thai cooking

I have to say, I'm enjoying the cooking aspect of domestic life more than I thought I would. I've been surprising myself with the types of dishes I am able to make that I previously only thought I could get at restaurants, for instance, beef pho or chicken tikka masala. The latest ethnic concoctions I have tried to prepare are Thai dishes. As you may remember, I started out by making red chicken curry, which I posted about a couple months ago. Since then, I have made two more Thai meals, pad thai and hot and sour soup, to round out goal #66 which was to cook three dishes in total.

Here's the pad thai. (I got a little crazy with the cilantro!)

Pad thai turned out to be my favorite to prepare of the three. It's a fantastic recipe! Here's where I started from: http://browniesfordinner.com/2010/05/11/easy-pad-thai/  Rice noodles, the main ingredient, were fun and easy, because I found out that they just cook in hot tap water. No need to boil! Nice! I made it vegetarian style the first time and Brian, the carnivore, didn't even really seem to mind.

Lastly, I gave thai hot and sour soup a try. It's funny, I used to not even really like soups up until about 3 years ago. So weird. Anyway, I've done a 180 and now I seem to crave soup all of the time! Here's the recipe I roughly used: http://thaifood.about.com/od/thaisnacks/r/hotandsoursoup.htm. This one was fun because I got to use bok choy for the first time. Look at it just draping itself so beautifully over the edge of the ladle. :]

If you come to visit, there's a good chance you might get served (at least!) one of these three.