April 5, 2024 – False advertising is a thing.
Subway sandwiches alienated consumers when its “foot-longs” measured under 12 inches. Kellogg’s caught Federal Trade Commission blowback when it suggested Rice Krispies improved child immunity. Red Bull reached settlements because it does not in fact give you wings.
That is not the case here.
Quite the opposite.
Thai Is Fun cooking school is on brand.
Along with the enjoyment, TIF proves intriguing in its origins and enlightening with its lessons, which usually happen in Korrutal “Goi” Yugaroen’s Seaside home.
Gatherings of up to a dozen people (starting at $693 total)—sometimes for a tourist group, or a special occasion, or a surprise party, or a team-building session—dive into the depths of Thai ingredients, traditions and cheffing in her tidy kitchen-dining room-garden setting.
“The fun part is when you get together to eat,” the Chiang Mai native says. “Thailand is a hanging-out culture—and we can eat all day when we hang out.”
The dishes she does leap off her website—laab kai, pad se ew, pat khing and khao pat among them.
The shorthand history of her path here also pops. She was a veteran international school English teacher with a master’s when she won a U.S. green card lottery, and eventually left home with three bags and $700. When she landed in Portland, she took every job she could squeeze in at schools and Thai restaurants, but kept her eye on a college teaching post.
When told her extensive kindergarten to high school experience wasn’t the same as instructing adults, she created a course to teach at a Portland community college. The strategy worked, and a gig teaching Thai at the Defense Language Institute brought her to the Monterey Bay more than a decade ago.
In 2015, she applied for and earned a business license from the city of Seaside and started doing, per her website, “not only a class but a party.”
On my visit, she used her assembly of prepped ingredients to whip up a deceptively easy pad kra-phrow gai (aka stir-fried chicken with basil). It promptly locked the kitchen in an aroma trance then beguiled my tastebuds too, traversing spicy, savory and sweet with texture.
Meanwhile dialogue leapt from her test period with a mainstream American diet (“When in Rome…” she says, “I got fat and depressed!”) to the importance of using a mortar and pestle on garlic and chili peppers (“You have to smash, otherwise it’s not the same result!”) to the secret ingredients she spotlights for each gathering (which I agreed to keep in-class, and are worth the price of admission), all interspaced with her lightning bolts of laughter.
“Thai food can be simple but particular at the same time,” she says. “It’s like Thai people, who are easy going but particular when it relates to food.”
Blue Zones Project Monterey County turned Edible onto Thai is Fun, after it recently became BZP’s latest Recognized Participating Organization.
(Editor’s note: It just so happens it’s the second Seaside revelation BZP has recommended on a short stretch of Broadway Avenue alone. The other thrives a few blocks down with fellow teacher/healthy eats-ambassador Martha Henry’s Heirloom Collard Project.)
Lauren Redden, BZPMC’s organization lead on food environment, loves to find and support operations like Thai is Fun because it syncs with so many of its Blue Zones’ values, including natural movement, home gardening and plant-based eating.
“Before working with BZP, Thai Is Fun was already promoting BZP principles, so it was a natural fit for the cooking class to become a [partner],” Redden says. “The vegetarian dishes Goi teaches students to prepare—such as the green curry and stir fry ginger mushroom—are loaded with flavor. Students take away new ways to add excitement to plant-based dishes that they can add to their meal routine at home.”
In upcoming months, Yugaroen will appear at another BZPMC collaborator’s events, delivering cooking demos at Everyone’s Harvest Farmers Markets in Marina (date tbd), Pacific Grove (4pm June 10) and Seaside (4pm July 11).
Yugaroen also shares her energizing brand of cooking on the other side of Monterey Bay. Her new Cabrillo College Extension class in Aptos, “Plant Based Thai Cooking,” happens June 2. (See p. 36 of Cabrillo’s class schedule for additional details.)
“Healthy eating and happy cooking: That’s what I’m doing!” Yugaroen says. “Just eat more Thai food and you’ll be fine!”
More at thaiisfun.com.
About the author
Mark C. Anderson, Edible Monterey Bay's managing editor, appears on "Friday Found Treasures" via KRML 94.7 every week, a little after 12pm noon. Reach him via mark@ediblemontereybay.com.
