Inexpertly riding on the moor, 'Postman Pat country' in the distance

“Are you grossly overweight?” asks the woman on the other end of the phone. “I hope you don’t think I’m being rude but people today are all so unfit. They do nothing but sit in front of their goggleboxes and gawp!”

Calling up to book a place on Skaigh Stables’ all-day pub ride through Dartmoor, I find myself in the hands of a bone fide old English battleaxe. Rosemary Hooley may have been running Skaigh Stables, in northern Dartmoor, for nigh-on 50 years but she’s clearly still very much holding the reins.

When my photographer Pauline and I rock up early one Saturday morning at the stables, her diminutive yet purposeful figure is striding about the yard, arms full of heavy tack. After reassuring her that we’re in reasonable fitness and signing a disclaimer (“These health and safety people make everyone sign one these days,” sighs Rosemary dismissively), we don archaic hard hats and make for our mounts. Mine, Mara, looks solid enough, with a reassuringly greying coat, but I’m still a mite nervous, having not ridden for a good decade.

“Don’t worry,” says Donna, who – with partner Mac – will be our escort for today. “We’ll take it slowly.” I feel that perhaps she may be humouring me as she also reassures Pauline (a seasoned rider with her own horse) that it will be exciting enough for her. “Because of the rocky ground even walking feels a lot more exciting than usual riding,” she says. “We’ll be going through water, up and down steep bits and when we’re up on the moor we can have a good canter”. All of this sounds a little too exciting for me and I’m thinking about feigning sickness until I’m ordered by Rosemary to mount, and I’m too scared of her to disobey.

I can barely remember how to sit on a horse, never mind ride. Luckily everyone else is more experienced than me and Pauline reminds me how to hold the reins, my pinky twisted out from the grip for stability. Shortening the reins until I feel a bit mean – “It should be tight enough to feel the horse’s mouth but not so tight that you hurt her” – she asks me to imagine that I’m offering and retracting a tea tray with each movement. I feel silly.

My morning is chiefly spent trying to obey instructions barked by the others: “Heels down! Hands down! Shoulders back!” while simultaneously enjoying the sullen beauty of the countryside.

Dartmoor is the UK’s largest area of wilderness, chiefly known for three things: Dartmoor prison, wild ponies and the Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, where scion of the local gentry are run down by a slathering hell hound. Between thoughts of the dog and escaped convicts, I make a mental note not to wander around by my self at night.

Despite, or maybe because of, the moor’s edgy reputation, it has a wild beauty that can’t fail to give one literary aspirations. Echoes of the greats who were inspired by moorland – Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte – inspire us to be literary too, talking poetry and literature as we ride. Pauline contrasts this literary land with the arable fields and hedges outside the park, or in her words “Postman Pat country”.

The outside world does seem tame when you’re trekking through the gorse and scrubland of this wilderness. The beauty of Dartmoor is in its rawness, unchanged over centuries. Of all the national parks, Dartmoor is the one that seems the most primeval; despite being one of the smallest (‘just’ 1,000 square kilometres) it has the most ancient monuments – more than 1,200 separate cairns, stone circles and mehirs (standing stones).

The raw materials for these are in abundance on this rocky ground, which is dominated by huge tors and boulder fields. The horses trip these with the perfection of practice, placing their feet carefully.
I’m slowly starting to remember how this riding malarkey works and, after three hours of wobbly riding – just before we break for lunch – I finally find my seat. Hands down, heels down, shoulders back, I rise to the trot and smugly siege into the car park of the Northmore Arms village pub in Throwleigh and dismount, only to find myself sprawled on the floor two minutes later as my tired legs misjudge a step.

No one could stay embarrassed for long though in the face of a pub lunch and a pint of excellent country cider, however, and by the afternoon session I’m in a delightful stupor of good food and good company. Having a better handle on the horse in the second half of the day means I have more time to look around and just enjoy not being in the city. I find out later that Dartmoor is the same size as London but with 280 times fewer people. You really have the space to breathe out here.

