Thailand Food Journey

Photo from here.


It would be a dream of mine to visit Thailand one day and just go on a journey to eat all their food, visit their markets as well as check out some of their beaches. Growing up, my dad would post all these colorful posters of fresh and exotic fruits from Thailand as well as the beautiful girls in Thai costumes and the markets on the water.

Until then, I like to look at these vendor street food videos from ImportFood.com. They make me so hungry just watching them. Ok, maybe sanitary-wise--not so great, but the food is cheap!

Speaking of exotic fruits, I picked up a pomelo from the Asian store the other day. I never tried it before, but saw it a few times in Thai cooking, so I thought I try one. It's actually quite good. It looks and smells like a grapefruit, but it's actually tastier than a grapefruit. It doesn't have that bitterness that grapefruits tend to have. So if you don't like grapefruit, then you might like pomelos.



And those bananas in the background? I have no idea what kind they are. I thought they were just regular bananas that haven't riped yet, but after a few days, they still haven't riped, so I ended up tossing them. What kind of bananas are these that don't ripe? Were they like the green mango that will never ripe like a regular mango? We buy bananas every week, so I just felt dumbfounded this time.

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.

1st Restaurant Review: Amazing Thailand, Minneapolis

I think I mentioned this before, and in case you haven't noticed, my favorite foods are Thai, Vietnamese and Italian. My coworker who likes similar food as I do recommended this Thai restaurant in uptown Minneapolis called Amazing Thailand. He's been there a couple of times already, so I wanted to try it out for myself. The only other Thai restaurants I've tried are Taste of Thailand in St. Paul and Sawatdee in uptown a long time ago.

Just about everything we ordered was good. I was truly impressed. We ordered the Thai beef salad, red curry, Pad See Iew noodles, and papaya salad. My coworker told me their papapya salad was really good. Unfortunately, I didn't think it was that great. I was hoping it would taste more like the papaya salad I had at The Thai House in Fresno, CA. Somehow they made it simple, but so good. It's still one of my favorite restaurants because I grew up eating there.

Anyway, when you drive by Amazing Thailand, it's easy to miss because of all the shops around uptown, but you'll be surprised inside. It's actually a nicer Asian restaurant than most you see in the Twin Cities area. It is professionally and tastefully decorated with a Thai/Asian theme throughout. The interior was dark due to minimal lighting. They do have some seating outdoors in a small alley and out the front of the restaurant. I actually liked the small alley because it had some unique furniture and it just felt unique being out there, but my husband didn't like it at all. He said it was in an alley, but I thought it felt really exotic being outside. I'm not that big of a fan of dark-interior restaurants, but oh well...at least the food won me over. The service was good too. If I had to compare this to the two Thai restaurants in the Cities, I would rate this one above the other two because food was great, service was good, and the interior was nice. I do like the curry dish at Taste of Thailand more though, but T-of-T service is really slow. Every time we go there, there's like an hour wait to get our food and just when we think they forgot about us, we finally get our food and forgive them after we eat their curry dish. I won't even compare those two restaurants with Sawatdee. I only been there once and it was never that impressive. I'll have to try other Thai restaurants in the future.

So if you like Thai food, I would highly recommend Amazing Thailand. I meant to order a different noodle dish than the one I ordered, but I ordered the wrong one. Either way, it was still good. Yum. I was hoping that my family from WI would come up here and I have another reason to go out to eat, but maybe next time!

Rating: Highly recommended. 4/5 stars for a restaurant in its class. Why only 4? I wish their papaya salad was good as well. I'm probably being too picky, but a 4 in my book is a 5. haha

(Sorry I took the above pic with my cell phone. I didn't know I was going to do a review). :P

Thai Basil Chicken

There's a small fast food Thai restaurant in the Minneapolis skyway where I work where I first tasted this dish. I originally ran into a recipe from Thai Foodcast, but was not impressed with it. It didn't taste like the one I had at the restaurant. Not only was it too salty, but it didn't taste "Thai" to me. The one at the restaurant had grounded chicken, but the sauce was much better. I guess I should've known when the recipe called for four tablespoons of oyster sauce. I didn't remember the dish to taste like oyster sauce at all. So, since I had some more basil on hand and since I've been buying a lot of chicken breasts, I decided to try a different version of this. One of my new favorite food blogs that I just recently encountered is Rasa Malaysia. That is where I got the recipe for the second attempt. This version tasted much better and more closely resembled the restaurant that I tried. It uses fish sauce instead of oyster, which is more authentic Thai. My picture doesn't look that good since I took it at night time, but I thought this dish was good. I'll give it a 4/5. Easy to make and tastes good. It might be too salty/spicy for some, but then again, this is Thai!

