Fried Shrimp with Basil Leaves

How to cook... Fried Shrimp with Basil Leaves

Written by Richard Barrow

Fried Shrimp with Basil Leaves (pad grapao goong) ผัดกระเพรากุ้ง Some people might find the dish this week a bit too spicy, but it is not unbearable. It is Fried Shrimp with basil leaves or "pad grapao goong" in Thai. You could also cook it with chicken if you like. In the ingredients pictured below, you can see holy basil leaves and shrimp on the left and bird's eye chillies and garlic cloves on the right. You need to prepare the chilli and garlic cloves first by pounding them with a mortar and pestle. Heat some oil in a wok and when it is hot, add the chilli mixture. When it becomes fragrant add the shrimps that have already been prepared. Stir well so that everything is well combined. Season with fish sauce and sugar. You could use oyster sauce if you like. Don't cook for too long. At the end, add the basil leaves and give a good stir. Come back next week to www.thai-blogs.com for another Thai food recipe. You will find the archives at Enjoy Thai Food.

Deep-fried Prawn in Red Curry

How to cook... Deep-fried Prawn in Red Curry

Written by Richard Barrow

Deep-fried Prawn in Red Curry (chu-chee koong tod) ฉู่ฉี่กุ้งทอด The Thai dish this week is Deep-fried Prawn in Red Curry or "chu-chee koong tod". The word "chu-chee" comes from the sound when you put something into hot oil. If you don't have prawn you could use fish, pork or chicken as an alternative. In the ingredients pictured below, you can see shredded kaffir lime leaves, green chillies, palm sugar and red curry paste on the left, fresh shrimp in the middle, and coconut milk and flour on the right. There are two stages to cooking this dish. First you need to mix the flour and water equally to make a batter. Dip the prawns into this batter and then deep fry them until golden brown. Set aside on some tissue paper. Next, heat some vegetable oil up in a pan and stir fry the red curry paste. Add some coconut milk so that it doesn't dry out. Season with fish sauce and palm sugar. This is a careful balance so you need to adjust to your own taste. The red curry paste is then poured into the serving dish. Add the fried prawns and sprinkle with shredded kaffir lime leaves and either green or red spur chilli. Come back to www.thai-blogs.com next week for another simple Thai dish.

Chicken and Wax Gourd Curry

How to cook... Chicken and Wax Gourd Curry

Written by Richard Barrow

Chicken and Wax Gourd Curry (gaeng khua fak gub gai) แกงคั่วฟักกับไก่ This is one of my favourite curries that I cook every now and then. It is Chicken and wax gourd curry or "gaeng khua fak gub gai" in Thai. You cook it in much the same way as other red curries but there is an extra step with the wax gourd. You can see these at the top of the ingredients picture below. You can also see coconut milk, sliced red chilli, kaffir lime leaves, tamarind, palm sugar, sliced chicken and red curry paste in the middle. You need to prepare the wax gourd first by peeling it, slice it several times lengthways, remove the seeds and then finally cut into one inch chunks. Heat up the coconut cream in a wok for several minutes and then add the red curry paste. Add some coconut milk if it starts to dry out. Add the sliced chicken and cook until it is nearly done. Transfer to a deeper pot, and add another cup of coconut milk together with the wax gourd. Once the wax gourd is cooked, season with equal amounts of tamarind juice, sugar and fish sauce. You can use lime juice if you don't have any tamarind. Add the torn kaffir lime leaves and red spur chilli before turning off the heat. Come back next week to www.thai-blogs.com for more Thai Food Blogs. If you have any questions then feel free to post in our Thai Food Forums.

Thai Food Menu

Best Thai Food Menu

I wrote a weekly food blog at thai-blogs.com detailing the street food that we ate in the Paknam Web offices. The idea was to show that food bought from street hawkers is not only cheap but also very attractive and delicious. I think we proved that we could make a meal for 3-4 people for only about US$4. The same meal in restaurants would cost you three or four times as much.

