rotomonkey.org

It's Tuesday, so you, my faithful readers, get to find out about the tasty Thai food we learned how to make last night. Last night's lesson lecture centered primarily around Thai chilis ("prik kee noo") and their use in various salads and soups. After an amusing side lecture on some Thai swearing practices - prik kee noo translates literally as 'mouse shit peppers", see, and 'kee' means both 'shit' and 'in excess', so prik kee noo is a play on words meaning both it's really hot and peppery and you hop around like an excited mouse when you eat one - we learned that Thai chilis are frequently just smashed a bit and left whole in salads. You can be merrily chomping on your lettuce and suddenly get a full bite of heat. Anyway, on to the menu:

• Hot and Sour Prawn Soup - Dtom Yam is a delicious, light soup that I've not had before. It's nothing like the heavy, tofu-laden Hot and Sour soup I'm used to from Chinese cuisine. It is made from a light stock of water, fish sauce and the prawn shells. Limes are added just at the end to add the sour flavor.


• Curried Mousse of Red Snapper in Banana Leaf Cups - Oh wow was this dish good. Eggs and fish are added to the standard curry paste and coconut milk sauce. The mixture is then placed in cups hand cut and formed from banana leaves and then steamed. The result is a very light, mildly spicy custard. The banana leaf cups add to the prep time, but if I need to impress with presentation, I will definitely give this dish some thought.


• Spicy Basil Chicken - Always a favorite of mine, this very simple dish came with a lecture on how to season and use a wok. I'm glad we did this one; I learned plenty about why mine never tastes like what I get in a restaurant.


• Stir-fried Broccoli with Thai Oyster Sauce - This too is a nice, simple dish you can prepare quickly. Thai meals generally are not served with salt and pepper at the table; a sauce of chopped up chilis mixed with fish sauce is put out instead. Since fish sauce is salty, this is how Thai season their food at the table. Unfortunately, in looking to turn up the heat, I added too much of the chili sauce to my broccoli dish and I overpowered it, unable to taste the difference between oyster sauce and the fish sauce used in the chicken dish. I'm looking forward to trying this again without as much heat.

Posted by rotomonkey at 11:47 AM | Permalink

So, on the slight chance that there's a reader who doesn't know who I am, I now confess to having worked on Robots before moving out west. While I'm very glad that I made the switch, I really hope that Robots does well: life for the folks back at Blue Sky will be considerably better with another hit under their belt. (P.S.: Well done on the redesign KP)

Of course, publicity like this can't hurt [click on the pic of the issue to download the pdf and then go to about page 10].

Posted by rotomonkey at 9:34 AM | Permalink

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.

Posted by rotomonkey at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In the "you learn something new every day" department: I was mowing our lawn for the first time yesterday with our shiny new push mower (side note: nothing makes you feel like an adult like buying and using a lawn mower) and I noticed a distinct oniony smell. It turns out that over half of our backyard is populated with wild onions. They haven't flowered yet so I can't be sure, but I'm reasonably certain that they are Aliium unifolium [usda.gov PDF]. The wild onion is apparently pretty hard to get rid of since you need to dig out the bulbs to make sure it's really gone. I don't know how to feel about this: it's somewhat cool to have this wild vegetable that sustained native americans growing free in my yard but sometimes I just want to go on my back porch, drink some coffee and not smell onions, you know?

Posted by rotomonkey at 10:12 AM | Permalink

Monkey steals the peach. [via bump]

Posted by rotomonkey at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)