Cooking Classes with Krid

Every restaurant in Chiang Mai advertises a Thai cooking class- it’s the biggest craze here, along with massage classes and “non-tourist” treks. What these places don’t advertise, though, is that if you take a cooking class from them, you will be stuck in a kitchen in the middle of the Hot Season, too miserable and sweating to actually learn anything.We decided to find an alternative.Through another set of random connections, we found out about a Thai cooking class that was held on an organic farm about an hour outside of Chiang Mai (www.yousabai.com) and it was just as wonderful as the person described…

We met the owners of the farm, Krid and Yao, at Wat Suan Dok, a temple on the outskirts of Chiang Mai, where they pick up anyone who is interested in the cooking class or just staying on the farm. The sungthaw filled up quickly with a couple from Canada (Alicia and Xaaq), a girl from LA (Noelle), a girl from Sydney (Christina), and the three of us.

When we arrived at the farm, we quickly realized that the farm was not just for cooking classes- if anything that was just something that ended up happening because Yao and Krid were such good cooks. In fact, the farm was a large plot of land that hosted internship programs, many families, and random people who wanted a place to relax and use their hands, whether it was to help build the huts that people lived in or work on the farm.

Our first morning of cooking classes began with making soy milk and tofu- processes that are more simple than I ever thought possible. For the soy milk, we merely ground soy beans, added some water, separated the pieces from the milk, and then boiled the liquid…and suddenly the healthiest soy milk I’d ever tasted (perhaps a little too healthy) was ready to drink. Because they’d already made soy milk that morning, however, we turned our soy milk into tofu- by just adding vinegar to the boiling soy milk, it quickly curdled into a solid enough mixture that we could put it into a cheesecloth bag and squish it with a giant piece of wood and after 15 minutes Poof! It was tofu, just like, if not better, than any tofu I had ever bought from the store.

The remainder of our three days at the farm were pretty similiar- around lunch and dinner time we would go to the “kitchen”, which was basically a long table overlooking the rice paddies and mountains with three stoves set up in a row, and take the peel off of at least 30 cloves of garlic, chop up vegetables that we didn’t even know existed, and then watch Krid cook some interesting Thai dish. The bottom line of this cooking class was that it was SO MUCH FOOD. Krid would demonstrate how to make a dish, we would eat his creation between the three of us, and then we would make our own version of it and also eat that. This would be repeated three or four times for each meal, leaving us stuffed with vegetables and garlic for pretty much the entire day. When we weren’t cooking, we were swimming in a nearby stream or lying around reading, as really those are the only things to do in the afternoon during the Hot season…all in all, a pretty fantastic environment.

Our creations are all exhibited on the Flickr website, as we were careful to document everything that we made by taking pictures because they were all so colorful and as delicious as they looked. By the end, our full menu included:

1) Pad Thai
2) Green Papaya Salad
3) Ginger Mushrooms
4) Fat Rice Noodles with Thick Gravy and Kale
5) Green Curry (with Thai eggplant and long beans)
6) Fried Bananas
7) Red Curry
8 ) Panang Curry
9) Masamann Curry
10) Pumpkin with Coconut Milk

However, really what we learned is that Thai food must include a few key things, and from there you can make anything: soy sauce (to make it salty), palm sugar (to make it sweet), tamarind juice (to make it sour), and garlic (to always have a little spicy).

-Luthien

City Mouse Goes to the Country

Realistically, the majority of the time at the farm was spent either swimming in the river (at least 3 times per day, often more) and picking piles of green beans from the garden to eat for all meals. However, every now and then, work with the animals would come up and Harry would patiently explain to me, who has never fed a chicken in my life, that you add small rocks to the chicken food to make the egg shells thicker (who knew?). Then I would skip down the hill shaking the plastic bucket of chicken feed and the chickens would run after me in a single-file line until we got to the chicken coop, where I would dump the food in the trough and shut them in for the night. It’s the simple pleasures in life, “they” say, but, really, the hilarious sight of a chicken running (”waddling” is probably a better word) as fast as she can down a hill may very well be enough to keep me on a farm for a very long time.Another notable task was herding a bull from one paddock to another farm across the road. After Jeanette, Anne, and I finally found the bull in the woods, we cornered him against the fence and then chased him down the hill, from one paddock to the next. By “chased”, I really mean that we chased him. In my Old Navy Jeans and Chacos, waving a rod sort of like a ski pole, we ran this giant bull down the hill, onto the road, across a bridge, and then eventually to the other farm…”adrenaline” doesn’t even begin to describe how great it felt.On one of the last days at the farm, when Anne and I were officially in charge because Harry had hurt his leg badly and was in the hospital and Jeanette had political stuff to deal with, Jeanette called us and told us to herd all of the sheep from the top paddock (about 50 sheep) to the “house paddock”. Given the size of the farm and the paddocks, this sounded like an incredible task, but we grabbed our herding rods and hiked up the hill to the paddock. The great thing about sheep, we soon realized, is that they really do run in packs and stay together no matter what, so after Anne had gathered all of the stray sheep out of the gorse patches (very awful, dense spiney plants) and I’d more or less pushed a few very old sheep towards the others, it was just a matter of convincing the sheep that their only option for running away was towards the open paddock gate by, again, running after them and waving our rods threatening.

