A Bunch of Burts

Well, our week was a bit caddy-whampus, and the Cashew Chicken was made on the scheduled day, but it did get made. Points for that right?

I even remembered to take pictures as I was making it!

You know your own family size, so you can adjust portions accordingly.

I used 1 kg of chicken cut into small pieces and about 4 cups of chopped vegetables. You can use whatever veggies you like, we tend to have onions, peppers (sweet), carrots and broccoli.

First, gather your sauces and such.

You will need: dried red chilies, Thai chili paste, oyster sauce, some soup flavoring ( envelope) and good soy sauce. The brand pictured is called Golden Mountain sauce. I believe all these things can be found at most any Asian market and many grocery stores now.

Before cooking, chop chicken, vegetables and mince garlic, about 3-4 cloves.
Heat a couple of TBL oil in a wok or large skillet over fairly high heat.
One of the keys to Thai cooking, is using high heat for a short time to cook the food quickly.

Stir fry the garlic until it just begins to turn brown, then add the chopped chicken.
To the chicken and garlice add chili paste.

There is room here for some fiddling. I found that for our family, we like the taste of this dish more as I added more chili paste. I use nearly 1/2 the jar at a time. This chili paste is really not all that spicy, just flavorful, although you may want to begin by adding less for the first time and increase it as your family tolerates.

Stir and cook the chicken in the chili paste until cooked through.
Add a small handful of the dried red chilies. This is what will add the most heat, so if you like it hotter, add more.

Add your oyster sauce. I have not measured this, but you can see the size puddle on the utensil.
Try somewhere around 2 TBL
Stir in a bit a bit of water, approx 1/4 to 1/2 cup and sprinkle some soup base/seasoning in. Stir to mix. If you cannot get powdered soup base, just crush up a boullion cube and add it. You should have cooked chicken in a reddish gravy at this point.

Keeping the heat high, stir fry the veggies for just a minute or two. You do not want them to be overly soft and mushy. They should still be slightly crisp.
(at this point you can also add your cashews and cook them in at this point, but some kids in our family do not like them and so we add them on top. No sense wasting perfectly good cashews on fussy children.)

Serve with rice, of course and enjoy. Aroy!

Here is a close up of the brand chili paste I use, the best one we have found. I know it is available in the US, but cannot say for elsewhere.

Happy cooking!

P. S. If you like to stir fry often, I love the spatula-type tool that I used in these pictures. I highly suggest looking at a cooking store or asian market for one. It is wonderful, and I have fewer spills using it than I did when I just used a large spoon or metal spatula. In Thai it is called a daa-lii-oo, if that helps.

One of my friends has been encouraging me to participate in Menu Plan Monday, a weekly peek into the kitchens of ladies from all over. Laura, at I’m an Organizing Junkie sponsors this menu share every week.

I don’t know about you, but somedays, I just cannot think of yet another meal to make and serve.

Good thing I love to read cookbooks.

When we still lived in Brinnon, we all loved the weekly trip to the Bookmobile for our fix of books and videos. The Bookmobile librarians were so faithful to keep the cookbook section stocked with fresh selections each week. I happily perused them each week, highlighting new recipes and adding them to my ever growing file of ” To Try”.

Not only did my file folder with all those wonderful recipes disappear into postal oblivion, but there is no Bookmobile, let alone library for me here in Chaing Mai.

Enter Laura’s Menu Plan Monday.

I enjoy checking out what others are cooking up and have gleaned some great new recipes too.

Maybe I can give someone else a new idea, or remind them of a loved but lost or forgotten idea for dinner. Share and share alike, right?

Monday: Potato Soup
Tuesday: Gaeng Kiaw Waan (Green curry with chicken), Rice, Fruit (recipe below)
Wednesday: Dinner at the Grace cafe
(Zach and Leah have basketball games, and it is only 25 -or so- baht a plate. 1$=34B)
Thursday: Gai Pat Met Mamuang (Cashew Chicken), Rice and cucumbers
Friday: Enchiladas and Spanish Rice
Saturday: leftovers
Sunday: Apples, popcorn, cheese and muffins

I will try to remember to take pictures on Thursday when I make the Cashew Chicken. Pictures make it so much easier to explain.

Gaeng Kiaw Waan
Green curry packet
coconut milk (two cans or boxes)
Chicken, sliced and diced (enough for your family)
round green eggplants, or potatoes, or carrots (chunked)
bamboo shoot slices (optional)
sweet basil leaves- 1 cup
kaffir lime leaves (whole or minced)
fish sauce- 2Tbl
sugar- 2tsp

In a hot wok or sauce pan, combine 1/2 can of coconut milk and packet of green curry. Stir to mix, and cook 2-3 minutes on high heat. Add chicken and stir until white. (Does not have to be cooked through at this point)
Add remaining coconut milk (1 1/2 cans).
When it is boiling, add the vegetables.
Cook until vegetable is softened.
Add fish sauce (Don’t be afraid here. I know fish sauce smells awful, but it helps to create the overall flavor)
Add sugar. (This is sort of to taste. Start with just 1 tsp and see how you like it)
Add lime leaf and 1/2 of basil.
Stir to combine.
Turn off heat and add the remaining basil leaves, but do not stir.
Serve with rice and garnished with sliced red chilis.

My first try at making this curry was at a cooking school. Not hard at all, especially if you use prepared curry paste. Give it a try!

