Adventure-Cooking in Chiang Mai...or "you want me to cook WHAT?"

Ace! NewsFlash

Chiang Mai -- 'OK guys, this is not the supermarket," says Naomi Duguid to the three women beside her. They're at the entrance to Chiang Mai's morning market, a sprawling grid of lanes lined with vendors selling everything from seasonal vegetables to prepared curries. The scent of fresh herbs mingles with smoke rising from half a dozen charcoal grills.

It's early morning on the first full day of Immersethrough, a weeklong culinary class run by Ms. Duguid, a Canadian cookbook author and photographer, and Jeffrey Alford, her husband and co-author. The women -- all students in the course -- are getting a lesson in grocery shopping, traditional Thai-style.

Ingredients and cooking equipment are laid out at the farm kitchen in Fang

Mr. Alford and Ms. Duguid have become known as fearless culinary explorers through their acclaimed travel cookbooks-cum-travelogues -- such as "Hot Sour Salty Sweet," about foods along the Mekong river, and "Mangoes and Curry Leaves," a look at South Asian cuisine -- that combine first-person essays with evocative photographs and foolproof recipes.

At the market's entrance, motorbikes, pedicabs and porters dart around Ms. Duguid, a tall, 58-year-old blonde whose hands gesture extravagantly as she offers the women a few tips: "Keep small change on hand. And you don't have to buy by weight. Just ask for 10 baht of this or 20 baht of that." She then hands each a shopping list of ingredients from the mundane (dried chillies, garlic) to the mysterious (sawtooth herb and jakan, or woody stem, used to flavor stews and soups), plus a wad of Thai currency: "Here's your list. Here's your money. Make it happen." Later, the trio -- Americans Jodi Liano and Jennifer Knapp, and Peruvian Penelope Alzamora -- eye their hardest quarry: chunks of raw beef, innards and fresh cow's blood for gaeng om, a northern Thai beef stew that they'll prepare shortly with the rest of the students, who are shopping at a different market with Mr. Alford.

For the women, all current or former teachers at the famous San Francisco cooking school Tante Marie, it's the first time up close and personal with northern Thai ingredients -- and a local wet market. They place their order and exchange baht for the meat and offal while Ms. Duguid hangs back. As the group, shopping bags bulging, exits the market and heads to the Immersethrough kitchen, Ms. Duguid chuckles. "Basically, I threw them into the deep end to see if they'd swim," she says. "And they did!"

Ms. Duguid and Mr. Alford, a 54-year-old American whose graying hair frames a boyish face, have an approach to travel ("low to the ground" is Ms. Duguid's description) that has led them into villages, home kitchens and cross-cultural friendships that enable them to connect with local peoples and cultures in a way the average tourist can't -- whether for lack of time or pluck, or simply an inability to toss aside itineraries and "just let things happen," says Ms. Duguid. It was in a Lhasa, Tibet, guest house in 1985 that Mr. Alford, a habitual traveler on his umpteenth Asian jaunt -- financed by odd jobs -- met Ms. Duguid, a Toronto corporate lawyer on sabbatical. Within six months they were married and writing together -- at the time, about bicycling around Asia -- to support their travel habit.

Then in 1986, while the couple was crossing the Pamir and Karakoram ranges in central Asia by bike, Mr. Alford, who had been interested in food for as long as he could remember, hit upon a food-book idea. "Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker's Atlas" wouldn't come out until 1995 -- by which time the couple had become frequent contributors to food magazines such as "Bon Appetit" and "Food & Wine" -- but it would then win both the James Beard Cookbook of the Year and the Julia Child First Book awards. In the years since, while raising a pair of sons (now college-age) at home in Toronto and on the road, journeying separately and together, the two -- neither of whom is a trained chef -- have turned out five more cookbooks.

Today the couple is admired by travel-minded foodies, who gobble up their coffee-table-worthy tomes, and respected by culinary-world peers. Their latest, "Beyond the Great Wall," was named International Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals in April and in May it received a coveted James Beard Award, for best International Cookbook. They hope to bring their approach to travel to the culinary class in Chiang Mai, a city the couple had been visiting for 30 years before finally buying an apartment three years ago. The first session was in February; the next one will take place in January. Both have given cooking demonstrations during book tours; neither has ever taught a formal class -- nor wants to.