Chicken and Bamboo Shoot in Yellow Curry Every Friday from now onwards I will be working in the Paknam Web office instead of the school. So I thought I would share with you what we eat at lunchtime every week! Well, at least some pictures. I have had so many letters from people asking whether I would restart my Thai food blogs again. So, hopefully this will be the first of a regular series of food blogs. The first dish on the table was a variation of my favourite. I like chicken and bamboo shoots in green curry a lot. However this is a yellow version using turmeric powder.     Snake Head Fish with Fried Black Pepper You can use just about any fish in this dish. as well as the fried black pepper, there is red chili and onions. You can also use red and green peppers.     Stir Fried Vegetable with Prawn Always a good idea to have a dish of stir-fried vegetables. This one comes with fresh shrimp. So many variations. To get the bright colours, a good tip is to dip into boiling water for one minute before stir frying.     Fried Mushroom with Bean curd The final dish is vegetarian and is a mixture of bean curd and mushrooms. There are several stir fried dishes that use bean curd and they are quite easy to cook yourself. A very delicious meal. Now, I wonder what we will buy for our lunch next Friday. If you want to know, then just visit thai-blogs.com next Friday to see!

Lunchtime Thai Menu 02

Red Curry with Pork (gaeng pet mooo)   This is the continuation of my weekly Lunchtime Thai Menu. Every Friday I will be bringing you pictures of what we are eating in the Paknam Web office. My main purpose here, apart from trying to make you feel hungry, is to show what splendid meals you can have on the side of the road. Yes, that is correct, all of the dishes so far have been bought at stalls by the side of the road. Our budget for four people is about 100 baht which works out at about 75 cents each. As you can see, I am very generous when it comes to splashing out on food for the office staff! Last week we came in under budget at only 80 baht for the entire meal which was about $2.40 for four people.

The first dish is one of my all time favourites. I always like to have a coconut based curry in my meals. This one is red curry with pork. You can also choose, beef, chicken or fish. However, I really love with roast duck which is more expensive. This version also has plum tomatoes and pineapple. Unfortunately it is doubtful you will find this one for 20 baht by the side of the road.

Fried Mackerel with Shrimp Paste Sauce (nam prik kapi pla too)

 

This is a favourtie dish of Thai people. I live in a fishing town so it is readily available. The fish is pre-cooked and you just choose which vegetables you want and also the kind of sauce to go with it. Personally I am not too keen on fish and so this is not a favourite. I know plenty of Thai people who will eat just this for a meal.

Tom Yum with Banana Flower and Snake Head Fish

 

This is a variation of the popular tom yum spicy soup. I had Tom Yum with shrimp last night which is my absolute favourite. This is a different recipe. This has a bit of coconut milk though not as much as say tom kha gai. At first I thought the white pieces was shiitake mushrooms that had been sliced up. But this dish uses the banana blossom. In addition there is snake head fish. To be honest I didn't care for it much, but the others liked it.

Fried Mushroom and Pork in Oyster Sauce

 

This is quite a plain and easy dish to make that contains fried pork, button mushrooms and carrot and cooked in oyster sauce. There are so many variations of this dish. Do you like the sun rays affect with the shredded carrot? The staff are really getting into the swing of this food blog. Even though the food is ready made, we take a long time preparing the dishes for display and then photographing before we can even think about sitting down to eat! Good job there isn't much washing up to do at the end!

Omelette

 

The final one was an extra dish of omelette. For today's menu we actually went over budget as we had one extra guest visiting. So we broke the bank a little and spent a whopping $4.25 for the five of us. But, that is a considerable saving when you compare to how much a similar meal costs in a restaurant. Last night I went with some friends to a restaurant at "Bangsaen 2" by the Gulf of Thailand here in Samut Prakan.

There was four of us and with four dishes, fried rice and beer it cost me 890 baht or $26. Obviously I don't want to spend that kind of money too often. And living in Thailand, you really don't need to spend a fortune to eat a King's meal. Just eat by the side of the road for some of the cheapest and most delicious meals in the Kingdom.
Come back next Friday to see what we will eat for our weekly Thai lunch!

