Amuse Bouche

Sate chicken, A pear, maple syrup and ginger crumble and tandoor chicken in butter sauce

Another week has passed and I've barely had time to swing by my feed reader to check in on every one.

I did click on Simply Recipes and saw the Pear, Ginger, Maple pie that Elise had posted from Vanilla Garlic.  Hello, crystallized ginger! Maple syrup!  Brown sugar!  Oh yes please. The maple syrup is the gorgeous dark amber stuff I get from my guy in Maine who makes it in his back shed.  It is so deep and complex in flavor.

I'm more of a crumble girl than a pie girl so I just tipped it all into my baking dish, put the crumble topping on right away and baked it at 350F for 50 mins.  The smell is intoxicating.

On the counter right now is my Zojirushi rice maker, which I adore(!), cooking up a batch of Basmati for tonight to go with the Tandoor chicken with Butter sauce and then leftover rice for Monday night to make some stir fry rice to go with Sate Turkey Tenderloins.  I'm making the marinade right now. It's a well loved recipe that I have been using for years.  I just pulled out some peanut sauce from the freezer.  I have no idea if it freezes well or not, but I will report back later to advise, fingers crossed cause I'm really not in the mood to make a batch right now.

We picked up some gorgeous green beans at the Farmer's market so husband requested Gujerati Sem to go with the chicken so here is everything prepped and ready to go.

Tandoor chicken marinating and jar of butter sauce ready to go.

The goal tonight is to be eating dinner by 60 minutes instead of approaching 9:00 at night which has been the situation lately.  Oven is currently cranked as high as it can go and the chicken is out of the marinade and ready to hit the heat.  I put most of the sauce together earlier with the last of the hot chilies from the garden.  We ripped everything out this weekend since the frost killed it all.  My tomatillos were literally covered with hundreds of empty lanterns.  Another couple of weeks and I would have been awash in them.  I at least got a small harvest out of them.  I have to get more sunlight to that bed next year.  All I need to do now is heat the sauce up and add the butter, add the cooked chicken and serve with some limes and ginger chutney.  Mmmmmmm.

Hopefully I'll remember to take a picture of the chicken before it hits the table...Have a great week. 

Pad Thai

Last night I taught my Thai class at Newton Community Ed.  Each time I teach this class I tweak the recipes a bit, change things around and edit.

last night we made:
Jasmine Rice
Cucumber Pickle
Fried Spring Rolls (Beef and Shitake)
Chicken with Holy Basil
Thai meatballs with Peanut Sauce
Thai Beef Salad (my personal fave)
and Pad Thai

I've seen many, many Pad Thai recipes and none of them have satisfied me for the necessary mix of hot and sour, salty and sweet.  They all generally made too little sauce to the ratio of noodles and/or incorporated odd ingredients in order to make it 'user friendly'.  A few weeks ago the fabulous Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim fame posted her version of Pad Thai for beginners and something about they way she wrote it, more as a technique primer than a 'recipe', caught my attention. 

First, she has you make a good quantity of the sauce and you balance the flavours in that sauce for the components that are critical for making Thai food - hot, sour, salty, and sweet.  Having made Pad Thai many times I know it is not easy to try and adjust the seasonings in the end.

Most of the ingredients should be easy to find these days.  The only ingredient I had to seek out were the dried shrimp.  I can usually only find these in a true Asian market, or course Super 88 has them if you are in the local Boston area, or perhaps Asian market on Waverly Hill Road in Waltham.  The dried shrimp are kept in the refrigerated section not on the shelf.

When I poked around in the store I happened to find some very, very tiny ones. For an idea of how small those are, one strip of the butcher block underneath them is 2" wide.  The shrimp are between 3 - 5 cm long.  I have bought them in the past and they were much, much larger and very orange.  These, as you can see, are very pale in colour.  These are an important flavour in the dish and I highly recommend seeking them out.

Pim also implores you to treat the shrimp in a particular manner.

It's important to use the mortar here and not your cuisinart, which will turn to dried shrimp into a hard, dried chunks (entirely capable of cracking a tooth) instead of fluffy bits of salty shrimp.

