All posts tagged: Chiang Mai

Siam Rice Thai Cookery School

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This week, I made a Tom Yum Gai (hot and spicy chicken soup) at Siam Rice Thai Cookery School. Read about my Tom Yum experience here. Cookery school is a great value way to spend the day at 900 baht($38NZ/$28US) per person, includes hotel transfers, ingredients, class, market tour, 6 dishes, 1 curry paste and a vegetable carving session. I purposely chose to cook 6 different dishes to those I cooked at Baan Thai. If this were a science experiment, I would have repeated the dishes. You will not need to eat anything else on the day, so the price includes your meals for the entire day. A full day course runs from 9.30am to 3.30pm and runs at a good, relaxed pace. There are half day and evening classes available for those with limited time (Evening course: 800 baht. Half day course: 700 baht). No hard sell on anything at all. If you wanted to buy beer or souvenirs, you had to get up and enquire, but they were reasonable 50-70 baht for a …

Eating Thai and Vietnamese at The Kad

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The Kad Klang Wiang area is in the middle of Old City in Chiang Mai. An open air courtyard with shops and restaurants all around. There is a good mixture of classy and cheap places to eat here and while many are for tourists only, there are a couple of places that are frequented by the locals. Tourists spend a lot of time on their feet so it was nice to have a place that you could just have a sit at. Trees provide some good shade. Sate Salad & Spice Papaya Salad was on my list of dishes to try while in Thailand. In this dish, green papaya is mixed with fresh chili, garlic, fish sauce, lime juice and palm sugar. I asked for not too spicy, but this was really spicy. The flavours were intense – salty, spicy and sour. It was like eating a whole bowl of condiments. I crossed it off my “To Eat” list but I’m afraid I’m not a fan. I have a feeling that this dish is usually eaten with other …

Art Cafe, Chiang Mai

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Art Cafe is right by the Thapae Gate between McDonald’s and Starbucks. We ate there every second day so they must have been doing something right. The menu is huge and they are yet another restaurant that serves Italian, Mexican and Thai food. Good food at good prices. We may have been subliminally enticed by the name of the cafe, but there is no interesting art in here and while the interior is a bit dated, but it’s clean and light. Breakfast at Art Cafe With one of the most extensive breakfast menus around, I loved that they had lots of mexican inspired breakfast dishes. We don’t eat Mexican for breakfast in New Zealand but I love beans and rice first thing in the morning. The quesadilla were really good. 3 Buttermilk pancakes. Omelette with country fried potatoes and a croissant. Thai food They do offer Thai food, but it’s only ok. There are better and cheaper places around for Thai. After all, this is Thailand! If you want Thai, eat where locals eat. A …

Eating Italian and Mexican in Chiang Mai

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In Chiang Mai, many restaurants that we went to weren’t Italian or Mexican, they were Italian and Mexican. For reasons unknown to me, there are shit-tons of Italian and Mexican restaurants in Chiang Mai. There’s not a noticeable Italian or Mexican population there so it must have something rather to do with how both cuisines offer a range of dishes with just a few ingredients. With a little training any chef can do pizza, pasta, nachos and burritos. Whether they do it justice is another story. Pizza and a pasta ordered. Pizza and pasta eaten. I was pleased I got to try squid in pasta for the first time. There is some kind of play centre right next door and the noise of children yelling and screaming is cute for about 30 seconds. Pizzadilla 38 Loikroh Rd., Changklan, Muang, Chiang Mai Tel : +(66)53-449629 Mob : +(66) 81-838975 Open: Lunch/Dinner 10am-12pm

Familiar food at Phil’s and Top 10 foods to eat after dental surgery

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Even the most adventurous eater yearns for the food of home. Here are our experiences in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. At Phil’s Diner, we found a hearty breakfast, soft food for after dental surgery and recovery food for the days following. There is a nice outdoor area out the back though they were never busy when we visited. Dinner sized portions of mash and gravy aren’t on the menu anywhere, but when I saw that bangers and mash were at Phil’s Diner, I begged Phil to whip up some. Phil especially prepared a dinner-sized portion of mashed potatoes and gravy for the post-surgery Koala. Phil’s Diner is not gourmet, it’s decent, familiar food. We loved local food but sometimes exotic local food can get too much and you yearn for the food back home. Comfort food can be particularly important after surgery. Our first breakfast in Chiang Mai was eaten at Phil’s Diner. I loved the look of my Shakshouka eggs (quite similar to my beloved Bus-Stop Eggs) and The Koala was pretty chuffed about his breakfast grill. …

