Mango with Sticky Rice

Kao Nio Ma Muang

Mango with Sticky Rice
1 cup of steamed sticky rice
1/2 cup of coconut milk
1 ripe mango (peel, remove the seed and slice into pieces)
1-2 tbsp. of sugar (or wet palm sugar, available at specialty stores like Rainbow Grocery)
1/4 tsp. salt
1 vanilla bean (or padang* leaf, if you can get it)

Place coconut milk, vanilla bean, sugar and salt in a pot. Heat until boiling. Turn the heat off. Add steamed sticky rice. Mix together well. Let it cool. Serve with sliced mango.

*Padang is a dark green sturdy leaf that imparts the coconut with a distinct flavor that is similar to vanilla. I don't have a source for it in the U.S., but would be happy to find it someday.

recipe courtesy of The Chiang Mai Thai Farm Cooking School

Do you know how coconut milk is made?...by pressing coconut shavings!

Making coconut milk from shavings at the market

We spent a delicious day at The Chiang Mai Thai Farm Cooking School (www.thaifarmcooking.com), visiting a market in the countryside before touring the school's farm of fresh-as-can-be ingredients, including bananas, mangoes, galangal, ginger, kaffir limes, lemongrass, and more. We cooked a feast with ingredients from the farm, including red curry chicken (kaeng phed gai), basil chicken (phad kaprao gai), pad thai, and chicken coconut soup (tom kaa gai). Are you noticing a pattern? Gai means chicken! We made our curry paste from scratch, but you can see in the photo below that Thai cooks can purchase fresh curry paste in red, yellow, or green from the market in bulk.

Green curry paste for purchase at the market (thai cooks' secret)

Chili sauces and oil at the market

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the 20 baht (70 cent) bag of FRESH green peppercorns.
That's galangal directly behind the peppercorns.

Sarah and I had these little balls of delight in a very thin sauce with red peppers and lots of broth on our first night in Thailand at a street market stall, served on a skewer of chicken, pineapple, tomato, and onion. Oh how I would love to have access to fresh green peppercorns in California.

In case you're wondering how to make sticky rice...
First, you must purchase sticky rice grains. You can't make sticky rice by using regular rice grains. Next, soak the sticky rice in water overnight. Finally, steam the rice in a bamboo steamer until it is soft. Voila!

We learned a very important lesson at cooking school.
How to eat sticky rice...
1. Grab a ball of the rice with your fingers (half the size of a ping pong ball)
2. Roll the ball in the palm of your hands.
3. Flatten the ball into the shape of a blood cell.
4. Use your patty to scoop up bites of yummy Thai food.

Magic Gardens

Chedis (also called stupas in other countries) can be found in all Thai temples and are a solid structure, meaning you cannot enter it, as it's more of a monument. They are built to hold relics and other treasures. Thais kneel before them to pray and give offerings of incense, flowers and candles.

The chedi at Wat Lok Molee is practically in ruins. Bare brick is all that remains. It is massive and golden Buddhas sit on various levels. The base of the chedi is the height of a 2 story building and is covered in green plants growing. Three monks in saffron robes sat smoking behind it. The top of the base was wrapped in what I call "monk orange" fabric.


The main temple was made of very dark wood. In front of the temple stood a tree of gold and a tree of silver with 2 white elephants with red and yellow details. It truly was a magic garden.


The very shiny Chedi Luang was in a temple complex where, on Sunday evenings, food vendors set up stalls selling ice cream, sushi, noodles, thai tea (sold out of lemonade machines that keep it moving constantly), skewers of meat and fish balls, and rice dishes.

This reclining Buddha at Wat Phra Singh is experiencing Nirvana even though they've built a tiny little house for him, which seems too small. He could never stand up in this structure! Notice Sarah standing at his feet to truly understand how gigantic he is.