Lunchtime Thai Menu

Hot and Sour Chicken Soup (tom yum gai) This is now our third week of the Friday Lunchtime Thai Menu blog. Every Friday, we will be bringing you pictures of our meal in the Paknam Web office. Our budget is around 100 baht which is about $3 for all of us. The first dish was tom yum gai. This is a hot and sour soup with chicken. The famous one is with shrimp which I often order when taking guests to restaurants. The recipe is also similar to another of my favourite soups, tom kha gai. Though the one today doesn't have any galangal (kha). Basically, you bring some chicken stock to the boil and add lemon grass and kaffir lime leaves. Then add the chicken and mushrooms. You season to taste with fish sauce, sugar and lime juice. At the end, add cherry tomatoes and the chilies. When you order tom yum at restaurants, you need to say what kind you want. The choice is either "nam sai" which is transparent soup or "nam kon" which is thick soup. I prefer the latter because they add coconut milk to thicken the soup. That is the version we had today. Very delicious and one of my favourites. At the roadside foodstall near my house, this cost only 20 baht. Down the market it might be 30-35 baht. Deep Fried Spring Rolls (por pia tod) This next one is really an appetizer. It cost only 20 baht for six rolls. The dip you can see is one of my favourites. It is hot and sweet and is the same one we use for fried chicken. There are so many dips (nam jim) that you have to be careful that you use the right one. The spring rolls we ate today had minced pork, shredded cabbage, shredded carrot, mushroom and mun bean noodle (woon sen). Glutinous Rice Fingers (khanom niaw) Our dessert today was sticky rice flour with shredded coconut. It is sweet as it has palm sugar and caramel. The topping is popped rice. Som Tam Fruit Salad (som tam polamai) I have saved the best for last. Off all the varieties of som tam, this is most definitely my favourite after som tam tai. Most som tam stalls will make this for you as long as they have fruit. Actually, I am not sure why they call it "tam" as it is not pounded in the bowl like its cousin. Anyway, this one contains apple, guava, rose apple, shredded unripe mango, shredded carrot and cherry tomato. And whole roasted peanuts. When you do takeaway, they put the fruit in one bag and the sauce in another. Then you just mix together when ready. This cost 50 baht which is more expensive than the regular som tam. The sauce was very sweet but sour at the same time. It contains, water, sugar, lime, salt, garlic and chili. Normally I find one chili is enough for fruit salad. This sauce also had some dried shrimp. I love this very much. It can be a meal in itself. You can either eat it by itself or with sticky rice. So, what should we eat next week? We could go back to the som tam shop as they have 15 different versions. We could almost do one per week for the next few months! If you are in Paknam, go to "Som Tam Dontree". They have two branches. One opposite the courthouse and the other on Sailuad Road near Krungthep Bank. Both are very large shops with several floors. They are good for variety. However, I like my som tam seller at the top of my soi for eating som tam thai. We have three sellers in our soi but he is the best. If you have any suggetions for next week's lunchtime menu, then please post them as a comment. If y

Lunchtime Thai Menu 04

Crispy Catfish Salad(yum pla duk foo) This is the continuation of our weekly Friday Lunchtime Thai Menu. Every week I will be bringing you pictures of what we eat at lunchtime in the Paknam Web office. The budget for all of us is about 100 baht ($3) though I think we blew that budget this week. Everything you see here is Thai street food which surprises many people. Quite often, restaurants sell the same food, though at inflated prices. A lot of street food in Thailand is single dishes. For example, noodles, fried rice and Chinese chicken. However, most of the food that we have been buying is the kind that you share between your friends. This makes it more economical. We will try and give you some single dishes in the future. The first one today is a favourite of mine in the local restaurants. It is a green mango salad with crispy fried cat fish. It also has peanuts, chopped red shallots and chillies on a lettuce base. The secret ingredient is the sauce and not everyone makes it the same way. A common one would be lemon juice, fish sauce and palm sugar. This dish is called "yum" in Thai which means salad. However, if they used garlic instead of shallots then it would be a "som tam" dish. This dish cost 25 baht from the night market in Paknam. It was good but I have had better. Fried Coconut Palm shoot with Shrimp The next one is a simple dish that uses the young coconut flesh and fries it with shrimp. The dish only cost 25 baht. So, at that price they didn't give many shrimps. So we bought some fresh shrimp ourselves and fried these up for this dish and the other one further down this page. In Thai this dish is called "pad yod mapao on kung". Pork Belly with Five Spices and Boiled Eggs (kai pa loh) This is a dish that you often see in food markets though in my mind it doesn't look appetizing. However, I sometimes buy it for two reasons. Firstly it is not hot and spicy and so goes well when mixing with meals that contains curry's. It also lasts several days so you don't need to eat it all in one day. There seems to be two versions. Sometimes you see them in big enamel pots with mainly pork and tofu with a few hard boiled eggs. This one is the opposite and the main ingredient is the eggs hence the alternative name "kai pa loh". The other version would be "moo pa loh". The taste of the soup is very distinctive and probably the reason that I like eating it. It is also quite nice cold. To make it, the pork is fried in golden garlic together with cilantro root and five-spice powder. Once cooked, chicken stock is then poured in and to this is added soy sauce, fish sauce and sugar. The hardboiled eggs are added last. One bag of this was only 20 baht. Seafood Tom Yum (tom yum talay) This is the famous hot and sour soup called "tom yum" in Thai which I have written about before. I normally eat with shrimp or chicken. But this is a seafood version which, to be honest, I am not so keen on. This dish cost less than $1 but we cheated a little and added a few of our own shrimps. You will find that although street food is often cheap, there isn't always a lot of meat. Sometimes, when we only have curry or soup left over, I will cook up some more meat the following day to add to whatever is left over. Thai Dessert We splashed out on dessert today though it was really worth it. This variety of sticky rice desserts was 40 baht from the market. It was topped with some coconut cream. I am sure I have talked about these deserts before in previous Thai food blogs. So, I won't go into any details now. But, I will do a special blog on Thai desserts in the near future as it is a popular subject. I just hope that I don't gain too much weight during the research! The things I have to do for thai-blogs.com! Before I forget, this meal cost a whopping 140 baht which is about  $4. We will try and keep within budget next time. Please post as comments any suggestions that you have for street food we could buy for next week's meal. If you have any questions, then please post them in our popular Thai Food Forums over at ThailandQA.com. We will be running a competition there soon to win a Thai cook book. This will be only for members so make sure you go and sign up today if you don't want to miss out on this competition.