The tasks that I did on the farm were pretty menial, but nonetheless very exciting for someone who hadn’t actually ever seen a sheep in real life. In addition, as I was running around the countryside chasing farm animals, there was a split second where I thought about the fact that on my trip around the world, on the other side of the world, I was chasing a bull down a hill- who would’ve guessed?

-Luthien

Finding My Dreams in New Zealand

After a two week road trip around the circumference of the South island of New Zealand, we took the ferry to the North Island and drove straight through in four days (stopping in Mordor and Mount Doom in National Park Village, a very small town in the middle of the North island), where Julie dropped Anne and I off at a farm in the Cormandel Peninsula and the drove to Auckland to catch her flight to Cairns, Australia. While Julie scuba-dived in the Great Barrier Reef, Anne and I lived on the farm of Harry and Jeanette, about 7km from the nearest town (Thames) but seemingly hundreds of miles from anything.

Harry and Jeanette quickly made us feel at home. With 30+ WWOOFers staying on their farm every year, plus a multitude of other people living in their house, barn, and sleep-out on any given day, they were accustomed to people inhabiting their space and making them feel like they were not imposing in the least. Harry is a 67-year-old retired sheep sheerer (used to be one of the top sheep sheerers in the region until an accident involving a sheep falling on him ended his professional career) who seemed soft-spoken for most of the day as he gave us instructions for the work day. Yet as we sat around the dinner table at night, conversation always escalated and suddenly we were learning everything there is to know about the New Zealand political system and environmental issues. Realistically, despite his proclaimed profession of farmer, Harry was the man to learn about New Zealand politics from. He is on the committee who interviews, chooses, and ranks Green Party candidates for the national elections that are held about every 3 years, which generally includes 100+ potential candidates that are narrowed down to about 50 candidates for the final ballot. Because NZ assigns Parliament members proportional to the number of votes the party receives, having more candidates on the ballot will increase the number of votes for the party in general, even though only about 6 of the candidates will likely sit in Parliament.

If that wasn’t exciting and educational enough, his wife, Jeanette, was only around for about half of the time that we stayed there because otherwise she was at Parliament, as the co-leader of the New Zealand Green Party (the Green Party requires a female leader and a male leader). Not only was she the first woman in Parliament when she was elected 12 years ago, her position in Parliament marked the first time that the Green Party was represented in the New Zealand Parliament. Today the Green Party holds 5% of the seats in Parliament, but the upcoming election in November is causing some concern, since a party cannot hold seats if it does not receive at least 5% of the vote and the percentage of votes for the Green Party in the last election came dangerously close to missing this mark. In addition to these credentials, Jeanette is cited as THE expert on climate change in New Zealand, so dinners with her also provoked some very interesting discussions.

The most impressive thing about staying on the farm was that Harry and Jeanette, despite her prestigious-ish place in the government, lived as simply as two people could possibly live. By using energy-efficient light bulbs and only using electricity when absolutely necessary, they were able to cut their energy usage to less than 10% of the average house of four. The farm is not registered “organic” because there is one strain of disease that can hit sheep and kill them within 3-4 days that can only be stopped by a chemical. However, while most farmers spray this chemical on all of their sheep every two weeks no matter what, Harry and Jeanette instead do weekly examinations of the sheep and only spray a sheep if it displays symptoms of the disease. At night we would have giant dinners of green beans with garlic and butter, red potatoes with rosemary, lettuce salad with olives, tomatoes, and other vegetables, and delicious fish with lemon…and the only item on the entire table that was not grown on the farm was the fish, which was purchased from a local farmer at the market.

All in all, when it comes to WWOOFing, I can’t imagine a more educational and inspiring set-up than we had in New Zealand.

-Luthien