I am currently back in Chiang Mai, Thailand (for about 2-3 months)! I’ve been doing some slow travel lately. My friends from Taiwan visited for a few days, so we decided to take a Chang Mai, Thailand cooking class. They told me they booked with Mama Noi Cookery School, so I booked online as well to join them.

Chiang Mai, Thailand Cooking Class (Mama Noi Cookery School)

We booked the half day evening course from 4:30 PM to 8:30 PM for 800 baht (about $24.58 USD). This included the creation of a soup, a stir fried meal, curry dish, and a thai tea.

Market + Exploration

We started the day getting picked up at our studio apartment heading to the market. Our host showed us some of the ingredients we were going to be using. It was pretty cool checking out the Thailand local foods. The Thai lemon basil was our favorite!

I thought we would get to pick out our ingredients for our meals at the market, but this was not included in the evening class.

We then headed to the actual cooking school:

And we played with puppies for the first 15 minutes hahaha they were soooo cute:

The garden outside was quite beautiful too:

The Cooking Begins

The setup was nice:

There were 3 choices out of the 3 categories that we could choose from (soup, a stir fried meal, curry dish). Each one of us picked what we wanted in the beginning, and they provided the materials shortly after. You can see the menu items here. I chose the Stir-Fried Chicken with Hot Basil, Hot & Sour Prawn Soup, and I also chose the Green Curry, but for some reason they accidentally put me down as the Penang Curry or someone took my set. I didn’t mind though.

Stir Fry & Soup

We started with the stir fry and the soup:

The Hot & Sour Prawn Soup ingredients:

Here is my end creation! Hot & Sour Prawn Soup + Stir-Fried Chicken with Hot Basil. The stir-fry was my favorite – it was delicious! The soup looks full of flavor, but it actually tasted a bit watered down for some reason (probably due to my subpar cooking).

This is the Pad Thai and the Sour & Spicy Soup that my boyfriend made:

Curry + Thai Tea

The curry was interesting to make. You grind the ingredients in a little stone bowl:

A photo of us making our food:

It becomes a ball of paste, and afterwards you put it in a pan and cook it over a stove along with meats and other foods. Here’s a photo of me holding the ingredients, ready to put them in the pan!

The thai tea and curry were delicious as well, but we were already so full from the first two dishes that it was hard to finish everything. I don’t even know how people did the full day of cooking over the half day! That would be so much food to consume.

Conclusion

I loved Mama Noi Cookery School! It was so fun, and the host was a great teacher. She was hilarious, and very clear with her instructions. They were on time with picking us up and sending us back. The only weird thing was them giving me the Penang curry ingredients rather than the green curry dish I chose, but I really didn’t mind. Overall I was super pleased with the experience and recommend it to anyone traveling to Chiang Mai for the first time.