As we get back on to the moor proper, I’m jerked out of my reverie by a suggestion from the more able riders that we have a canter. I feel guilty for holding them back but fear makes my brain seize. I can’t process the concept of standing up in stirrups while holding on the horse’s neck. There’s no option to sit this one out though so we just go for it. I cling on for dear life and make some squawking noises as Mara’s hooves pound the stones. “Remember to breathe!” shouts Mac, as my heart thunders in my ears. What a buzz!

As we turn back to the stables the sun comes out, almost as if it knows this is the finale. For the last half hour of our five-hour marathon we wander a gorse and heather-strewn ridge, the valley below to our right. Tiny patches of cloud cast shadows like handprints on the fields beneath us and from this height the patchwork of villages and fields is a silent scene. Out on the moor often the only thing you can hear is the clop of hooves on stone and the wind’s rustling path.

We reluctantly return to Rosemary’s stables. I now understand what has kept her training and riding horses here for almost 50 years. Perhaps it’s the fresh air, the moody literary skies or the ancient civilisations just beneath the surface but there’s a romance and wildness to Dartmoor that I want to bottle and take with me back to London. Then one night when I’m tempted to watch the ‘gogglebox’, I can take it out and take a big lungful of moorland air and be transported back to the real world instead.

Sarah rode through Dartmoor with Skaigh Stables. Look out for her upcoming piece in TNT magazine.

'Pizza Crunch': Glasgow's favourite deep-fried snack...please God, give me quinoa instead

When you’re a kid learning to talk it seems that as soon as you learn a new word everyone’s suddenly using it all the time. It’s rare that this happens as an adult, but occassionally it does and it seems like a bit of brilliant cosmic timing.

It happened to me toinight for the first time in ages, on my press weekend in sunny Glasgow. The word in question is ‘Sumac’, a word I’d never heard before but meaning a citrisy flavouring, used in olden times instead of lemon and apparently back in vogue.

After my 4.45am dash to catch a flight up here yesterday, I found myself dozing in front of Saturday Morning Kitchen in my giant 5* hotel bed, being taught by an eccentric TV chef what Sumac is. Imagine my sense of cosmic togetherness when I checked my posh hotel’s dinner menu tonight, and found good old Sumac making an appearance.

Paired with roast loin of pork, pork leg croquette, pancetta crisp, my new favourite flavouring was lovingly sprinkled on a mound of quinoa, every hippy’s favourite grain, and not what I imagined I’d be eating in Glasgow, where I’d last heard that ‘Pizza Crunch’ was a delicacy.

It was delicious, all of it. I don’t normally like eating alone in restaurants and had brought a book to immerse myself in (Nick Hornby’s Complete Polysyllabic Spree, in case you’re interested) but I was forced to ignore the book. If I’d been with a companion I think I would have been forced to ignore them too, given that my eyes glazed over with the exstacy of delicate spicy, sweet and porky flavours and I found myself sighing with joy intermitantly; By (sticky toffee) pudding time, I had to stop myself from licking the bowl.

Food aside, and my delightful hotel – the newly-opened spa hotel at Blythswood Square – this has been a very low-impact press trip, very relaxed. My assignment wasn’t until the Sunday afternoon, which gave me plenty of time for a wander.

I don’t think I’ve seen a taste of the typical city by any means: it’s been far too sunny. Midsummer weekend and it’s been light until almost 11pm and the hottest place in the country. I’ve spent my time wandering the wide streets and insiduous hills of the city centre and sunbasking in the georgian squares with young couples and groups of irn-bru swilling neds.

People are very friendly in the city, I suspect that’s not just the sunshine, I’ve been engaged for a chat several times in shops and cafes. I’ve been asked for directions four times, so either I look very Glaswegian or the city needs better signposting.

This morning I wandered into another world, taking a trip down to East Glasgow and ‘The Barras’: Glasgee’s indoor and outdoor flea market. I’d no hope of understanding the stallholders’ rumbles and squeaks, except for the odd wee, och, aye, oor, . If you think I’m being rascist goan ha’ ae lissen yeesel’.

