I don’t tend to mess too much with Thai curries, at least not with their spicing. The rest of the ingredients are usually fair game though. But this time I decided to go one step further.
It probably helped that the recipe I first looked at was written by Nigel Slater in The Observer. And I feel comfortable with Nige (as he is known at home) and his recipes. After all, Real Fast Food was the first cookbook I ever owned. Continue reading
There are times in the last three months that I would have crawled over broken glass for a taste of fish. If my right arm had been made of fish instead of meaty flesh (or should that be fleshy meat?) then I probably would have gnawed on that. That’s what a two-week diet of nothing but meat and potatoes does to a person.
At that moment, if somebody had produced a plate of steamed fish, I would have considered something close to a miracle. Hell, I might even have converted on the spot. But they didn’t, and I didn’t. Instead, that need just quietly grew. Continue reading
The search was long and arduous, but finally I’ve found it. A good Thai restaurant in London. It took long enough to find! There was none of that namby-pamby bowing to “western” sensibilities either. This was properly spicy, if you asked for it. And yes, I certainly asked for it…
So, thanks and a shout out to all those tweeters who recommended this as a place to try when I sent out a distress call on Twitter. North East Londoner that I am, I was a bit lost when heading into the badlands of the South West (of London). And what a happy surprise it was to find them neither bad nor boring.
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The thing about cooking curries, tagines and other big pot dishes, particularly if there are only one or two people eating, is that there is a minimum amount that you can realistically make. So I often – with varying degrees of success – have to find other uses for those bits and bobs. This is particularly true of Thai curry pastes. They act as a kind of counterbalance to the law of diminishing returns, in that past a certain point, the less you make, the more effort you have to put in to get good results. Continue reading
I woke up on Sunday with a hankering for something fragrant, spicy and defiantly Thai. Not Chinese, not Japanese, Italian or Turkish. Not even Vietnamese. It had to be Thai. There’s something so comforting and yet explosive about the delicately balanced flavours and textures you get in a Thai meal. The heat, the sweetness and wonderful, dark, deep pungency. I love it. Continue reading
Having dined on Thai for lunch I had a hankering for more fresh and spicy SE Asian flavours. Also, as part of an ongoing January clear out, I wanted to use up some of the bits and pieces sitting unnoticed at the back of the cupboard. You know, those things that looked like a great idea in the shop, but then somehow just never got used.
Delving into the fridge netted me a pack of raw prawns, some poached chicken and a couple of slightly tired stalks of lemongrass (left over from Wednesday’s cleansing chicken soup), basil, mint, half a cabbage and a lime. The store cupboard meanwhile served up a pack of dried rice spring-roll wrappers. Add to that some Indonesian chilli and ginger sauce I got for Xmas, peanut paste, sweet chilli and crusty old bottle of fish sauce and I had the beginnings of a mini-feast. Continue reading