If you want more ideas, see what others are cooking at Laura’s site.

Today is Chinese New Year! Happy New Year!

Today begins the Year of the Rat.

Although we are in Thailand, this holiday is well celebrated here. Many people have some Chinese ancestry, and there is a large population of Chinese living here, especially in Chiang Mai.

Anyway, it is a celebration, and the Thai love to celebrate, no matter the occasion.

Tonight we are having dinner with the family of our Thai teacher, who also happens to be the wife of the pastor at our church. We have been getting to know this family, and are looking forward to sharing a meal at their house.

From what we have seen in the stores and the markets, chicken is the dish of choice for Chinese New Year. So many different kinds of chicken and some duck too, are lined up, or hung up, as it were, to be sold to fuel the celebrations that will be going on this weekend.

Of course there are other delicacies to be had as well, from some enterprising vendors along the streets here.
Anyone for roasted rat?

You never know until you try it!

We enjoy talking about food with people we meet. It is a subject that everyone is interested in and one we can converse on at a fairly adept level.

Chiang Mai is getting more and more ‘international’ restaurants all the time. When we want to go out for a special treat, there is one little Mexican restaurant, that does a pretty fair job of enchiladas, taco salads, burritos and the like. Unfortunately, the chips and salsa that are usually served free at Mexican restaurants are conspicuously absent. Oh well, helps us save room for the meal, right?

I have asked many of our Thai friends and neighbors if they like Western food.
Most will answer this way:

I like pizza.

I like spaghetti.

I like brownies.

Does that really sum up American food? Pizza, spaghetti and brownies?
KFC, McDonalds, Burger King, and Pizza Hut are doing well here. (Although be warned, just because the name is the same, that does NOT mean the offerings are!)

Not the most daring pizza we have seen offered, but different enough. Note that there is no tomato based sauce, but a Thousand Island type sauce instead.

So here is a question.
What is American food? Are we too big a country to nail that down? Too many regional differences?

What do you think of as quintessential American food?

As I have been making treats for my Thai neighbors and friends, they have often found our goodies to be too intensely sweet for them. That is not to say that they do not like to eat the treats I offer, or enjoy sweets, but that our western, sugared, buttered, baked and then frosted confections are a bit over the top for them.

I have found that in many, many desserts, I can cut the sugar up to half, and it still tastes great. Sometimes even better.

In 2006, the per capita sugar consumption was 44.5 lbs. Pounds! Each person!

I have this memory of a book I read as a kid about a baker/candy maker who was trying to make more profit on his treats, and so began to cut back the sugar he used bit by bit until he was hardly using any. He did it so gradually that no one noticed until…. Sam Sugar Slurper, (or whatever the character’s name was) came to town. He ate one of the low/no sugar treats and fell into a reverse sugar coma. I think the story was about trying to cheat and not getting away it, but what stuck with me was that NO ONE else noticed the sugar content slipping away. ( by the way, anyone else remember this story?)

This weekend I made no-bake cookies, which generally call for a large amount of sugar. I used half and my family still gobbled them up without noticing the difference.

So there is my ‘works for me’ today, less sugar. Easy.

As long as we are on the topic of less sugar and still eating fun treats, anyone know how to make crunchy granola bars at home, without corn syrup? . ( I know it is not ask-for-a-tip week, but I couldn’t resist. )

There are many more suggestions and answers to your dilemmas at Rocks in my Dryer

Ahh, a familiar scene in our house: everyone hungry, and Mom with no dinner plan, even though she wrote up a menu for the week already! Probably did not get to the store, or the store did not have the necessary ingredients for said menu.

Hubby is not on his way home, he is already there! That is what happens when his job is studying language at home. Hmmm.

What usually works for us here in Chaing Mai, is take out! hehehe.

you do have to be specific when you order though, or you get a tidbit like this on top of your food!

Really it is cheaper than making my own dinner many times. But, the kiddos, especially #2 and #3 are not so exicted about Thai at dinner after eating it at school for lunch.

Personally, I could eat it all the time. We used to have a great restaurant at the end of our street that made great food, but the cook disappeared one day and was replaced by a very inferior imposter! No more riding the bike down the block to pick up lunch or dinner. But I digress.

Our fast and easy, and actually fairly cheap meal of choice is chicken baked in BBQ sauce (the most expensive part) or other tasty marinade and Mustard Potatoes.

Mustard Potates
Cut enough potatoes for your family into small pieces.
Microwave in covered bowl with a bit of water until soft.
Set potatoes aside
In saucepan, melt a couple of TBL butter and saute some chopped onion and garlic.
Once the onion is clear, add a cup or so of milk and a couple of squirts of yellow mustard.
Sprinkle a bit of cumin -or- yellow curry powder and blend well.
Salt and pepper to taste. Be careful with the salt here, the mustard already gives it a bit of saltiness.
Toss with the potatoes and bake in a greased covered casserole dish 20 minutes or so, at the same temp as the chicken is using.
(of course if you have a large family, you will need to increase the amount of milk and mustard. You just need to make sure you have enough sauce to coat the potatoes well. )

Add to the chicken and potatoes a variety of fresh veggies, like carrots, broccoli and tomatoes and dinner is served!

For more fast and easy dinner ideas, go to www.rocksinmydryer.typepad.com for this week’s edition of Works for Me Wednesday