Posted by Jim at April 8th, 2004

Over the last two weeks, I’ve made four meals that involved Thai food. I’ve been curious about it and Kristen bought me a Thai cookbook in February, but I hadn’t really thought much about it till recently.

Some observations:

1. Thai food seems to make a lot of use of lemon, lime, ginger and coconut. Almost all the food I’ve made so far contained at least 3 of those.

2. Green curry paste burns. Early this week, I made a beef curry. It required 4 tablespoons of green curry paste. Though it was great stuff (both Kristen and I liked it), it was closer to inedible than it ought to have been. I checked the cookbook later to see if I might have put it too much. I didn’t. I’m currently thinking that people in Thailand like their food much like people in India do–burning hot. The Thai use more fish sauce though.

3. As for nam pla (fish sauce), I am currently meditating on various brands. I most recently bought fish sauce from the local grocery store. It looks very much like ethnic food packaged for US use. It’s kind of reddish in color, but slightly transparent.

The last time I bought fish sauce was at Saigon Market, a local Vietnamese grocery. That sauce was obviously shipped straight from Vietnam. It was silver and black in color–similar in color to the rotting fish that lie on the beach of my hometown most summers.

I can’t help but wonder which is more authentic, but bearing in mind that the flavor seems the same, it’s a bit of a moot point.

4. Here’s something I’ve never had to do before: brown dry rice in frying pan, grind it up in a coffee grinder and mix the resulting powder into ground beef. It turned out just fine, but I’d never have come up with that myself.

I may write more about Thai food when I’ve had time to cook more of it. We’ll see. I’ve also got a mostly unread Japanese cookbook I’m tempted to actually use.