Iron Chef Bangkok

We woke up the next morning in Bangkok ready to rage. By rage, I mean a vegetarian/vegan cooking class experience with May Kaidee. I am not sure exactly how this slipped into our itinerary, but it was entertaining. We headed out to the class and underestimated the length of the taxi ride. We arrived late. Not only late, but to the wrong location. We were escorted by a nice local man (American from New York) to the correct location and walked in about thirty minutes fashionably late.

There was a table of about eight people and the four of us, along with May Kaidee—a smiley Thai woman dressed up in ridiculous clothing—and her two assistants. We were immediately thrown into some type of Thai sing-along, which had a pause to sing your own name. Because of the whole language barrier, Clayton was given the name Cray for the duration of the class. We must have sung it ten times while in the class, not only did I butcher every Thai word, I couldn’t even say my name in tune. I may look like remarkable vocalist, but I hadn’t prepared and had a tickle in my throat. It didn’t go well.

We were teamed up in groups of two, I was matched with Iron Chef Robert E Lee, and Clayton & Co. were together. (Couple names are so in) We cooked a variety of tasty dishes. When I say cooked I mean we placed the pre-selected, pre-chopped vegetables and tofu into the hot wok following the recipes we were given, under the direct supervision of Mai Kaidee and her posse. I can’t imagine anyone really messes up the dishes in the class. All I did was toss a carrot in the hot oil one time, making the oil jump from the pan and burn Sous-Chef Robert E Lee’s leg once. That was it, one time.

                       

We would return to our seat intermittently to eat our dishes. Many of them were quite spicy, and the assistant pouring out the cold water must have had a hell of a night prior. He was moving like cold molasses. So, yet again, we suffered from the spice sweats. Good thing the upstairs was nice a cool with seven burners running and minimal air conditioning. The sweaty kids at the vegetarian cooking class, good times.

I have to admit I do not support vegetarianism, seems like a fad to me. If you are going to be vegetarian/vegan, I expect hard core, home grown everything, recycle your life, and live barefoot in the forest. Maybe I just enjoy the taste of slow-tortured, industrial-farmed animals pumped full of chemicals and corn based food products. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by how tasty and filling the food was. Best food I ate in Bangkok, and not just because I cooked it. I am now an expert chef of Pad Thai, red and yellow curry, summer rolls, and sticky mango rice. Well, by expert chef I mean I can follow a recipe reasonably well. Call for reservations.

After we finished our first few courses, we watched May Kaidee and her assistant (also dressed up) perform a ‘traditional’ Thai dance. There was a lot of wrist rolling and stepping and hip stuff. I was terribly excited to try the dance as soon as I got home, and to my luck we were all told to stand and circle up to dance right in the kitchen! I half-assed the dancing of course, if she had thrown a little Thrift Shop on things might have been different. To my right Clayton was making an excusable attempt at keeping up, and across the circle Coco was dancing next to the Iron Chef General. Now this Iron Chef had somehow mastered the moves, moving his arms and hands in graceful sways, and really breaking it down. He was on fire, actually I thought he was going to catch the back of his light green apron on fire on the burner behind him, but managed to dance his way out of that one. Clayton has video of him getting down with it, and busting a move or two.

After the class we met a tour guide to see the Royal Palace. The guide was nice and spoke pretty good English. As if the guide would have been a mean old woman who didn’t speak English.. When we got to the Palace we were told that we couldn’t show our legs or shoulders because of the Buddhist temples we were entering. The crop top and short shorts I was wearing weren’t going to cut it. We had packed some clothes to put over, we were prepared—or so we thought. I uncomfortably pulled my jeans up over my shorts only to look around and see Robert pulling up his relatively tight black jeans over his shorts. Clayton did the same, and Coco had a scarf thing or shawl or whatever you call it to cover her shoulders. The guide said that wasn’t good enough and got her a very fashionable and cultural top with temples and elephants on it. I was jealous.

We saw a variety of amazing temples and palaces; I won’t bore you with that cultural stuff. You can Wikipedia it. Here is a fun picture of an Asian lady doing an epic ‘Asian taking a photo’ stance.

Ok here are a few cool things we saw, including the reclining Buddha. Google it. This was ironic because reclining was the exact position I was wishing I could be in, preferably in an air-conditioned room. The whole double pants thing wasn’t going too well in the heat. Some how we survived. Here is a Buddha statue and me getting my meditation on, you can tell how deep in thought I am by the size of the sweat stains on my shirt:

After the tours we headed back to change and shower. We then met up with Sir Samuel and headed over to Khao San Road, a world famous backpackers street of restaurants and bars. It was a lot of fun. There were guys walking around trying to get us to go to Ping Pong shows (whatever those are), there were very dressed up good looking girls (lady boys), and people walking around with trays of cooked scorpions and cockroaches. 

After we ate (real food, not the bugs), we walked around getting hassled by all the venders and promoters until we settled down for a drink. As the night progressed, we met a crazy variety of interesting people. I met a couple from Whales, tons of Australians, two middle aged Indian guys, a group of English, Pakistanis, Americans, Germans, and even a few Thai. Somehow, (beer consumption) the Australians convinced us to try the scorpions, which I could tell were fresh by the stale, flavorless crunch, and the way little pieces got stuck in your teeth for about thirty minutes after.

We managed to avoid the lady boys on our ride home, and even managed to make our flight in the morning without too much drama. We were on to Phuket, an island in the south of Thailand. It was beautiful, weather was great, and table tennis was interesting. 

Stay tuned.