Good View

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Only a short work from Chiang Mai Thai House and over the bridge is a strip of bars and restaurants along the river. A nice place for pretty drinks, pretty food and a good view of the sun set over river. We met up again with Leanne and Kathy from Brisbane for a leisurely outing. Good View Bar and Restaurant is big and there is plenty of indoor and outdoor seating. We sampled a range of different cocktails and also ordered lots of snack plates to share. What a fun way of eating. Just be careful of anything that looks like a pickle garnish. It may turn out to be a spicy chili. We arrived late afternoon and the place was fairly empty, but by the time we left the place was buzzing with diners and a live band and there wasn’t an empty seat in sight. We split the bill which ends up being 420 baht each / $17NZ / $14US. Not bad for a bunch of snacks and several cocktails. Yummy cocktails in …

High up in Chiang Mai

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Wat Phra That Doi Suthep is a temple way up high overlooking Chiang Mai. There is a cool legend about this site. From Wiki: “a white elephant which was released in the jungle. The elephant is said to have climbed up Doi Suthep…trumpeted three times before dying at the site. It was interpreted as a sign and King Nu Naone ordered the construction of a temple at the site.” As at any site, there were plenty of snacks available outside. Fried quail eggs and cups of sweetcorn (seasoned with condensed milk) were eaten with enthusiasm. Simple street food. This monk figurines lined a low wall. I love their cute features and chubby cheeks.

Chiang Mai Thai House

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If you go to Chiang Mai on a modest budget, you should stay at Chaing Mai Thai House. We stayed here for a week and wish they weren’t fullY booked during the rest of our stay in Chiang Mai or we would have stayed there for the full time. Our fan room (nightly rate: 400 baht / $16NZ / $13US) had a TV with plenty of movie channels, our own bathroom with a big teak mirror, a queen bed a wardrobe and a lovely big window. Fan room was fine for winter, it was warm enough that a daily swim was welcome, but I actually prefer fan over air con. Facilities include a computer room with 5 computers and free internet, a swimming pool, a cafe/restaurant (good food and reasonably priced), a laundry service and a tour service. Only a a few steps from a fabulous dentist on Thapae Rd (handy if you need dental work done) and situated between the Old City and the Night Bazaar. Lots of bars and restaurants within walking distance as …

40 days and 40 nights

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40 days into our epic SE Asia adventure and we had eaten amazing things in 7 exotic countries. 40 nights into our epic SE Asia adventure and I missed cooking. I met up with Leanne and Kathy, the lovely Australian sisters from our tour, for a cooking class at Baan Thai Cookery School in Chiang Mai. At Baan Thai, I cooked and ate 4 dishes at one of their evening classes. Chicken pad thai (fried noodle dish), Seafood in coconut milk soup, Green curry with chicken and fish cakes. The green curry was the best green curry I have ever tasted. It was the last dish of the night so I had a pretty good idea of how much curry paste I liked by then. This was spot on. The instructors will encourage you to use plenty of chili and curry paste, but hopefully you know what you can handle and can be firm about how much you want to use in your dishes. You’re the one that has to eat it after all. My finished …

Eating at the Night Bazaar, Chiang Mai

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Back to sharing our epic SE Asia adventure…It’s already June and I’ve only chronicled about half of our time away… Sila-aat two times Our first night in Chiang Mai was our last night together with our tour group. For dinner, we visited the Night Bazaar which is also a shoppers paradise. Over the next 2 weeks, The Koala and I would come back many times to shop and to eat. Our last meal as a group was at seafood restaurant Sila-aat. They have a few live fish and the rest is displayed on ice at the counter. They have some a good selection of seafood platters that we wanted to try but the timing  was never quite right. I felt like something light so picked some light Chinese dishes. The Koala picked a heavy Chinese dish. Snow peas. I adore snow peas, but they are freakin expensive back home. My local supermarket sells snow peas for $26NZ per kilo. Does anyone know why snow peas are so damn expensive? Straw mushrooms and shrimp. I love …

We are home.

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It has been an epic 65 days of traveling, eating, drinking, experiencing and adventuring with my husband The Koala. Along the way, we’ve traveled with friends and family, met up with old friends and made new friends. We visited 7 countries and stayed in 18 different places in south east asia. Brunei, Malaysia (Borneo), Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. It’s been exotic and surreal. Being back in front of my mac, in our lounge (looking just the way we left it) it feels like the last 2 months happened to someone else. In the 2 months we’ve been away, I “cooked” only 3 times. A half day cooking class in Chiang Mai, and if you count it as cooking, we had local BBQ where you cook raw ingredients at your table at a restauarant- we did this 2 times (Vang Vieng, Laos and Koh Phangan, Thailand). All other meals – I’m talking an average of 3 meals a day – were eaten out. That’s 192 meals right there! I didn’t photograph every single …