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Last night marked the beginning of my four week Thai cooking class with my friend Dan and some people from work. Kasma teaches a communal, hands-on class out of an enlarged kitchen in her house: everyone preps food and washes dishes and takes turns cooking then we all sit down to a Thai feast.

Last night we started by learning a little about the geography of Thailand and its effect on cuisine and then a lot about what makes for good or bad coconut milk and fish sauce and where in the Bay Area to find this stuff. We also learned how Thai food is made up of various combinations of five basic flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, salty and hot and how to taste the food as you are cooking it to see the effects of each flavor of the dish. You would be surprised, for instance, to taste how adding sugar can actually make hot food hotter (apparently it delivers the heat over more of the palette). We then got down to business. The menu was:

• A smoky, not very spicy chicken massamun curry. Very nice and complex, but quite rich. Massamun is traditionally a dish for Thai royalty - the ordinary Thai palette finds it too rich.


• A medium-spicy green curry with fish, shrimp and two kinds of Thai eggplant. Now I despise the western purple eggplant, but mixed into a spicy curry, these bitter green eggplants were quite tasty.


• A light stir fry of shrimp with garlic, onions, cucumbers, tomato and cilantro. This dish had some mellow Hungarian peppers and wasn't as spicy as Kasma was hoping, but it was a nice counterpoint to the heavier curries.


• Dessert was a very simple, incredibly tasty dish of bananas simmered in coconut milk, sugar and a dash of salt. "Salt," you say, "in dessert?" This was one of the more interesting lessons of the night: complementary flavors can balance, and even enhance, the main flavor. We tasted the sugared coconut milk both before and after the pinch of salt was added; the salt made the sweetness much more complex and interesting and, surprisingly, a little lighter on the palette.

Next week? Thai chilis.