Still, even if I didn’t understand anything, I was pleased to see some character that’s lacking in the city centre (a place made up of the usual ‘Britain PLC’ chain pubs, fast food joints, and an extraordinary number of Gregg’s bakeries). Anything and everything a chap can unload is sold at the Barras: Rangers scarfs, shirts, posters, hats, badges; towels designed to look like kilts (sporran included); old fashioned sweets, like rhubarb and custard sold by the quarter; pellet guns, high-vis and all manner of darts’ paraphanalia: flights and boards too. This seems to be where all the country’s second hand VHS have come too – for one last ditch attempt at life, sold for pence.

Serving on the stalls are ladies of indescriminate age and clothing size, with leathery decollatages and 40-a-day throats, rasping the latest gossip to each other. Their kids (grandkids?) weigh out sweets or flog tracksuits. Even the youngest teens smoke, I notice, drawing heavily on Rothmans and Embassy’s from between pinched forefingers, like old men.

I pop into a newsagent here for a juice and a newspaper but there’s no hope of a Guardian. The Sun, The Mirror, Zoo, Nuts and something called Beaver Hunt are my options. It seems Dorothy and I are no longer in Kansas.

Dubious reading material aside, Glasgow is a thoroughly charming and friendly city, with a real appetite for life. Where else could you sample sumac-infused quinoa and pizza-crunch in the same day?

For all its gentrification, it’s nice to see a British city with so much character. The Barras, for all their chain-smoking children and knocked-off, chip-fat splattered goods have reassured me that British cities do retain a personality, if you scratch the surface. I was starting to think that we could just call them all Wetherspoons-KFC-Topshop and have done with it.

(Try the pork, sumac and quinoa at Blythswood Square: www.townhousecompany.com/blythswoodsquare)

After not having blogged for weeks, it seems crazy that the instrument of my return is the humble croissant. And not even a French one at that. Just the common or garden Shoreditch variety, so much beloved by those high-haired individuals until they get too fat for the ubiquitous skinny jeans.

Purchased from Coffee Me, my new favourite Joe provider (purely by virtue of it being the mid-point twixt tube and desk) this croissant’s usual buttery charms were rounded off nicely by virtue of it being free with my latte. Ignoring the inner voice of my sister, for whom “We don’t want fat Sarah back” has become something of a mantra, I plumped for the biggest and butteriest I could find.

Is there any greater pleasure than wandering through the back alleys on a sunny morning in April, teasing off wisps of spun dough? Like a chubby ear of August corn, there’s something in the consistency of a croissant that whispers of prosperity and sunshine: its golden tinge and plump shape suggesting the end of summer or the comfort of middle age. The Nigella Lawson of foodstuffs, if you will.

Is this the pinnacle of French cuisine? Surely nothing else in the country’s repertoire is such a simple engineering feat? Shocking that what is essentially a dough-wrapped cloud of fatty air can notch one’s happiness up so perceptibly. Especially when replicated by a second-rate backstreet cafe in a country demeaned for its cuisine by the pastry’s very inventors. Phew, I think I’m in love.

I feel a bit silly blogging about my breakfast. Surely there’s enough rubbish on the internet as it is. But waxing lyrical about the small pleasures is all we have some days, otherwise it’s all sweating the big stuff and fretting over taxes until we die.

So, I’m sorry little sister, I will keep eating my big fluffy comforting croissants. Call it descriptive practice; a sharpening of my professional skills. There’s poetry in pastry, and there’s nothing inspiring about a bowl of Alpen.

Mmmm...

My favourite part of any Vietnamese meal is the humble spring roll (Cha Goi). Mined meat, vegetables and herbs all mixed up and rolled up in rice paper and then deep fried…twice. Yum, yum, I say. So I went to a cookery class in Hanoi to learn how to make them. Here’s the recipe:

2 oz translucent rice vermicelli or cellophane noodles, chopped
2 tbsp dried tree ears (wood fungus or wood ears), soaked until soft and chopped
3 Chinese mushroom caps, soaked until soft and chopped
6 oz minced pork
3oz minced prawn
1 handful bean sprouts
2 stalks spring onions, chopped
2 tbsp nuoc mam (fish sauce)
1 tsp pepper
1 egg, lightly beaten
12-14 sheets banh tranhg (uber thin rice paper)
vegetable oil for deep frying

Put all ingredients except skins or rice paper in a large mixing bowl and blend well. To adjust seasoning, boil a small nugget of mixture and taste. Adjust seasoning if necessary. In a bowl of tepid water gently lower each sheet of bang tranhg or spring roll skin until becomes softer and clear.