Pad Thai (Thai Fried Noodle)

Pad Thai (pad thai)
ผ้ดไทย

Today we are going to show you how to cook one of the most popular Thai dishes for foreigners. It is called "pad thai" or Thai Fried Noodles. It is not that difficult to cook but it involves a bit of an effort to prepare the ingredients. To be honest with you, we cheated a bit today. Our local pad thai food stall kindly gave us all the ingredients and also allowed us to make notes on her method of cooking. However, she wouldn't tell us the secret ingredients for the sauce.

This is what makes her stall more popular than others around this area. She actually admitted that even she doesn't know the recipe as it is made by her mother in a back room. The ingredients you can see below are, from top and going clockwise, roasted peanuts, fresh rice noodles (sen jan), salted Chinese radish, fried tofu, red shallots, dried shrimp, fresh shrimp and two eggs in the middle. Normally it is one egg per dish. On the left, you can see Chinese chives, beansprouts and sliced lime. Some people use garlic instead of red shallots. I have also sometimes seen chicken instead of the more popular shrimp.

Heat the oil up in a wok. Add red shallots and cook until fragrant. Then add the fresh shrimp, salted radish, tofu and dried shrimp. Give a good stir all the time. Move the ingredients to one side and then break two eggs into the pan. Cook for about a minute and then mix in with the other ingredients. Move to one side again. Add the fresh rice noodles. If you are using dried noodles you must soak in water for about 10 minutes. Then add tamarind paste and the secret sauce. Adjust the taste to your liking by adding soy sauce or fish sauce and sugar. Stir slowly until the noodles become dry. Now mix all the ingredients together. Finally, add the Chinese chives and beansprouts. Stir this in but there is no need to cook it. Serve with fresh vegetables, ground roasted peanuts and a slice of lime. I think ours tasted just as good as the real thing! Looks good too.


You will find the archives for my Thai Street Food blogs over at our new site www.ThaiStreetFood.com. You will also find there cooking videos that I shot at our local food vendors. You can download these for free. Some of the more popular videos have already been download more than 25,000 times!

Spring Rolls

 

Spring Rolls (por pia tod)
ปอเปี๊ยะทอด

I think spring rolls are a favourite appetizer for many people. In Thai it is called "por pia tod". The ingredients do vary but in our picture below you can see, spring roll sheets, mungbean noodles, chopped garlic, minced pork, bean sprouts, white cabbage and an egg in the middle.

