Taste of Thailand

The above pic is the curry chicken I attempted to make from Taste of Thailand. I took all the pics with my camera phone, but as you can see, it looks a lot better than the one I made at home. lol I think mine was sort of close. I think. :P

We went to Taste of Thailand a few weeks ago and every time we go there, the food is always great! I think this is my favorite Thai restaurant in the cities. We usually go to the one in St. Paul on Selby and Snelling. We ordered the usual: curry with spinach and chicken and their spring rolls. We decided to order their pad thai this time and tried their beef salad as well since I've recently grown fond of the Thai beef salad. I'm going to try to make it one of these days. The only complaint I had was that there wasn't enough of it! I wished they would've added more lettuce and less onions. It was very good though. It tasted similar to the one I had at Amazing Thailand, but the portion at Amazing was much bigger. I used to think ToT's spring rolls were the best even though they make them really plain. I think it is the sauce that makes it so good. I prefer the sweet/peanut sauce over the hoisin sauce at Vietnamese restaurants. I have ordered pad thai from ToT before, and don't remember it to be all that great, but for some reason this time was really good!

I haven't done my usual blogging-cooking for a while now. I've been mostly just making meals that I know by heart and haven't tried experimenting anything new recently. I've been so busy with everything: being a mom, wife, work, school, and trying to find ways to make additional income. I actually have a few other blogs out there, but they're more personal blogs. Anyway, maybe when the winter comes, I will cook more since there's less to do outdoors.

Pad thai:


Beef salad:

Curry Chicken with Spinach

I have found a great Thai cooking book. I have tried four recipes so far, and so far, so good. It has great pictures as well. I was anxious to try out their curry recipes as the ingredients seemed like it would taste good. I was right! This was the best curry I've made at home so far. I was trying to make the same chicken curry from Taste of Thailand. I love that dish. They serve the curry with spinach. Spinach?? Yes, spinach. It's actually quite tasty with the spinach. I actually could just eat the curry with the spinach and skip the chicken, but it probably won't fill me up as much. So, I adapted this recipe I found and tried to make it similar to the one at Taste of Thailand's. I think it's pretty good. When I have more time, I am going to try to make my own curry paste from scratch. I have made this dish twice now with red and green curry. Both are good. I know the picture doesn't look good, but the dish was good IMO. My husband loved it and licked the bowl. He wants me to make curry everyday for him, but coconut milk is very fatty. The original recipe called for only one tablespoon of palm sugar, but my husband likes his curry sweet so I added 2 or 3 more tablespoon. You can start out with one and then adjust, but I liked it at 3 or 4 tablespoons. Sorry, I didn't write down what I did exactly since I made this two weeks ago.

Ingredients:
1/4 cup of coconut cream
2 tbsp red curry paste (Maesri brand)
12 oz skinless chicken thigh fillets, sliced
1 3/4 cups of coconut milk
2 1/2 tbsp fish sauce
3 tbsp of palm sugar

1 bag of baby spinach (can't remember what mine was...4-9 oz?)

Chopped Roasted Peanuts


Method
1. Put the coconut cream in a wok or saucepan and simmer over a medium heat for about 5 minutes or until the cream separates and a layer of oil forms on the surface. Stir the cream if it starts to brown around the edges. Add the curry paste, stir well to combine and cook until fragrant.

2. Add the chicken and stir for a few minutes. Add nearly all of the coconut milk, the fish sauce and palm sugar and simmer over medium heat for 5 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium low and continue to cook the chicken for an additional 10 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, boil a pot of water on high heat to blanch the spinach. Prepare a large bowl of ice cold water on the side. When the water is boiling, pour the baby spinach in pot and boil for about 30 seconds. Immediately pour the spinach into a colander to drain the water, then transfer the spinach into the ice cold water to stop it from cooking. Transfer the spinach into a colander to drain the remaining water and set aside until ready to eat.

4. The spinach is put into the curry chicken when it is ready to eat. Serve on a plate with some rice. Top the curry dish with the chopped roasted peanuts.

