This is a dish I've heard a lot about. This is like the national dish of Thailand and my sister-in-law and one of my best friends from college who has lived in Thailand for about 5 years they talk about it to me like it's an American hamburger. One thing they always tell me is that it's spicy. It sounds innocent but it's about the spiciest thing that Thai's make. Needless to say I couldn't wait to try it sometime but I was scared to death because spicy food doesn't do my stomach good.
Throughout this two year journey of waiting for this Thai menu from Next I didn't think it was on the menu. All my research didn't mention a thing about it. So when I saw it on the ebook I was pretty excited. My initial thoughts even looking at the actual recipe I thought that it had been westernized with less spice. Then I looked closer this week as I prepped to cook it and realized how little dried chiles weigh.
Ok, enough prose, time for the pictorial evidence.
So this was the base for the sauce. The infamous dried thai chiles, thankfully for me 1 gram didn't end up being as many of those little buggers as I thought, garlic, lime, peanuts, salt and palm sugar. The one thing that wasn't in the photo was fish sauce.
I busted out my brand new mortar and pestle and crused the chiles and garlic until it formed paste.
From there I crushed the peanuts to make the mixture that you see above.
Then the fish sauce and lime juice went in until the whole mixture made a sauce.
For the salad portion of the evening we have peanuts, green mango, green papaya, a little bit of tomato, crab, lime and cilantro.
So to start the salad I cut little slits in both the mango and papaya then peeled it off. Dear reader this is the lengths I go to for you. In the process of cutting these little slivers my knife decided to attack my left thumb and I ended up with a nice little slice. Thankfully, it wasn't debilitating and it wasn't even close to the worst cut I've suffered in the kitchen, but know this I'm willing to sacrifice my appendages for you.
So I pounded out the mango and papaya briefly and then prepared the rest of the ingredients to form the salad.
I combined everything together to form the final salad. This isn't even close to a presentation I wanted for this dish. The recipe would like you to serve this in the body of a blue crab, which I didn't use because I can't get it here.
Overall, this was a good dish. I think I over-sauced it, and honestly I think the recipe is still a bit westernized because it was spicy but not crazy spicy.
No comments:
Post a Comment