All US residents over the age of 18 are invited to submit* their original Thai appetizer recipe for a chance to win one first prize of $599 and one second prize of $399. 
Recipes for these fried spring rolls (Po Piah Tod[1] ปอเปี๊ยะทอด) vary so greatly that you’re not likely to find two family recipes that are identical. It’s fairly safe to say, though, that the ones most commonly found in the central part of Thailand usually contain glass noodles or mung bean threads (wun sen วุ้นเส้น), bean sprouts, and wood ear mushrooms. This recipe from my aunt’s kitchen is quite typical in that way. What I love the most about her fried spring rolls – something I don’t always find in other versions – is the aroma of the quintessential garlic-cilantro root-peppercorn paste.
Good spring rolls must taste good on their own, in my opinion. Poorly-made, bland fillings that exist just to live off of the charisma of crispy spring roll skins and flavorful dipping sauce are too underachieving to be worth the calories.
Yes, I'm looking at you, cheaply-made $6.99 lunch special spring rolls, stuffed to the gills with cabbage-heavy filling whose raison d'être, apparently, is to keep you tubular.
Thai Iced Tea with Lime (Cha Ma-Nao ชามะนาว) is a staple at anything from the lowliest of khao-kaeng (rice-curry[1]) stalls to school cafeterias, to little posh cafés, to sit-down family restaurants. People like it, apparently.
While pairing wine or beer with Thai food can be tricky sometimes, and soda doesn't always work (try drinking coca-cola with anything spicy that contains lemongrass and/or galangal -- yuck), Cha Ma-Nao -- ordinary as it may seem -- hardly, if ever, fails. The combination of Thai tea and lime juice seems to go with just about any Thai dish.
I have proposed in the first part of the Pad Thai series that the best pan to use to make Pad Thai is a wide, flat-bottomed pan with a nonstick surface, short rims, and great heat retention ability. In the second part of the series, I have proposed that the best rice noodles to use in Pad Thai is flat rice noodles between 2 to 5 millimeters in width (measured before soaking). In the same post on the noodles, I've also cautioned you against blanching or par-cooking the noodles prior to stir-frying for that is the surest way to get your noodles to clump up and your Pad Thai completely ruined.
In this post, I will be making comments and suggestions on the ingredients and garnishes that help make your homemade Pad Thai that much closer to the most common version found on the streets of Bangkok. You may not have seen some of these ingredients before in all the versions of Pad Thai which you have had outside Thailand. But I can assure you that none of these ingredients is foreign to most Pad Thai enthusiasts in the motherland. And this is undoubtedly a yawn-inducing post to them for, you see, Pad Thai is such an ordinary food that is found everywhere in Bangkok, and these common ingredients are found right along with it. Everywhere. Every day. Almost all the time.
Lan of Angry Asian Creations and I started our respective blogs the same year, and we've become Twitter and blogging buddies ever since. Lan is a very nice person who is also very creative in cooking and craft; her blog is an evidence of that. Angry Asian Creations is a happy place where you'd want to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon browsing and looking for ideas on what to create during the week.
I've asked Lan to be the fourth person to continue our series of dishes created around the herbs that are used so heavily in Thai cuisine in general and Tom Yam in particular, i.e. kaffir lime, lemongrass, and galangal. So far we have seen Tom Yam-flavored French macarons, Tom Yam-flavored baked alaska, and mango with smooth coconut fromage blanc cream thoroughly infused with Tom Yam herbs. Today, we have this scrumptious roasted chicken added to the growing list.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lan.
This is one of the dishes by which I judge a street food stall. Stuffed calamari with crispy garlic is such an uncomplicated dish to make. And precisely because of that, when it's done carelessly, it's obvious. But when it's done right, you get tender calamari and well-seasoned pork stuffing fragrant of the ubiquitous garlic-cilantro-pepper paste all of which are lightly doused with aromatic garlic oil and thoroughly bespeckled with tiny shards of sweet, crispy garlic. And that's a very, very good thing.
Have these little gems with warm jasmine rice. Don't forget a little bowl of Nampla Prik on the side. Or you can do what my grandfather liked to do: eat them as an appetizer with cold beer.
If those who follow me on Twitter have wondered why it took me so long to finally publish this post on Thai Sour Curry or Kaeng Som (or Gaeng Som แกงส้ม) after I'd announced it nearly two months ago, check out the length of this post. There's so much to say about this curry, so many possible angles from which to approach the subject. When you see how much information I've been forced to relegate to the footnotes to keep the length of this post reasonable – and I’ve barely succeeded – you'll understand the procrastination.
After all, it's kaeng som[1], one of the grande dames of Thai curries, we're talking about. It's the curry that captures so very well the flavors associated with traditional Thai food. A short, quick post would be disrespectful.
We loved kaeng som in our family. We loved it so much that it was served at least twice a week, or more if you count the leftover meals. And on the days when I didn't have kaeng som at home, it would be served at school. If Brillat-Savarin is right, then I am nothing but a big bowl of kaeng som.
Thai grilled bananas (Klauy Ping - กล้วยปิ้ง) come in many shapes and forms. You can see them in the first image in my post on Or Tor Kor Market (which, by the way, should be on your itinerary should you visit Bangkok). Some are split open on one side and grilled in their peels. Some are peeled, skewered whole, and dipped in various syrup concoctions. All of these grilled bananas fall into the broad category of Kluay Ping. But when one refers to Kluay Tap (กล้วยทับ), it's bananas which have been grilled and pressed -- a subset of Kluay Ping -- that are in view.
Different people use different yardsticks to measure the quality of Pad Thai. For me, the noodles represent that which makes or breaks this dish. True, the noodles alone don't make a good plate of Pad Thai, but they do form the bulk of it. And when the noodles are badly cooked, they invariably drag everything down with them. In light of this, a post focusing on nothing but this ingredient is, in my opinion, entirely justified.
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