Spicy Shredded Beef

This is one of my favorite Hmong dishes. It's Hmong because I haven't eaten it anywhere else besides our Hmong household lol. I've been eating/making this ever since I was a young girl. We had some relatives that stayed with us for a few days and one of them made this dish for us. It was the first time we've ever had this dish (my family and I) and we thought it was soooo good! It still is. I've been making it since then. The funny thing is that back in the old days even though it was available at the time such as the food processor, can opener, mop and broom, etc., my family never bought any of those "modern" appliances. We did everything the old-fashion-back-in-Laos days. Yep, we chopped meat manually, opened the cans with knives and mopped the floors with towels using our feet. Even though the convenience was out there, I still chopped this meat manually for several years until just a few years ago, I finally decided to go buy a mini-food processor. That was why I didn't like making this dish as much because it took so much time chopping the meat, but I knew it was all worth it. Ingredients: 1 lb of beef (I normally just buy the beef for beef stew that comes in chunks at the store) 2 cloves of garlic 1/2 cup cilantro, chopped 1/2 cup green onions, chopped 1 1/2 tbsp of fish sauce, 1 tbsp of lime juice (has to be fresh, never use that other kind!) 1 tbsp of dried red chilli pepper, crushed Method: Spread the meat evenly on a foil-lined baking sheet. Broil at 500 degrees until brown on each side, about 20 minutes the first side and 5-10 minutes the other side. When you turn over to the other side, be sure to drain the liquid off the baking sheet. You do not want the meat to get moist. It needs to be dry, almost like beef jerky. This is how the meat should look like after it's cooked on both sides. I let my meat cool off either still on the rack or in a dish. I don't like to run things that are hot in my food processor for fear of burning the thing. It's happened before at another household. Once meat has been cooled off, chop (shred) the meat in a food processor until medium-finely chopped; otherwise, you can manually chop the meat with a knife. Using a mortar and pestle, pound two cloves of garlic until bruised. Next, throw in the meat, cilantro and green onions. Mix with a spoon. Add the fish sauce, lime juice and pepper. Mix well with a spoon. This is where you might want to go sparingly because you might like yours less salty, sour or hot. This is just how I made mine and I like things spicy and hot! Using the pestle and spoon, mix and pound all the ingredients together. I prefer using the mortar and pestle because it allows one to infuse all the flavors together. I don't get the same effect with any other method. Keep pounding it a couple of times until the meat and herbs are somewhat bruised: This dish is meant to be served at room temperature or even cold. I just like eating it with white rice and mixing the two. Tastes great with sticky rice too.

Favorite Recipe Search

Can you guess what the most searched recipe is that leads visitors to my blog? It's so sweet. (Pun intended.) Yep, just about everyday, someone across the globe searches for "nab vam" or "tricolor dessert." I do wish more people would leave comments, especially if they have tried the recipe. It would help me improve things if the recipe needs improvement or provide others more tips. I don't blame them. Nab vam is a yummy dessert, probably the yummiest Asian dessert there is out there since we aren't known for our desserts. Have you ever notice that when you go to an Asian restaurant, there isn't much variety in the dessert menu (if there is one at all)? I think most Asian restaurants have a dessert section in their menus just to cater to the American public since Americans consume so much sweets.

Thanks for visiting!

California Summer Rolls

I bought some of these summer rolls made by a local sushi place. Even though they are very plain, they taste so refreshing to me. I love cucumbers and avocados so maybe that's why I like these. They are like the California sushi rolls without the rice and seaweed. I also really like the spring roll wrapper that they used. It's very soft and not like the ones I have used before. I finally bought this one brand recommended by some people and I think I found the right wrapper! It tastes exactly like the one the sushi place uses.

Anyway, on a hot summer day when I don't feel like eating anything too heavy, these are great. These are also great because there is hardly any cooking involved. Making the tamago (omelette) is pretty easy.

Makes about a dozen rolls

Ingredients
1 cucumber
1 avocado
1 small package of imitation crab/lobster sticks or cooked shrimp
Tamago (Japanese omelette)
Spring Roll wrapper (Three Ladies Brand)
Spring Roll sauce (see picture)

1. Prep and cook the Tamago. See recipe below.
2. Cut the cucumber and avocado into long slices or strips (about 2 inches long, 1/2inch wide). Cut the crab or lobster sticks in half lengthwise. If using cooked shrimp, cut the shrimp in half lenthwise as well.
3. Fill a large deep bowl with hot water and put in a single sheet of wrapper into the bowl. I work with just one wrapper at a time to make it easier. Once the wrapper is soft and pliable, take out the wrapper and put it on a plate. You can put the wrapper on top of a dish cloth too, to soak up some of the water.
4. Assemble on top of the wrapper with one seafood stick or 2 shrimp haves. Top it with 1-2 strips of cucumber, 1 strip of avocado, and 1 strip of the tamago. These ingredients should all be clumped together. Then roll the right and left sides of the wrapper in, and then finally rolling into a roll. I didn't take any step by step photos this time, so feel free to reference here on how to roll these.


Tamago Ingredient and Recipe:
3 eggs
1 tbsp sugar
1 tsp light soy sauce

1. Mix all ingredients well.
2. It's kind of tricky explaining the cooking part, so I recommend just following some videos on YouTube such as this one. I just used a regular round non-stick pan to make mine.
3. Cut the omelette into strips and set aside.

This is the lazy sauce I used for these rolls. This is also the same sauce I used (and mixed) for the rice rolls. I usually make a homemade sauce for other types of spring/summer rolls, but too lazy! Eventually, I'll make some more and different rolls, so maybe I'll post those and the sauce one of these days.