Shortly after finishing university my girlfriend and I bought two round-the-world airline tickets, with the first stop being Thailand. After a few days we flew north from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, where we attended a one day cookery course at the Thai Farm Cooking School. This is where I picked up one of my most treasured cookery books – a 31 page Thai recipe book with the cookery school’s most popular dishes. Every student gets a free one.

And so that’s where I got a taste for Thai food. My favourite main course is the yellow curry (Kaeng Ka Ri Gai), and for dessert I got a serious taste for mango with sticky rice. One that always goes down well at lunch time, or even for a starter or light meal, is the Somtam papaya salad.

Somtam papaya salad - from the Thai Farm cook book (serves 1-2)

Peel the papaya and rinse under running water before removing the seeds. Shred the flesh with a grater until you have one cup-full. In addition, you’ll need:

1-2 Thai hot chilli
2-3  peeled cloves of garlic
1 tbsp. of lemon juice
2 tsp. of sugar
1/3 cup of chopped long beans (chop about 3 cm long)
1 tomato, cut into 6 pieces
2 tbsp. of peanuts
1 tbsp. of fish sauce or soya sauce
1/4 tsp. of salt

Put the garlic, long beans and chillies into a mortar and crush with a pestle. Then add the lemon juice, sugar, fish sauce, tomato and salt and mix together. Finally add shredded papaya and mix together well with the pestle and a spoon. Enjoy with some lettuce and boiled rice.

The wine match

Thai food is hot. Often *very* hot, but I can certainly think of a rosé that might help put out the fire. Chateau Bauduc’s Bordeaux rosé is still a favourite of Ronan Sayburn, the sommelier of Gordon Ramsay.

For whites wines, I’m heading to Australia. The dry, low-alcohol Woodstock Semillon Sauvignon blend from buddies Scott Collett and Ben Glaetzer, and the citrus loaded Cascabel Riesling from Eden Valley. If there’s any wine that can handle this, it’s them.