Thai Cooking

We've been experimenting with Thai cooking (both eating it and making it) lately.  We bought a great cookbook, Simple Thai Cookery, by Ken Hom.  It's full of good pictures and  has about 40 basic Thai recipes that are pretty easy to make. There's a nice introduction that includes lots of information about Thai cooking style, ingredients, and utensils.  All of this combines to make cooking Thai food much less daunting. Pretty much everything is made in a wok, which is a very easy and quick way to prepare food.  The other nice thing about it is that all dishes are "one-pot" recipes, so they're easy to clean up!  

Rosemary has unfortunately had some unpleasant run-ins with Thai food in the past.  Ironically, she seems to be allergic to basil, cilantro, and lemongrass.  So that makes it pretty difficult to find things she can eat.  But it's been fun experimenting, and we've found things we both like.  

The thing that's really captured our interest lately, though has been this cool website importfood.com, which is linked in the title of this blog.  It's a great website specifically for Thai food, that has all sorts of recipes and an online store where you can order everything you'd possibly want to create any Thai recipe.  They really have a great inventory, and it's cool to be able to find things, like Kaffir lime leaves, galangal, and Golden Mountain sauce, that are hard to find even here in New York.  They also have some great woks, Thai-style cutlery, rice cookers, and even traditional Thai mortar and pestle, which are used for making things like a curry paste, if you feel like going to the trouble of making it from scratch.  Another cool feature is a series of videos showing street vendors making traditional Thai dishes.  They're accompanied by an English narration that describes how the dish is being made and what's going into it.  They also make sure to let you know "you can get all of these great ingredients and more at importfood.com!"  Anyway, I just thought that some people might also be experimenting with Thai food, and I wanted to share this great resource.  

I was trying to enclose one of their videos, but a combination of Blogger's limitations and my ignorance of the Interweb have conspired against me.  Instead, I've included a link here to a video of a street vendor making two different variations of pad thai.  

- Brian