Quimby gets a tutorial, waiting to spring into action

Put a spoonful of the mixture in the centre of the paper, one third of the way along. Fold in the sides and then roll the mixture in the paper tightly, making sure to keep the cylindrical shape.

Not as easy as it looks...

Heat oil and test it by putting the end of a chopstick in it. If you see bubbles then the oil is ready to cook your spring rolls. Put them in the oil for 10 minutes, turning constantly.
When you are ready to eat heat them through in the oil for another 10 minutes. Pat dry on paper towel. Bon Appétit, or as the Vietnamese say: Chúc ngon miệng!

Not bad for a first attempt, although I did cut my hand open making the tomato into a rose...muppet!

The Basket: all the essentials needed for life on the road

Every year the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK
collects the prices of 650 goods to calculate the official retail price index and Consumer Price Index (CPI), which give it an indication of inflation levels and household spending.

Known as ‘The Basket’, the list of items that are compared are chosen to reflect the appetites of the nation. The very first basket, back in 1947, according to The Times, included lard, unskinned wild rabbits, back-laced women’s corsets and a gallon of lamp oil. 2009′s basket includes smoothies, USB pen drives and a rotisserie chicken.

Backpackers, and even a slightly more indulgent ‘flashpackers’, don’t exactly buy smoothies or rotisserie chicken on a regular basis. Instead there is such a thing as a Traveller Price Index (TPI), that the average traveller evaluates the expense of travel in a country by.

In the essential Basket used to calculate a country’s TPI I
would include: a night’s budget accomodation in the backpacker district, a bowl of noodle soup, packet of washing powder, packet of cigarettes, t-shirt, sunglasses, an iced coffee, 1.5l water bottle, bus ticket for a 12-hour journey, roll of toilet paper, DVD, book, and – most importantly – a pint of beer.

In this way we’ve been able to compare countries and find that Malaysia is the most expensive country we’ve visited, with a TPI of £41.80 and Laos the cheapest with a TPI of about £22.90.

More than this though, the huge variety of price differences in each of these items brings up some strange anomolies. In some very Muslim parts of Sumatra, for instance, a pint of beer costs £2.50, while a hotel room can be rented for about £1.50.

In Vietnam a roll of toilet paper costs more than a packet of cigarettes, while in Laos a bottle of water and a bottle of
beer both cost the same amount (about 60p).

It may seem a sad little exercise, and you may wonder if I don’t have anything better to do with my time, but comparing prices can be fun. In Vietnam, for instance, where a pint of bia hoi (fresh beer) can be had for 25p and the cheapest room is £8, a beer is only 3% of a night’s rent, rather than 120% in Sumatra so there’s obviously far less guilt involved in having a few beers in an evening. Or that’s what we tell ourselves anyway.

Parasols on sale at the fabulous Hmong tribal craft market, Luang Prabang

A few days in Luang Prabang will doubtless be one of the highlights of any trip to Indo-china. A couple of weeks there allows you to sample most of what the city has to offer in terms of sights, excursions, food and drink, accommodation and activities. So Jamie and I – having been here for almost two weeks – have compiled a guide to the best, the best value and the best avoided of Luang Prabang tourist culture.

Accommodation

The good
Santi Resort
On the outskirts of the city, this opulent colonial-style mansion has tasteful rooms and a tasty restaurant but would get the award just for the stunning paddy-field view from the bar that floats on the lily pond.

The cheap
Muong Lao
If the free wifi starts working again, this would be the perfect place to stay for the budget traveler, who also gets a very comfortable bed, TV, air con, hot showers and free travel advice for their £5 a night. Also with on-site cafe.

The ugly
Merry Guesthouse 2
The ‘own bathroom’, which has a blocked drain, is the highlight of a grubby living experience that leaves you itching and not with the desire to return. Additional sideshow in the form of the moodiest landlady in all Asia, probably.