Soak the mungbean noodles in water until they are soft. Then cut them into short lengths. Mix together the pork, egg, finely sliced cabbage, beansprouts and noodles. Add a tablespoon of light soy sauce. Fry the crushed garlic in hot oil until golden brown and then add the pork mixture. Set aside. Put a spoonful of the mixture onto a spring roll sheet. Fold over the mixture then roll it about half a turn. Tuck in the ends and then finish rolling it and seal it with a wheat flour paste. While you are preparing the spring rolls, heat an inch of oil in a wok. Once hot, deep fry the spring rolls until golden brown. Server it with a sweet chilli sauce.

How to Cook Thai Food

How to Cook... Thai Food with easy way

These are the Thai Food Blogs that I wrote at www.Thai-Blogs.com in the series called "How to cook..." Every week I showed the ingredients needed to cook a different dish. As usual, I am not pretending to be an expert. I am just someone who loves to learn and to cook Thai food in the kitchen every day. For me, the best way to learn how to cook Thai food is to experiment and to cook by trial and error. When cooking Thai food there is never any precise measurements. You need to know from experience and by tasting your food often during the cooking process.

nam phrik mamuang
น้ำพริกมะม่วง

This is a dip called "nam phrik mamuang". In the ingredients pictured below, you can see palm sugar, red chilli, red shallots, dried shrimp, green mango and shrimp paste in the middle.

Put the shrimp paste into a mortar and pound in the shallots and dried shrimps. Also add the hot chilli, sugar, fish sauce and finally the shredded green mango.

Thai food for free download

Welcome to Thai Street Food

One of the best things about living in Thailand is the food. It is not only delicious, but it is also plentiful and cheap. In fact, you can find it on almost any street corner at any time of day or night. I guess we are spoilt in Thailand in having such easy access to Thai food. After all, one meal in a Thai restaurant in say London, New York or Sydney would probably be the same as our weekly food budget. I know that is not really fair to compare as portion sizes in the West are far greater than what we get here. In addition, if you order say chicken curry in a London restaurant you are actually going to get a fair amount of meat. Here you will probably get a lot of bone and a bit of meat! Basically you get what you pay for. As you probably know, I love to cook. So, I don't actually go out and buy street food that much. If I am going to eat green curry, I like to have a good amount of quality meat in it. If I am going to have stir-fried vegetables, I want to make sure that it isn't sweetened with a lot of sugar or "flavoured" with a tablespoon of MSG. I also like playing around with recipes mixing Thai and Western recipes to create my own innovations. It is fun. Cooking for myself also means that I can have more Western meals. Variety is always good I think. I don't live in Bangkok and we don't get much of a choice here in Samut Prakan. One of the downsides to cooking at home is the cost. If you are buying quality ingredients or cooking Western meals then it is going to cost you more than the average meal bought on the street. Electricity is also expensive and my cooker and oven contribute greatly to my electricity bill. In the West we cook at home in order to save money. If we go out we might prepare sandwiches and a flask of hot soup. In Thailand, in theory, it is the opposite. I think a lot of us would say that it is actually cheaper to eat out every night. Of course, that doesn't mean dining at five star hotels every evening and drinking wine or beer. You can easily go through a lot of money that way. Eating out for us is going to a local food shop or buying something from a food cart. Something that I don't do nearly enough. Which is what gave me the idea for this food challenge. I decided for one month that I would eat nothing but Thai street food. This would be three meals a day, seven days a week. I am not allowed to go to supermarkets, restaurants or even 7-Eleven. At home I cannot cook or even heat things up. I won't even be allowed to boil some water to make a cup of coffee. Quite a few Thai families don't have a working kitchen. Or if they do then it is just a single gas hob. What I want to see is if I will really save money by eating out for every meal. I have already made a note of how much I spend weekly at the supermarket and also the monthly average for my electricity bill. To make it a bit more interesting, and certainly more challenging, I am not allowed to eat the same dish twice. Straight away this means I will be eating at least 90 different dishes in one month! I am not sure if that is even possible. In addition, I cannot return to the same food shop, food cart, stall or food vendor twice in the same week. To be honest, I am not sure how easy it is going to be for me. Breakfast is certainly going to be a challenge. My Soi doesn't sell much in the morning and I have to be at work by 7.15 a.m. So, I might have to do what many Thai people do and eat leftovers from the night before. Though, of course, for me it has to be something new bought the night before. I was never one for eating spicy food so early in the morning!