However we didn't have a mortar and pestle last night, I really didn't want to lug my 20 pound slab of marble mortar and pestle with me so we tried using a spoon and a bowl but it was not getting us anywhere near flaky and fluffy.  We dredged through the cupboards and found a mini chopper and I am guessing because these shrimp were so tiny and soft it worked perfectly instead of making shrimp rock candy we had fluffy light shavings and we were off and running.

I confessed to my students after they had made the dish that I had used them as guinea pigs for the recipe, but I don't think they minded at all, the recipe worked perfectly.  This recipe, friends, is restaurant quality Pad Thai.  I highly suggest you go and read her words and heed her advice, this Pad Thai recipe can't lose.

Coming Attractions

Coming Soon:
Aromatic Vegetarian Fried Rice
Mango Chicken
Asian flavoured Eggplant crostini
Asparagus and Coconut Quiche
Thai Meatballs and Peanut Sauce

Been UNBELIEVABLY busy.  Tales coming soon.  Be patient.

Tom Ka Gai - Thai Chicken soup

Updated Feb 24, 2007

This soup is one of the recipes that lands people here the most, second only to stuffed pork tenderloin...go figure.  I wanted to update this recipe because I made it again for dinner last night and I realised how horrible the picture was.  I also wanted to correct my title which was previously Gai Tom Ka and it should be as reflected, Tom Ka Gai. 

I haven't changed the recipe for this soup at all and it is still so, so, so amazingly good.  I will encourage you to seek out Galangal and Fresh lemongrass.  Whole Foods tends to carry Lemongrass these days, galangal you may need to work a little harder to find.

Today I took a ride of to Brighton to see the famous Super 88 store.  And what a store it is!!! The whole impetus to my trip was to find some Galangal to make gai tom ka.  I really, really need to find someone who understands some of the finer points of  Asian cooking to come with me.  I saw things that  blew me away.  Big sheets of dried sea snail, a tiny bottle of something that claimed to be 'essence of giant water bug', Durian fruit whole for .99 cents per pound, rooster testicles, chicken and pigs feet, pig heart, lamb tongue, whole cow tongue, literally every single part of the animal was packaged and for sale.  Fresh!  An enormous seafood counter , now I know where to go finally to get fish heads to make stock.  There were tanks with live lobster sharing space with catfish, moon fish and eels, perch and one called simply, 'big head fish', and it was. 
There were aisles of condiments from every corner of Asia, rows of oils and nam pla and rice wine.  An entire aisle of canned vegetable and fruits.  Things like lychee and jelled pineapple and durian fruit.  Spices for every type of Asian dish you could wish to prepare, jars of seasoning for rice with dried fish flakes and seaweed, sesame seeds, salt and dried egg all in a shaker jar. 
I finally found some things I had been looking for like fresh galangal, scallion pancakes, baby bok choy (they had two kinds and I couldn't find anyone to speak English to explain the difference between the green and white bok choy), and soft sesame candy.

This is such a great soup, slightly hot from red curry,bright from galangal, lemongrass and lime juice, soothing with coconut milk, crunchy with sliced spring onion on top.  It's everything in one bowl.

This soup is easy to make and can be made partially ahead and kept in the fridge for up to 2 days.  Adapted from a jean-georges vongerichten recipe in the Barbara Kafka book 'Soup a way of life'.

Sate chicken

Sate or Satay simply means BBQ on skewers.  Around here, we skip the skewers and call this dish Sate.  It works for us.  We serve it with Thai Peanut Sauce and some side dishes of choice.

Plan on marinating this for at least a day.

Thai Peanut Sauce

Around here, we simply call this Ambrosia, nectar of the gods or the thing that would make poo taste good.  Of course we haven't tested that last theory.
This is my favourite recipe for peanut sauce.  It is adapted from a recipe in Charmaine Salomon's THAI cookbook. 
Make it the day before or the morning of the day you will use it.  I think it tastes better when it has a chance to rest and be reheated.  The lime leaves are very important to this taste.  Many stores are now carrying them fresh in with the herbs.  If you can find lemongrass, you should be able to find these lime leaves.  I find that they freeze well and keep quite awhile that way.