As I’ve said before, our biggest priority during our trip to Thailand was food. For me, small details about a trip can fade over time, but I almost always remember the foods that I encountered when traveling somewhere new. I’ll never forget my first apprehensive bites of steak tartare in Paris (at age 15, this was a stretch for me), or the innumerable donburi I inhaled at lunchtime in Tokyo. Determined to be able to recreate some of our Thai food memories at home, we signed up for a cooking class at The Chilli Club in Chiang Mai.

Our instructor, Chef Visutt, has taught the class for nearly 30 years. He has a wonderful sense of humor and, more importantly, an incredible knowledge of Thai cooking. We chose to spend a full day cooking with Visutt, and each participant in the class was allowed to select 5 dishes from the cookbook to make. As soon as we made our selections, Visutt whisked us off to a market just down the street where we loaded up baskets with the freshest ingredients for our dishes!

Shopping in a Thai market is a beautiful experience for anyone who loves food. It’s a lot to take in: the colors of the produce, the mounds of fresh curry paste and rice in varieties you never knew existed, the overwhelming scents that range from fresh fruit to stir-fried noodles to fermenting fish.

There is nothing packaged or processed about the selection in the market. The fruits are all fresh off the vine. The meat tables are covered in unidentifiable pieces of animal and the vendors use hand fans to keep the flies away. This fishmonger selected a fish from her bucket, bludgeoned it, gutted it, and scaled it before I could even process what was happening. In other words, this sh*t is real.

When we returned to our outdoor classroom, Visutt put us straight to work. We worked together with our two classmates to get our mise en place done, and then it was time to head to the woks.

I was amazed to see how quickly the dishes came together once the food hit the wok. We churned out dishes of Pad Thai, Khao Soi noodle curry, fried rice, stir-fried morning glory, spring rolls, and papaya salad faster than our stomachs could keep up. In fact, we ended up bringing some of the food back to our hotel with us since we couldn’t possibly eat it all there (luckily, The Chilli Club provides doggie bags for this purpose!).

We finished our meal with my favorite Thai dessert of fresh mango over sweetened sticky rice with coconut cream. As if all of this wasn’t good enough, we also took home a wonderful cookbook with all of Visutt’s recipes so that we can try our hand at cooking these dishes at home. I’m sure it won’t taste nearly as good as it did in Thailand, but I’ll give it my best shot.