Wow! Pig Candy! Who’d have thought?
Honest truth, though? I sounds good!
Fabulous authentic thai food
The biggest problem with cooking thai food is the ingredients. There are a few that are really required in order to get that authentic taste. If you really want that great thai flavor, you have to at least find fresh thai basil and it’s best if you can also get lemon grass, kaffir lime leaf, and kaffir limes.
But easy to find is good thai curry pastes and prepared chili sauces. You can make your own (I’ll post a recipe soon), but the prepared pastes are good for starters and make the process much easier. I like the Thai Kitchen brand, which is available at most fancier grocery stores around here. The Thai Kitchen Company has a Store Locator on their website, or you can also order online.
I use their coconut milk, noodles, sauces and pastes. If your new to cooking your own thai food, this is a great place to start, since the quality is high and following their recipes you’re basically guaranteed a good basic dish.
What to Eat
I’ve just started reading “What to Eat”, by Marion Nestle. I’ve seen this book for a while and just sort of skipped by it, expecting that it’s interesting, but mostly a lot of stuff that I already know…
Then I heard Marion Nestle on an NPR show. She was being interviewed with Michael Pollan (of Omnivore’s Dilemma) and they were just brilliant together.
Marion is a nutritionist, and admits that even with her background the research for “What to Eat” was daunting. In this book, Marion takes us on a tour of the american grocery store. As she puts it, “There are precise reasons why the milk is in the back of the store and the center aisles are so long. You are forced to go past thousands of products to get to what you need.”
more later, when I’ve read further…
My kind of Fast Food – Spaghetti Sauce!
Lately my lovely wife and I have both been keeping odd hours. It’s tough to eat right when you aren’t even getting home until 8pm or 9pm. Add to that my wife’s “witching hour” problem – she just isn’t hungry once she’s tired.
So yesterday I started a big pot of spaghetti sauce. This is my Mom’s recipe, with a little (Mom approved) cheating. It’s home-made marinara (or meat) sauce, without all the fuss.
Continue reading “My kind of Fast Food – Spaghetti Sauce!”
Ingredients make the difference, right?
Most of my food is fresh and flavorful. We live in a part of California that is famous for farmer’s markets and for produce stands on the side of the road. We get fresh fish from the shop on the coast. This year, we might join a Community Supported Agriculture program that will get us a big basket of fresh product every week.
But I’m also very busy, and I just don’t always have time to make my own chicken stock or stew my own fresh tomatoes. So I try things, I experiment and I find products that I really like. I’ll be writIng a lot about this subject – both the “finds” that I make and the frustrations of finding just the right thai curry paste or chocolate sauce.
Omnivores, with a few exceptions…
Around our house, just about everything edible is eaten. We love meat and cheese, fresh bread, fresh vegetables, and salads. We love desert, including vanilla Ice cream with chocolate sauce. We don’t diet, but just try to eat sensibly – and for us that means there are a few things we try to avoid.
Continue reading “Omnivores, with a few exceptions…”
Good food, good living, and the people you love [Part 1]
I love feeding people good food. I’ve made a bit of a name for myself doing this – just among friends and family. It’s very satisfying when people say “if I hadn’t been here watching you the whole time, I would have sworn you ordered got this [indian food] delivered!”
But I’m a bit lazy and bit impatient, so I take shortcuts. Mostly, this means keeping recipe’s simple, and using fresh whole ingredients. I’ll also use a prepared curry base or spice blend.
I also read labels. Some of my friends look at me a bit funny, until they try the Tom’s Cookies I just pulled out of the oven. You read the label on a carton of Tom’s Cookies and what’s in it? Exactly what you would have put in it if you made the cookies yourself from scratch. Same thing with Whole Foods Dark Chocolate Sauce. It’s so thick that you have to warm it to spoon it over your ice cream, and it contains nothing but chocolate sauce.
Yummm!