Day 28

Malaysian Coconut Beef. Its some of the same flavors as earlier curries this week but thickened with an unsweetened coconut galangal lemongrass garlic chile paste that we made. The sauce is great. Beef, meh. I just don't really do well cooked beef. It takes too much chewing. The sauce was kafir lime, coconut milk, and tamarind juice.

Serve, again, over rice. Next we made we made chicken soup. Tom Yan Goong. Thai style chicken soup. So good and comforting. We simmered lime leaves, galangal and lemongrass in chicken broth for 15 minutes to infuse the flavors, strained, and then returned to a simmer. In to the stock went pieces of shrimp, enoki mushrooms, a Thai green chile, cilantro leaf, lime juice and fish sauce. Lots of fish sauce.


It was strong and delicious. I don't ever order this at Thai restaurants. I will have to try it at my favorite place. It should definitely be made at home too. Its simple as long as you can find the ingredients. It helps to have solid homemade chicken stock on hand as well.
Next dish was another Indian chicken dish. This one was shorter on ingredients but had an interesting technique of using a cooked, pureed onion to season and and add body to the sauce. It gets added after the spices but before the chicken and yogurt. It also gets a pinch of saffron for color. Its not my favorite, but it was good over basmati rice for lunch. I hope to pawn it off to the family tonight. See the black specks in it? Those are cardamom seeds. At home I have only used pods, which I like to remove. The seeds are really strong in flavor and overwhelm my mouth often. I would substitute pods if I made it again. But I doubt I will. Meh.

But lets talk about deep frying now, shall we? I don't deep fry at home for all manner of reasons having to do mostly with cleanliness. But I will make a mess in other people's kitchens no problem. So today we made Filipino lumpiang. They are an egg roll sort of situation. This version used equal parts shrimp and pork, water chestnuts, green onions, egg, and soy sauce. You roll em up into small cigars and fry. Mine were large cigars as you can see. I don't have that small nimble rolling thing down quite yet.

You fry for them for about 5 minutes and then burn the fuck out of your mouth while trying to eat them before they cool down enough to handle. We made a funky dipping sauce of ketchup and sugar, water and Tabasco. It was really sweet so we upped the spice to try to balance it. It was tasty with the lumpiang. Are homemade deep fried crispy egg rolls ever not tasty?

If you said no go fuck yourself. They are of course good. And afterwards your stomach expands and you feel sleepy for a good few hours. I have leftover filling that I am going to use with wonton wrappers tonight. I will not be making ketchup sauce.

Tomorrow? Chef says we will eat the best fried rice of our life. I am of course skeptical. I'll let you know. We also are making my favorite Thai soup: chicken with coconut milk. MMMmmm.