A Trip to a Thai Market

Our  Maliwan Thai Cooking Class included a visit to the market to pick ingredients for the dishes we were going to make.

We bought round thai eggplants from this vendor for the green chicken curry. We chose similar sized ones so they cook at the same time.

Confused with all the strange produce?

Red  bird's eye chili, and pea cucumbers.

Our instructor Mae, choosing her produce.

A "tom yum" bunch--galangal root, kaffir leaves, lemongrass stalks--bundled together.

Wanted to help Mae with her list... but...nevermind.

Prawns of all sizes. That's about P450 a kilo.

Chilis in all sizes and colors!

This is what a galangal root looks like. The only use the root and not the stalk part.

And these are Kaffir lime leaves.

We only went down half this alleyway and we had complete ingredients.

 
Ingredients bundled up for a clam dish.

 
Live catfish jumping on the table.

Morning glory (aka kangkong), in all its forms.

Curry pastes and chopped garlic are readily available in the market--but we were making our from scratch today, excuuuse me.

Let's not forget the essential limes. In the summer, limes are quadruple the price and the produce has very little juice.

This lady had a big coconut grating machine. We were also going to make out own coconut cream and milk.

Garlic comes bruised with or without skin. This saves a lot of time in the kitchen.

Red cayenne peppers have no heat--they just add color.

Thai cooking uses coriander root, and unlike in other countries, you can actually just buy the roots.

We didn't need any dried fish but it looked nice to photograph.

At the fruit part of the market.

And I think we have a basketful of whatever we needed and more, for the class after ours.

Time to head back and start cooking.