"That's not what cooking is," says Mr. Alford. "It's about jumping in there and getting your hands dirty, experiencing it, tasting as you go along." The couple wants to offer an intense encounter with authentic Thai cuisine and culture that will enable participants to get to know the country as they have: stumbling upon unfamiliar flavors at street stalls, hunting for ingredients in chaotic wet markets, and learning to prepare dishes at the shoulders of local cooks proud and eager to share a lifetime of knowledge, even with a foreigner who doesn't speak their language.

The eight-day class ("Eight days is enough to take it all in but not so long that it exhausts people," says Ms. Duguid) became a reality last August when the couple met and shared their idea with Tante Marie's founder Mary Risley at an annual travel conference in San Francisco. "Hey, these two are heroes in the food world!" says Ms. Risley, who immediately reserved six places for the Tante Marie teachers. She later persuaded several friends, including 73-year-old retired physician Lesley Piskatel and his wife, 71-year-old musician Joellen, to sign up as well. Ms. Duguid and Mr. Alford charge $3,400, including accommodations (at a comfortable Chiang Mai boutique hotel, with a short sojourn to a rustic resort in northern Thailand), plus all meals and transportation within the country.

Before the course gets going, students and teachers gather at the couple's airy two-bedroom apartment to meet each other. To immerse the students in the Thai culinary culture, Ms. Duguid and Mr. Alford hired locals who are not cooking professionals to do the teaching. Among them is a Chiang Mai neighbor, 48-year-old Fern Somrak, who owns a lychee farm near the Thai-Myanmar border where some of the course is held and who acts as translator and all-around facilitator. Her mother, 67-year-old Juncheng Somrak, a skilled home cook, is an instructor whom students call Khun Mae (Thai for "mother").

"We don't cook much Asian food at home," says Dr. Piskatel with a shrug. He'd never heard of either Mr. Alford or Ms. Duguid before. "But Mary (Ms. Risley) told me, 'You've got to join this tour'...so here we are." Ms. Knapp, a 37-year-old, sunny-faced personal chef and the quietest of the Tante Marie group, muses that "though we've all eaten Thai food, I don't think any of us have experienced true Thai cooking." Northern Thai food, which favors salty, spicy and sometimes bitter flavors and rarely appears on restaurant menus outside the country, is a mystery to all. It uses a lot of pork and freshwater fish and makes use of unusual cultivated and foraged vegetables and herbs, often eaten fresh or blanched to accompany flavorful dips called nam prik. Nodding in Khun Mae's direction, Margaret Hemley, an athletic 39-year-old blonde who teaches French cuisine at Tante Marie, adds, "We'll be learning from a real home cook, not a professional cooking teacher. I mean, how often do you get to do that?"

After an hour or so, Ms. Duguid gives everyone a rundown of the week ahead, then she and Mr. Alford lead them to dinner at a casual, open-air street market of the type common in Asia. That compels the students to break every taboo of gastronomically cautious travelers: eat nothing from the street; nothing less than piping hot; nothing fresh that can't be peeled. "You know, when you're a regular tourist you go to restaurants and ask for foods you're familiar with," says Ms. Alzamora, a tall brunette and former Tante Marie instructor who expresses appreciation for every pleasing dish with a hearty, uninhibited "mmmmm." "But this is really exposing us to just what Thais eat. That first night I thought, 'Wow, this week is really going to be different.'"

Instead of working from written recipes, the students learn by watching and doing, the same method Ms. Duguid and Mr. Alford employ when gathering recipes for their books.

After their morning shopping trip, the students gather in the low-tech Thai-style kitchen Ms. Duguid and Mr. Alford have fashioned in a studio apartment across from their own. The room is dominated by a large, low rectangular wooden platform around which they all work, taking turns reducing slabs of pork to mince with a pair of knives; pounding chilies, lemon grass, garlic and shallots with a mortar and pestle; and slicing jakan, which imparts a pepperiness to stews and soups. Every dish is cooked traditionally, over charcoal, on one of three clay braziers on the balcony. Khun Mae circulates among the 11 participants, communicating with smiles and nods and taking their hands in her own to demonstrate the Thai way of peeling shallots and onions (away from, rather than toward, the body) and the secret to mincing meat efficiently (keep knives low to the cutting board).

Having trained in French cuisine, Ms. Hemley is used to a way of cooking she describes as "very codified," and is surprised to find that techniques in Thailand are so different. "Here cooks use the knife as more of a cleaver," she explains. "And they're not as precise about butchering say, a chicken. It's just 'whack'!" she says, wielding an imaginary blade and bringing it down with a sharp sweep. Not using recipes "frees you," says Ms. Alzamora. "You taste as you go, you pay attention with all your senses. And," she adds, "we're learning the way Thais do, with recipes handed down from cook to cook." Each cooking session ends with a meal shared from heaping bowls and platters placed in the middle of rattan mats on the floor of Ms. Duguid's and Mr. Alford's living room.

