My Attempt At Thai Food

Since I recently have a little time on my hands, I decided to attempt to cook up some Thai food. I have tried in the past to make Pad Thai and had very limited success - you could eat it, but it was not restaurant quality (or even that good). So the first thing I did was find a good Thai cookbook; I got Real Thai, The Best of Thailand's Regional Cooking by Nancie McDermott. There are no pictures, but when I started looking at the recipes, they sounded good and the ingredients made me want to give it a try.

Next up was to figure out what to make and the best way to do this, thumb through the cookbook and read some recipes! The first one I came across was for fried spring rolls, then rice noodles with soy sauce, Chinese broccoli and beef, then Mussamun curry with beef, potatoes, and peanuts, next was grilled pork on skewers with cucumber salad and spicy peanut sauce, and lastly sweet-hot garlic sauce. Ok, so all of these sound really good, but might be a bit ambitious for my first attempt! I was also on the lookout for Thai corn cakes - I found them on-line at realthairecipes.com.

My final menu was:
Thai Corn Cakes (Khao Pod Tod)
Fried Spring Rolls (Boh Biah Tote) with Sweet-Hot Garlic Sauce (Nahm Jeem Gratiem)
Rice Noodles with Soy Sauce, Chinese Broccoli, and Beef (Kwaytiow Paht Si-Yu)

Before I could start to cook, I needed to get the right ingredients - so I headed off the H Mart (see Lydia's post from February 2, 2010). Bean thread noodles, rice stick noodles, fish sauce, tamari sauce (or dark soy sauce), spring roll wrappers, plus fresh ingredients like shrimp, ground pork, flank steak, shallots, garlic and ginger - yum!

Now that I got the menu down and the shopping done, it is time to cook! Check out the rest of the weeks blogs for how I did and how it was all received!