The other version that I didn't like:

Thai Crispy Fish Salad

To me this dish sort of resembles "laab" or "larb" except for a few different ingredients and that the fish is fried. It is a good-tasting salad; I just hate to deep fry, but I gave it a try anyway. I probably over chopped the fish with the food processor because when I fried it, it didn't turn out like I thought it would. The fish crumbles were a little too crumbly for me, so I made fish balls with the remainign fish, and actually liked it better that way. I would also recommend using the full tablespoon of salt as recommended. I initially thought one tablespoon of salt was too much and only used about one teaspoon, but one tablespoon is necessary as too little salt may disappear between baking and deep frying. I usually follow recipes to the core and then make changes later to my liking, but I've been afraid to do so ever since I tried this one Laotian recipe and I almost threw up from it. This dish is definitely not gross IMO, otherwise I wouldn't post it. This salad can be served with fresh green mangoes and I know it would taste really good along with the other ingredients. I didn't have any turmeric on hand, and the dressing tasted fine without it.

Serves 4

Method:

Dressing
1 lemon grass stalk, white part only, roughly chopped
4 Thai chillies
1 garlic clove, chopped
1 tbsp fish sauce
2 tbsp lime juice
1 tsp palm sugar
1/4 tsp ground turmeric

10 oz skinless white fish fillets (traditionally catfish is used in Thai, but I used Tilapia this time)
1 tbsp sea salt
peanut oil, for deep frying
3 tomatoes or large cherry tomatoes, each cut into 4 or 6 wedges
2 Asian shallots
1/2 cup of cilantro, chopped
16-24 mint leaves, chopped
2 tbsp roasted peanuts, roughly chopped

1. To make dressing, use a pestle and mortar or food processor to pound or blend the lemon grass, chillies and garlic to a paste. Transfer to a bowl and add the fish sauce, lime juice, sugar and turmeric. Stir until the sugar dissolves.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Pat dry the fish fillets, then toss them in the sea salt. Place them on a rack in a baking tray and bake for 20 minutes. Remove, allow to cool, then transfer to a food processor and chop until the fish resembles large breadcrumbs (or fluff fish with a fork).

3. Half fill a wok with oil and heat over high heat. Drop a small piece of fish into the oil. If it sizzles immediately, the fish is ready. Drop a large handful of the chopped fish into the hot oil. The fish will puff up and turn crisp. Cook for 30 seconds and carefully stir a little. Cook for another 30 seconds until golden brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Repeat to cook all the fish.

4. Put the tomatoes, shallots, red onion, cilantro, mint and peanuts in a bowl with about half of the dressing. Transfer the salad to a serving plate. Break the fish into smaller pieces if you wish and place on the salad. To ensure that the fish stays crispy, pour the remaining dressing over the salad just before serving.


I had some left over fish crumbs, so I turned them into fish balls simply by deep frying them until crispy.

Thai Grilled Beef Salad

This was on my list of healthier dishes last week. It tasted pretty good. Even though it was beef, it tasted quite lean and still very tender. I have been making pretty good steak recently! I ate my salad with rice, but I wish I had some rice vermicilli noodles to mix with it. It would've filled me up more.