On the first day, the menu -- all prepared by the students -- consists of a rich and spicy beef stew, a banana-leaf-wrapped and grilled pork dish, herbed minced-pork salad, tamarind-soured mustard-green soup, herbed minced fish, and a whole chicken rubbed with spice paste, steamed and served with its own rich drippings, all accompanied by sticky rice and a heap of fresh sliced herbs and vegetables. After two days of shopping and cooking, the participants feel more comfortable with their surroundings and the regional cuisine. So to upset the equilibrium once again, after lunch on Tuesday everyone piles into comfortable vans for a three-hour trip north to Fang, a town near the Myanmar border. There for two days they will learn to prepare dishes peculiar to the Shan, a people who live primarily in Myanmar but have been driven in some numbers into exile in northern Thailand by political persecution and economic stagnation.

"We tell them nothing about where they're going. We arrive in the dark and when they wake up in the morning they're somewhere completely different," explains Ms. Duguid. "Once again their senses are heightened, just when they were starting to relax." The first morning in Fang, the students stop at the weekly market that draws hundreds from near and far. Many are ethnic minorities such as Lisu, Shan and Akha; some wear traditional dress, including a few Akha women with striking head coverings dripping silver ornaments. On offer is a new slew of unfamiliar fresh and prepared foods, including slices of soy-flour "pudding" dressed with chili oil, soy sauce and vinegar and topped with crunchy toasted soybeans, chopped scallions and coriander, and delicious deep-fried rice-flour "doughnuts" dripping with molasses. The course's participants plunge into the crowds unguided and without hesitation.

At classes at the lychee farm of Ms. Somrak, the group's translator, the students learn enough Shan-cuisine basics from a young Shan woman -- regular rice instead of sticky rice to accompany meals, salt instead of fish sauce, fresh and powdered turmeric to season many dishes -- to enable them to distinguish it from the northern Thai food they cooked earlier in the week. They cook and eat their way through dishes like galaam oop, cabbage simmered with turmeric and onions, savory pork and beef meatballs, and a lush, comforting stew of chicken and potatoes cooked so long they break apart with the nudge of a spoon. "Totally, absolutely local" is how Ms. Hemley describes the two days in Fang, as the class rides back to Chiang Mai. "Chiang Mai is great, with all its street food and big markets. But this gave us a true sense of how many Thai people really live."

Back in Chiang Mai on Saturday night, the last evening of the course, a palpable energy permeates Mr. Alford's and Ms. Duguid's kitchen, where everyone has gathered to prepare grilled foods and salads (gap glaem, or Thai "drinking foods"). As night falls and the scent of fish sauce-marinated caramelizing pork wafts into the room, the participants recall the previous evening's meal, a potluck dinner. Everyone was asked to bring prepared food bought on the street or at the market, or ingredients with which to create a dish of their own. The couple called the dinner "foraging Friday." "I have to admit, I had my doubts about this scavenging thing," says Ms. Risley, shaking her head. "But we ate darned well!"

Ms. Duguid raves about a dish conjured up by two of the students from items they found at the wet market: two types of ginger, garlic, pea shoots and large nut-brown mushrooms called het lom. Others swoon at the mention of a dessert created by two other students, a steamed coffee and coconut-milk custard topped with chopped roasted peanuts, brown cane sugar and a pinch of salt. Asked if she'll re-create any of the week's recipes at home in her California kitchen, Mrs. Piskatel nods. "Yes, a few. Finding the ingredients will be a challenge," she says with a smile, thinking perhaps of tua nao, the thin disks of pressed, preserved soy beans that are toasted and pounded to a powder before lending umami -- a meaty, savory, satisfying taste -- to soups and salads, and bplaa raa, an odoriferous fermented fish condiment that is a key ingredient in many northern Thai spice pastes. "But won't it be fun looking for them!"

Whether the participants actually cook the dishes once they return home "doesn't matter," says Ms. Duguid. "They'll be tasting and seeing things differently. That's what important." She and Mr. Alford acknowledge that their casual approach to instruction and deep-end-diving take on eating and exploring Thai culture may not appeal to everyone. All they ask of participants, she says, is that they be curious.

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***