Eating

L'Elephant: a colonial cafe with wonderful grub

The good
L’Elephant
It’s worth breaking with the usual traveler adherence to local cuisine just for a sense of eating out in history at this colonial French cafe. Good cafe classics, like onion soup with thick cheese crust, mix well with more exciting options, such as buffalo steak or perch fresh from the Mekong.

The cheap
Ancient House
There may only be three things on the menu (noodle soup, noodle soup or noodle soup) but they’re all great and quite as nice for breakfast (the Lao way) as for dinner. Order the ‘fur’ noodle soup and get a bewildering accompaniment of fresh greenery, chili pastes, condiments and herbs to go with (and all for 6,000kip – about 45p).

The ugly
Sisavangvong bar
It’s not just that the service here is slow and occasionally rude and the food is boring, it’s also that the music, which blazes loudly at all hours, encompasses the worst selection of western pop from the last four decades – Peter, Paul and Mary anyone?

Sights

The gold stupa on the top of Phu Si can be seen from miles around

Royal Palace Museum
Former home of the Luang Prabang royal family (who were exiled in 1975), this early 20th century mansion is now home to many pretty things relating to the reign of Lao kings. The highlight is a room full of gifts from foreign heads of state, including some moon rock from Richard Nixon.

The cheap
Phu si (or Phousy)
This hill dominates LP and the big gold stupa on its summit can be seen from all over the city. Worth the sweaty climb for stupendous views and many beautiful golden Buddhas.

The ugly
Night markets
All along Th Sisavangvong from the Royal Palace to tourist information is closed for a night market selling same-samey overpriced tat, for the most part. More exciting are the offal-wielding food stall owners round the corner who attempt to force feed you the local sausage, oozing with fat, or deep fried chicken feet.

Activities

A cooking class puts the icing on the cake (metaphorically speaking)

The cheap
Big Brother Mouse
This is the single most rewarding thing to do in LP – forget giving alms to the monks in the morning (also a great thing to do), donating time at this literacy centre to help local kids learn English is immensely rewarding. Just turn up any morning at nine (the building’s just behind the Three Nagas restaurant) and spend a couple of hours reading with these friendly interested kids – you’ll be sure to learn more than you teach.

The ugly
Luang Prabang Bowling
Not technically ugly as it’s lots of fun, but messy in the extreme – after all the bars close at a 10.30 curfew this is the place to go to drink (and bowl) until 3pm. There’s no need for bowling shoes but you may need your hard-drinking hat.

Drinking

The good
Utopia
There should be a prize just for finding this place. Despite the frequent flyering done by bored locals down on the Nam Khan it’s hidden down several winding backstreets. The prize is getting there: it’s breathtakingly gorgeous setting over the river provides the perfect end to any LP day.

The cheap
Hive
Hive may not be the smartest bar in town but it’s definitely the coolest. DJs roll out plenty of favourites from the early naughties as well as the latest thing to a mixed crowd. Other bars on the same strip are also cool but this place gets extra kudos for its Laos-shaped bee-hive logo.

The ugly
Khob Chai and Ban Aphay
Obnoxious people beerily peering at football on the largest screen in history is not what foreign travel is all about. Avoid.

Go to Luang Prabang for the sights, stay for the atmosphere, food, and people. A southeast Asia must-visit.

A sticky situation: Laos cooking has some interesting ingredients

Lao food is almost unique in Asian cooking as it uses ‘sticky’ (glutinous) rice as its main staple for all meals rather than – as in other countries –just desserts. This type of rice is named for its high starch content, which means that it sticks to itself and can be rolled into balls with the fingers and dipped into sauces or stuck to dried meats.

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and the sticky rice is a perfect example of this. For the Lao people, whose mountainous homeland necessitates the cultivation of a rice strain that can be grown without paddy fields, this unusual rice was a godsend and it’s treated as such.

Sticky rice is what has created subtle differences in their lives compared to other lowland or paddy-growing peoples in Asia: how they eat (with their hands), how they sit (on the ground with shared condiments and sauces) and even how they pray.

It is revered as a spiritual substance and used in various rituals: as an offering to ancestors in the temple, given to monks as alms (for merit-making) or rolled into balls and left on shrines outside houses and in temples to appease bad spirits.