Recipe courtesy of Ellie Krieger of Food Network

1 pound top-round London broil or flank steak, about 1 to 1 1/2-inches thick
3 tablespoons lime juice, divided
3 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
3 tablespoons canola oil
2 tablespoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 1/2 teaspoons minced ginger
1 1/4 teaspoons red curry paste or chili-garlic sauce
1/2 head red-leaf lettuce, torn (about 6 cups)
3 shallots, thinly sliced (about 1/2 cup), divided, for garnish
1/2 cup cilantro leaves, rinsed and dried
1 cup basil leaves, sliced into ribbons
Directions
Rinse and pat the meat dry. Place in a sealable plastic bag or small glass dish. In a medium bowl combine 1 tablespoon of the lime juice, soy sauce, canola oil, brown sugar, garlic, ginger and red curry paste. Pour half the mixture into the bag with the meat. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons lime juice to the bag. Seal tightly, and marinate meat in refrigerator at least 4 hours or overnight, turning occasionally. Reserve the rest of the mixture refrigerated, to dress the salad.

Spray grill or grill pan with cooking spray and preheat. Grill steak until medium-rare, about 5 minutes per side, depending on desired doneness. Let rest until room temperature then slice thinly against the grain.

Combine lettuce, sliced shallot, cilantro, basil and beef in a salad bowl, reserving a few shallots for garnish. Add the reserved dressing and toss to coat. Divide salad among 4 plates and garnish with reserved sliced shallots.

Sweet Barbecued Baby Back Ribs

I love to eat meat with bones and baby back ribs are no exception. Unlike spareribs, they don't require a long time to cook because they are already tender. I thought I would try this recipe I got from Andrea Nguyen. So far, I tried three of her recipes and simply love them. These ribs turned out pretty good even though I usually just like my ribs plain with salt and pepper. It's winter here in MN, so I can't grill outside just yet. I broiled these in the oven at 475 degrees until each side was slightly burned. I'm not sure why this recipe is called Thai barbecued ribs since they tasted more like Vietnamese or even Korean BBQ to me. Maybe I just haven't eaten enough Thai...?

I know I need to work on my plating. The other night, I made some avocado salsa for some steak fajitas and just added it to the plate to make it look pretty. The steak I made turned out really good considering I was only using top sirloin meat. I would post that recipe here too, but didn't take any pictures because it was too dark at night. Anyway, here's the recipe for the ribs. I did use brown sugar instead of regular sugar.

Papaya Salad

Papaya salad is definitely one of my favorite foods, it's at least on my top five list. I have to eat papaya salad at least every month. If it wasn't for the high salt content, this dish would be very healthy and I would eat it every week. I have never tasted consistent papaya salad, even from the best papaya salad maker. It always tastes different no matter how many times I have made it or when someone else makes it. I think it's because when this dish is made, the ingredients are just added as needed and rarely measured, so it's always different. A small amount of one ingredient will change this dish drastically. This is the first time I measured it and it turned out pretty good. I like to make my papaya salad "Thai" style with just a few extras. It is much more simple and does not involve a lot of the other ingredients.






Just use a teeny bit of shrimp paste as you see here. Too much will make the salad bitter:






Serves 1

Ingredients:
1/2 clove of garlic
1-2 Thai chili peppers, depending on taste
1 tbsp of roasted peanuts
1 tsp tamarind
1 tsp palm sugar
shrimp paste (see picture)
1 tbsp fish sauce
1/2 tbsp lime juice
1 cup of shredded green papaya
4 cherry tomatoes, halved

Method:
1. Put garlic and Thai chili peppers to mortar. With pestle, smash the ingredients together until nicely blended so flavors mix.
2. Add the tamarind, palm sugar and shrimp paste. Pound with pestle until well blended with the other ingredients. Note: I shredded the palm sugar pictured above with a shredder to yield 1 tsp. I like to use the tamarind pictured above because it has a fresher taste than the already made tamarind mix that you find in the Asian stores.
3. Add the roasted peanuts, pound until well grounded.
4. Add the fish sauce and lime juice. Mix well with a spoon with the other ingredients.
5. Add the papaya and cherry tomatoes to the mix. With one hand holding a spoon and the other with the pestle, toss and pound all the ingredients together until well mixed and tomatoes are smashed. You do not want to pound the papaya too much as you want the papaya to have some crisp, but you do want it a little smashed so that the papaya will absorb the juices from all the other ingredients.


(Click on image for larger view.)

I ate mine with leftover salmon and rice I made last night. Papaya salad is usually served with cabbage. You would take a piece of cabbage leaf and use it as a spoon to scoop up some papaya salad into it and enjoy. The cabbage gives a nice crunch to the salad.