thai food

had last night:
tom yum soup
isaan sausage
crispy duck salad
pad kee mow noodles

the isaan sausage was the only thing i've never tried before, it was sooo good especially with the slices of fresh ginger and red onion

i'm doing my presentation on THAI TOWN this afternoon -- wish me luck! maybe thai for dinner tonight to celebrate.

Tom yum soup is so ultimate.

where'd you go bell labs? Just two nights ago, while eating amazing chicken massaman curry at Srip, I mentioned how I've never had thai sausage, even though it's always one of the recommended things.

we went to zabb city.
we gotta get back to sri soon though.

sausage was excellent, not at all skanky.

tom yum is the best soup ever.

I'll get the sausage next time I go to one of the Zabbs, maybe Zabb city pre-Dazzle Ships next week. The one in queens near me is open till 2am though, so maybe I'll go late this weekend. I've recently tried both Nasura and Chao thai in elmhurst...both super authentic, though I preferred Nasura.

I took a chance at Zabb once and got a crispy rice and pork skin dish. I think I mixed the words up in my head and thought it was a crispy pork dish. It wasn't. The rice was crispy, and awesome. The pork skin was, well, pork skin, and the texture really freaked me out. I can be a real food wimp. I got scolded for not eating enough of the pork.

zabb city is becoming a weekly thing, it's so convenient. though i should get off my ass and go to queens, i want to try the new isaan place on broadway (i forget what it's called, it is close to where le sans souci used to be)

Poodam or something. I keep forgetting about that, it's about a 2 minute drive from my place.

arunee!

I haven't tried arunee yet but am planning, it'll complete my "authentic thai food of queens" tour.

http://sandiegorestaurants.typepad.com/san_diego_restaurant_revi/images/2007/05/25/kafe_yen_005.jpg

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hey there's a coincidence, I made tom kha gai tonight (greatest wintertime comfort food evar)

Never had that!

Made chicken in green curry tonight, first time I feel like I kinda pulled it off. Thanking self.

Never had that!

You are SO missing out.

Looking over a few recipes for this, looks reallly good. I gotta track down some galangal...

my gurl always orders this tom kha
she like

I load up on galangal whenever I'm in Atlanta -- always worth a side trip to H Mart.

I made tom kha gai tonight

wow, made it today. and yellow curry. the whole house smells but in a good way

Thai experts: does a pad thai normally come in a sweetish sauce? Every Thai place I've been in the UK (admittedly not many) does it slightly differently, some the sauce is far too sweet and overwhelms the whole thing; my favourite is one that's basically dry (but with lots of lime juice and flavour).

Tried using a pad thai sauce from a jar (in the US; not seen them in UK) and it was just bland and sweet. Love love love all other Thai food I've tried, though, can't believe I've only been to two Thai restaurants since I moved to SF!

ime pad thai varies pretty widely in the us. i hate when it's really sauce-y and sweet, should be more dry i think. i can't imagine making it using a prepared sauce.

does usually call for tamarind paste in the sauce which is mad sweet

yep def better when on the dry side. if a forkful of it drips, that's too much sauce.

xp the sweetness should be in balance with the spiciness and saltiness tho, like in basically every thai dish. americans are known to prefer sweet things and lots of places will up the sweetness in their dishes to appease/lure them.

yeah i use tamarind, it's not that kind of sweet that's bad though it's too much added sugar

i had some really nice Pad Kee Mao the other day from a pretty mediocre restaurant. it might be my new favorite fried noodle dish.

was in bangkok for 5 days a couple of weeks ago + holy shit that city has so much good food

omg made a jungle curry that is destroying my insides as we speak

brb, dying

screaming matches with my hallucinations brb

abrby's

love it, gives me spicy poos tho

(move to tmi ughhhhhhhhh)

do u know of any good vegan versions of fish sauce

i love spicy food and all. and i hate when i go into an asian or indiain restaurant and they give my white ass the "minnesota hot" variation of their food. but there were some amounts in this recipe i found ~very suspect~ and should have trusted my gut.

xp idk if that's possible, exactly? fish sauce is the runoff from salted down fish, you'd maybe have to work out some weird substitute?

o hai: http://www.thaigrocer.com/VegAdapt.html

I discovered the recipe for amazing Pad Thai recently. This is amazing shit that I've found that only 1/10 Thai restaurants gets right. The secret sauce is made of 1 part fish sauce, 1 part tamarind paste, and 1 part palm sugar. Mix them and cook over heat until dissolved. Then cook it with rice noodles!

thai was never my favorite but it has slipped down the power rankings to the extreme low end of choices for home cooking or dining out.

sadly, not a fan!

Is it possible that you don't have a good Thai place near you? I used to think Chinese food sucked until I went to a real Chinese place with real Chinese-Szechuan food (i.e. not deep fried meat covered in generic sweet sauce sitting under a heat lamp, like 99.99999% of Chinese restaurants in the US). It was fucking amazing and it's currently my favorite restaurant of all time.

I have eaten Thai across the globe including in Thailand with some resident gourmets/foodies. It's not a matter of access to Thai restaurants but just that my taste for it is pretty low.

I do like that you point out your preference to cook the spices down because I've found that a majority of Thai chefs would rather leave the spices in a raw or partially developed state which is probably the biggest turnoff. Either that or the abundance of sugar in everything. Bold, overt sweet flavors are probably my #1 biggest culinary turn-off (other than for dessert obviously and even then it remains a factor).

I think bold sweet flavors are my favorite thing =(

I am kinda full of shit...

I mean how many times have I asked you about HK milk tea? Or disclosed home many jars of nutella I consume on a monthly basis. :E

lol no worries. it's just that bold, sweet flavors are pretty present in a lot of chinese cooking

Thai food has a sweet/salty thing going on, which is why it's so delectable to me.

i dont think thai food in thailand is that sweet? i remember them liking sour things more

i guess i mean compared to anglicised thai food

I was in the southern part of thailand (just north of phuket, very local & not touristy) and I remember sugar being in EVERYTHING. there were these bottles of soy sauce on the table and they'd be almost as sweet as honey. my friend who was teaching english there confirmed that they put sugar in nearly everything. might have just been a regional thing tho

hmmmmmm yeah ive only been to bangkok