Sticky rice can be eaten as an accompaniment to many things, but especially jaeowbong, a condiment with the consistency and taste of a sweet chili jam, but which traditionally contains buffalo skin and so much garlic that your breath stinks for more than three days after eating it.

I know all this from the excellent cooking course I joined this week (my second of an intended S-E-Asian culinary extravaganza) at the Tamnak Lao in Luang Prabang. Along with the sticky rice and jaeowbong, I learned to cook the famous Laotian Laap (see previous writing), Khua Maak Kheua Gap Moo (Fried Egglant with Pork) and Kheua Sen Lon (vermicelli with pork and fungus).

The fungus isn’t the only unusual ingredient used in Lao cooking – frog, ant eggs and rotten fish are also still seen on menus. In the markets you can also buy rubix-sized cubes of gelatinous pig’s blood, used for flavouring stews.

These adventurous ingredients are – like the rice – a hangover from past times when Laotians of various tribes would make good use of their cut-off but forested and riverside terrains to supplement their diet with ferns, honey and fruit from the forests and perhaps some eel, water rat or frog from the river.

In those days poverty was rife, anything was fair game and no part of an animal would have been wasted. In hard times even beetles or other insects would have been made into stews to accompany and bulk out a meager ration of meat.

Reading this in my Laotian cookbook, I was excited by the idea of trying a beetle stew or perhaps a pig’s blood soup. Unfortunately the course had toned down its dishes for the western palate so we cooked Oh Paedak (a casserole made with pork and ‘paedak’, rotten fish) without the paedak and jaeowbong without the buffalo skin. Very tasty but not exactly authentic.

Still perhaps it’s for the best since I have a cookery book and will be trying these recipes out at home. Can’t see dinner guests thrilling to water rat head cheese or buffalo skin curry, or for that matter asking for woodear fungus in Hackney market – “You ‘aving a laugh?”

[more photos to follow]

Budget food for the discerning (i.e. pov) Laos visitor

Laap is a Laotian salad made with minced meat, finely chopped long beans and a number of piquant herbs and spices that give it a salty, yet sweet and lemony flavour. It’s delicious, tasty and – best of all – cheap and we’ve been eating a lot of it.

However for the last couple of days we’ve laid off the laap after the arrival of a kind benefactor in the form of my dad. Lavish on his holidays, as is his wont, he descended into our lives like Marie Antoinette, complete with doting entourage but without the giant powdered wig, shouting: “Let them eat steak!” So we did, and very nice it was too.

Two delightful days with dad in Luang Prabang didn’t just remind me of the delights of home (and rich food) but also gave me a chance to show him the best bits of our lucky life out here in Asia – and where better to do it in the place that the Lonely Planet describes as ‘the most photogenic city in Asia’.

Luang Prabang is seemingly one of the truly blessed places in the world, having avoided the devastation wreaked on other major cities in the Indo-Chinese (Vietnam) war. Its confines are still full of wats, stupas and colonial mansions, complete with shutters, columns and colonnades. Its streets are still full of bright-orange-clad boy-monks going about their business, parasols up to protect their shaved heads from the unrelenting sunshine.

At the confluence of two rivers: the mighty Mekong and the unassuming Nam Khan, it seems there is no part of the city where a delightful river-view is not seconds away. Many of these views can be taken in from the excellent restaurants, which we sampled with glee in Dad’s company instead of the usual laap.

Hot food and French buildings: a delicious combination

The pick of these is ‘L’Elephant’ – a perfect mix of French style and food with the laid back friendliness of Laos. Dining on the terrace here, you feel that you could be on a hot August evening in Paris, perhaps, were it not for such delights on the menu as Luang Prabang sausages or steak tartare of buffalo. The latter of these came (ordered by me for a slightly bemused Jamie) with a handful of whole green peppercorns and the requisite egg yolk served in a specially carved ‘egg cup’ made of cucumber.

There was nothing unusual about my French onion soup, except that I have rarely had it so flavourful, so cheesy and delicious outside of France. And Dad – who, without exception, orders the soup and the fish at every restaurant – pronounced the Mekong-plucked perch to be ‘delicious’. High praise from the connoisseur. What with the addition of a few large Beer Lao, of course, and brandies at the end for the boys (each costing more than our hotel room for the night), we left the table a very happy party indeed.

