The Great Thai Cook off

On my way back from school on Tuesday morning, I noticed a lot of commotion at the temple. Upon further inspection realized there were five teams of people from the village all cooking.  This was a government funded activity which travelled all over the north part of Thailand to the small villages.  The team of people organizing this were here for three days in total cooking a variety of dishes and each dish being independently judged.  The aim of the project is to guide the villagers to cook more variety for home stay programmes.

So after finding this out, GVI decided to take part and join some of the groups for the remaining days. 

I spent a full day on Wednesday cooking with team three, we firstly made some flavored jelly; orange, blackcurrant and coconut. Nice straight forward start to the day, however it was a hot day and crouching over a small wood burning stove in the sunshine was hard work.

We then cooked a pork mussotoh (namprikong), chicken soup (tom yum gai), boiled egg, which was then fried and served with fried onions. (kai luk kauy).

There was lots of friendly competition between the teams and everyone was taking it seriously.  It was interesting to see how they hacked up the whole chicken for the soup.  Some of the girls were used to this compared than others, however my team were not worried and I was splattered in raw chicken.   There were fresh vegetables and herbs and spices used, mainly chillis, ginger, lemongrass, coriander and limes.