This peaceful Buddha looks out over the moat surrounding the Old City of Chiang Mai. Ruins of the old wall on the inside of the moat still stand. Thais use the ancient gates in the walls (used to enter the Old City) as landmarks and meeting places. We stayed inside the Old City.
Here I am standing at one of the gates in the wall surrounding the Old City. The pink lanterns were part of the Loy Krathong lantern festival.

Chiang Mai Temples

Arriving in Chiang Mai after 18 years away I didn't know what to expect. I was absolutely delighted to discover the city still holds a spell over me. The rhythm of the city is quite different than any other place I've been. On the one hand, traffic is intense and chaotic and sidewalks are ripped up with gaping holes in them. On the other, you happen upon ancient buddhist temples, oases in the middle of the city that act as public parks and places of worship.

Monks walk the streets of the city in the early morning carrying an alms bowl to collect food and other offerings for themselves and the temple. This photo was taken as the monks returned to Wat Phra Singh (wat means temple in Thai), just after sunrise, carrying their alms bowls.


Thai culture, including religion and their script, is influenced by India. You can really see this in this shrine on a temple compound in Chiang Mai's old city.

I made a donation in exchange for a Loy Krathong with my family names on it. I also cut a piece of fingernail and a piece of hair using the scissors and clippers provided by the temple to add to the little banana leaf boat. The boat was added to a larger boat that they floated on the river during the festival.

Culture Shock

As a freshman in high school I decided I wanted to study abroad. I really didn't care where, I just wanted to leave the country. I was 14 so my mom helped me do research on possible programs. She found the Global Youth Academy on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz, a traveling school that toured the world during the school year and took shorter journeys during the summer. It was 1993 and they were going to Thailand and Indonesia that summer. I don't know if I had ever heard of Thailand before. I looked at a map of South America expecting to find it next to Brazil.

I fundraised money and joined the trip of 7 students and one teacher. When I stepped off the airplane in Chiang Mai, the second largest city in Thailand, my host family met me and drove me directly to their home. The next day they brought me to the uniform shop to get me outfitted for school and soon I was the tallest palest student at Wattanothaipayap school. I experienced major culture shock and home sickness. It was serious. I hadn't expected when I signed up that Thailand would be like Mexico (my only foreign point of reference at that time for places with spotty trash service and no hot water)! I hadn't realized many things, like there would be shanty towns built at the end of roads in my neighborhood, and we would eat fried chicken for breakfast with something I'd never heard of called sticky rice, or that each of us 7 students would be attending different schools across the city, so there would be absolutely no buffer between me and the Thai culture and students. Oh, and I hadn't realized that, at the age of 15, I would be a head taller than most of the teachers in my school and that it was disrespectful to have your head higher than a teacher, so I would bow down to avoid towering over them each time we passed in the hallway or a classroom.

I had an epiphany a few days into my stay. I sat down to lunch in the canteen at school and was introduced to a Thai girl who had lived in Los Angeles until she started high school. She complained bitterly about Thailand and lamented how much she missed California. She was unhappy. Our conversation cured my home sickness. Her attitude was so drastically different from everyone else I had met in Thailand. She was negative. She reminded me of my classmates in Santa Cruz, who had "everything" compared to Thais, but did not appreciate any of it and chose to focus on the negative in their lives. This had been me one week before when I left California. I decided right then and there at the lunch table that I would savor every minute of my time in Thailand because it was absolutely refreshing to be surrounded by people that smiled a lot, did not complain, and focused on the positive. Plus I was amazed by the orange robed monks wandering the streets, the incredibly ornate temples, and the armies of scooters in the streets. Thai pop was pretty awesome too.


Fast forward to 2011, my best friend Sarah and I took a trip to Chiang Mai and I met a bunch of students who weren't even born when I attended the school, but they look just like I remember them!

In my journal from high school I wrote that I had been worried that there would be no ice cream in Thailand. I was delighted when I found that they offered freshly scooped ice cream at my school. On my recent trip I was happy to see that the canteen still offers many ice cream options!