find the freshest ingredients. It felt like we were being let into all sorts of secrets!

We had a little bit of time to wander the market to see what was on offer while Xie picked up some ingredients.

We then travelled to her parent's house where the cookery was to take place. The biggest surprise was their garden where they grow all of the vegetables and a few of the spices they use! We were given a full tour and shown how best to grow things. Call us silly, but Dave & I were surprised to find that pineapples do not grow on trees! Where did you think they grew? We never thought about it before but they are grown in the ground like a root vegetable! Took us a while to get to grips with that! And to find out how the spice turmeric is grown. It looks like fresh ginger & we found it fascinating watching her calve of bits of it from the ground. Felt like we learnt a wealth of stuff out there in her garden!

The best use of turmeric I found was how it stops itching of mosquito bites! I was bitten to shreds the whole 3 weeks but rubbing a little bit of turmeric into my bites took away the itch instantly. I was yellow for the rest of the day but it was worth it!

At the beginning of the day Xie gave us a list of 15 different dishes we could cook. Three soups, three curries, three stir-fry's, three sides and three desserts! Since there was the three of us we broke it up in order to have a go at cooking EVERYTHING! Being able to cook such a range of food was more than we expected so we were excited the entire time. 

   

Above is mango sticky rice, fried bananas with condensed milk & bananas in coconut milk & vanilla!

Some of our feast!!

   

   

   

This was one of our favourite days and we'd say the best Thai food we ate! Xie even gave us recipe books of all the things we made at the end so in a few weeks time for my 25th birthday I'll be cooking up a Thai feast for a few of my friends! Will be nice to bring the things we learnt there into my own kitchen!

I highly recommend this cooking school! It was so personal, so comfortable & Xie was a spectacular teacher with a great sense of humour and full of so much information & knowledge!

Orchid & Butterfly Farm, Chiang Mai

There is not much to say about this post other than this place was pretty spectacular to drop in on. We only dropped in here for about 20 minutes but it was fascinating how many different orchids there actually are! I'm not sure which we went to. It could have been Bai Orchid & Butterfly Farm or the Mae Sa Orchid Farm. We stopped by here on our way back from our Elephant Trek & I didn't take proper notice.

The Orchids are EVERYWHERE & there is a small section of a butterfly farm to wander into. As you enter this place they are selling all sorts of butterfly & orchid inspired jewelry which was absolutely beautiful. Worth popping in for a few minutes if you have time and if you like orchids!!

Enjoy the colours!

      

 

Monthathan Waterfall, Chiang Mai

Hello!
August seems to be dedicated to Thailand, so I'm just going to go with that! 
This was a really special day. Swimming in a waterfall is one of those things I've been dying to tick off my list of things to do in life for a while. Thailand was the perfect place. It wasn't the sort of waterfall you could plunge yourself in but I just wanted to stand underneath the water crashing down off the rocks. It was a dream.
Do you remember that scene in Disney's Peter Pan when Peter goes to where the mermaids are? One of them is sitting on a rock underneath a waterfall & since I saw that I was determined to make it happen! Haha.
We went here after we went to Wat Phra Doi Suthep. A taxi dropped us off at the bottom of this footpath. It took us half an hour to trek to the waterfall. We have never been so sweaty & so hot in all our life. The humidity was insane & we said a few times "why are we doing this!?" but the question was soon answered once we got into our swimming gear and enjoyed the water right away! Absolute heaven!

Trekking boys!

   

Wooohoooo! There I am! ^^

We could have stayed here all day. I have never felt more refreshed in my life after frolicking in the water here. There is nothing else like feeling that water crashing down on you in the wide open jungle! We absolutely loved it. There are so many waterfalls in Thailand - you can't swim in all of them so just check before you trek to one but this needs to be something you do without a doubt! There were many other waterfalls we could have gone to but this was the nearest & best one we could get to in the short amount of time we had in Chiang Mai with all the other activities we wanted to fit in. I'll be sure to do a whole lot more waterfall swimming in my lifetime though.