On the last day of Dad’s visit I joined his party for a walking tour of the city. This was remarkable not least for the beauty of the temples and many golden Buddhas, but for me the luxury of having a guide. Usually if an explanation for something is not in my guidebook I find that I have to ask a million questions of everybody usually until I find out what I want so being spoon fed information (and having a captive expert) was delightful.

It was a bit of a rude shock to wave goodbye to Dad with a tear and to go back to reality. A bit sad there’ll be no more of that delicious tasty rich food (my digestion is secretly pleased). Very sad to say goodbye to Dad for another 8 months or so. And most of all shocked to realise how much living on the road has become home and our tiny budget is natural to us now. And I’m not complaining – I do really like the Laap.

The great philospher Socrates once said ‘Wisest is he who knows he does not know’. If this is true it makes me a very wise person indeed when it comes to Thai cooking.

I had always thought I could throw together an Pad Thai, have a stab at a Thai curry, and I was pretty sure I’d mastered the art of stir fry but my recent experience of a Thai cooking masterclass (at the excellent Time for Lime on Ko Lanta) taught me that I know nothing whatsoever about Thai food. And not just when cooking it: oh no – apparently I’ve even been eating it wrong too. My cheeks were red, I can tell you.

Junie Kovacs, the director and teacher of Time for Lime, is a Norwegian graphic artist, who moved to Ko Lanta in 2001. She divides her time between looking after fledging tourist chefs in afternoon cookery classes and abused animals as part of her animal charity, Lanta Animal Welfare.

Her premises, which at the moment houses both the cheffing and the woofing (kept very separately), is as stylish as you would expect from a sometime designer. In the cookery school an open-plan kitchen with shiny surfaces and minimal fuss reflects a serious approach to cooking, while the eating area at the far end of the room is deliciously casual, with a cocktail bar and steps down onto the beach.

The signature lime green of TFL’s logo is even tastefully picked out on some of the furniture, the aprons that the pupils are given as part of the course fee and, when she emerges to start cooking, Junie’s fisherman trousers and headscarf.

Junie starts by introducing us to the main ingredients of Thai cookery and the three main flavours: sweet, sour and salty, which must be in balance for the depth of flavour to be correct. So far, so interesting, and so all new to me. I’ve always been a student of the ‘throw-it-all-in-and-see-if-it-tastes-good-and-if-not-oh-well school of cooking. This was the big league.

Next Junie told us how to cut the ingredients that you don’t want people to eat. By this point I was a bit lost. Surely cooking is all about eating the ingredients, isn’t it?

Apparently not. Thais don’t just cook things that they want to eat but things that give flavour to the rest of the meal. Galangal, for example, is a slightly horrible-tasting root spice (“like a cross between shampoo and a Christmas tree,” jokes Junie) that gives a pleasant taste in combination with other elements of dishes like Tom Yam (hot and sour soup).

The Thais cut the elements that are not to be eaten in a dish in a certain way (“this is the ‘don’t eat me’ way”) so that people can eat around them. So Galangal is sliced into rounds, lemon grass into diagonally-cut sticks, and kaffir lime leaves ripped from their stalks and left in halves. On other occassions each of these ingredients (known by Junie as ‘The three muskateers’ because they are often used together) are meant for consumption and this will be indicated by the fact that they will be finely chopped instead (“the ‘eat me’ way”).

Gosh – a visual code to indicate edibility! Who would have thought Thai curries and stir fries were so complicated. And here was I all these years manfully (womanfully?) trying to digest lemongrass, and choking down the tough kaffir lime leaves. I hoped the other students didn’t see me blush, although I had noticed a least a couple of sheepish and disbelieving looks from them so assumed I wasn’t alone in my stupidity.

Luckily, the rest of the course passed without me doing anything too stupid and I even managed not to set myself on fire when making stir-fried morning glory, which demands a super hot pan. And – even more amazing – all my food was delicious. This has nothing to do with me and all to do with Junie’s teaching, but I still had a overwhelming sense of pride and I can’t wait (the 8-odd months) to get home so I can try my new skills out there.

Yes. I made this food!

The evidence