ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

A couple months ago my boyfriend and I started eating regularly at this nearby restaurant called the Thai Orchid, and although we have never in the past eaten that much Asian food on a regular basis, we both have caught the Thai food bug something fierce. It is so way better than Chinese food, which I like all right, but which I’m not nuts over. The restaurant is terrific, although eating there as frequently as we’d like would start to get pretty expensive. So I have begun this quest to make some of the dishes at home. I know that I won’t be able to come close to their excellence, but it won’t cost nearly as much and I decided that if I could manufacture an acceptable substitute, then it would be worth it. I don’t see us abandoning Thai Orchid, by any means. They are better Thai cooks than us by far, and on those days when we want different dishes (his favorite is the chicken in peanut sauce, which is a little fatty for me to eat very often), then obviously the restaurant is a better idea than trying to make two separate dishes at home.

So on to our efforts. I purchased the Thai Cooking from the Siam Cuisine Restaurant cookbook from the Johnson County library discard store for $2, which I decided was a completely terrific deal because elsewhere it is a lot more expensive. I also picked up the California Pizza Kitchen cookbook that day for $5, which is also a good deal, but more on that another day. So I began reading this cookbook and two things were immediately clear to me, which were that it is 1) totally authentic and 2) also quite intimidating.

The book called for a lot of authentic Thai ingredients that confused and frightened me, such as galanga, which I’m still not entirely sure what that is, and lemon grass, which I know of but am not sure where to find other than getting some seeds and growing it myself. It has recipes for spice pastes, which you make chiefly by grinding chili peppers and other things together, and then you use them as a base for various dishes by mixing some of the paste with coconut milk and whatever meats and vegetables you want in your curry.

Originally I thought, I want to go completely authentic, not get store bought spice paste that is probably full of added salt, and have the pride of doing all this myself. But since there are lots more kinds of curry than I ever really understood (red curry I, II, III and IV, yellow curry, green curry, basic curry, massaman curry, et al), I felt pretty intimidated by the whole thing. Each recipe makes about a cup and a half of the paste, and you use probably 2-6 tablespoons of the stuff for each dish, basically to the taste of how spicy you want it. So each batch lasts a while. I have no problem with making my own curry paste to keep in the fridge, but we haven’t had enough experience with Thai food to really have much idea of what the various ones are like in comparison, and it would suck to put the effort into making a spice paste only to find that we didn’t like it. Either way, I was going to have to suck up my courage and go into an Asian specialty store to find any of this stuff.

So we looked around for an Asian market at City Market yesterday afternoon, just missing the obvious Vietnamese market, which would have probably been more appropriate for Thai foods, and finding instead the Chinatown Food Market at 202 Grand. It stank overpoweringly of fish and when I first walked in all I could see was shelves and shelves of these totally insane looking packages of Asian sweets. I ducked into the first aisle to get my bearings, and began scanning the shelves looking for anything that remotely resembled Thai ingredients. I saw a lot of stuff like pickled fish and canned fermented vegetables at first, but we finally managed to find a section that sold a variety of pastes, which we decided to go with.

We found bottled pastes and canned pastes and wound up buying a small range of them with which to experiment. My rationale for this was, once we get a better feel for what we enjoy the most, based on these products, we can make our own spice mixtures at home without worrying as much that we will end up with six meals worth of something we don’t like. Oh, and one awesome thing about the Asian market? They were CHEAP. This crap would have cost easily twice as much as the regular supermarket.

So we took our assortment of pastes home with us and this is what we made:

Massaman Curry From A Can

• 1 4-oz can Maesri brand Thai curry paste (had to buy it at the Asian market)
• 1 lb boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into bite sized pieces
• 1 medium yellow onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 green pepper, coarsely chopped
• 3 potatoes, peeled and cut into sixths or eighths
• 1 14-oz can light coconut milk

Since all my seasoning was provided courtesy of a $0.79 can of spice paste purchased at the Asian market, my ingredients list was very simple. We chose the masaman/massaman/musuman (whatever, I have seen that thing spelled like 5 different ways) curry because it is my favorite at Thai Orchid. For vegetables, we decided we couldn’t go wrong with potatoes, bell pepper and onion.

It was so easy. I poured a half tablespoon of canola oil into my largest nonstick skillet, heated it over medium-high heat, and then according to the instructions on the can, added the entire can of paste and stir fried it in the oil. The directions actually called for two cans of coconut milk, but I didn’t realize this and I only bought one can at the grocery store. But it worked out OK anyhow. According to the directions, the first can should have been stir-fried with the paste. Oh, well.

While my boyfriend was stir-frying the paste in the skillet, which basically just meant he mashed it around a lot with the rubber spatula, since how else do you “fry” a paste? Anyway, while he was doing that, I coarsely chopped the onion and pepper and chicken and peeled and chopped the potatoes into sixths.

Then after five minutes, we whisked the can of coconut milk into the paste, added the chicken, and brought the whole thing to a boil. Then we added all the vegetables at once, gave it a good stir, covered the dish, and simmered it on low for about 25 minutes until the potatoes were tender.

The final result was pretty good, although nothing close to as good as the real deal at Thai Orchid. I think it would be worth learning to cook this one from scratch with real homemade spice paste. But we’re still going to try the others!