Green is the hottest
curry
After a week in a Phuket resort and a few nights to round it off in
Bangkok, there’s plenty to be appreciated about Thailand’s foodie culture.
Here’s five things that caught This Girl’s fancy.
1.
Green is the hottest curry
Kaeng Kiew Wan Kai (green curry with chicken) is my absolute fav, I ate
it wherever I could, made it at a day cooking school, and talked about it a
lot.
Chicken stock should supplement the coconut cream. The sweet, creamy,
salty and spicy tastes of the green curry must be in balance. Enter, chicken
stock. Keep your stock keep simple: all you need use is a chicken carcass and
coriander root.
We often use peas to imitate the pea eggplant not generally available this
far south. Don’t do it. Use only crispy veggies like snow peas and carrots.
If it doesn’t have basil, it’s not a green curry. And all these years
I’ve been using coriander. #fail
It’s not the curry you recommend to a newbie. Trying to be adventurous, one
of our young travelling companions couldn’t eat her dinner and had to do a meal swap. I’d forgotten to
tell her, green is the hottest curry.
2.
You always want what you can't have
I’ve never really made friends with the fruit of my youth: apples,
oranges and most disgusting of all, bananas. But in Thailand tropical fruit was
my daily breakfast delight: dragon fruit, rose apples, pineapple, watermelon,
cantaloupe, rambutan and the sweetest of all, mangosteen.
I want to eat tropical fruit every day. You always want what you can’t have and my cooking teacher James
lamented the sour strawberries that grow in his country’s north. I left him
with my homemade strawberry jam.
3.
The flavours of Thailand are awesome
Rooftop bars proliferate Bangkok’s skyline and so we found ourselves at
a couple in the hip Sukhumvit where the cocktails and bar snacks are abundant. At
Above Eleven, a three-level roof bar you enter off the 32nd floor of
the Fraser Suites you’ll find a Peruvian-Japanese inspired menu that blends
flavours like chimichurri sauce and sushi, and Pisco-based cocktails.
The best cocktail of the trip was at The Nest with the vodka based Siam Sunset with its
flavours of Thailand: lemongrass, chilli, ginger and coconut juice.
The most delicious donut ever was fried in the Phuket markets and served with a papaya and coconut cream dipping sauce.
4.
Stop for street food
We ate food from street vendors steaming hot and cooked in front of us. Heaped
plates of Pad Thai at Khao San Road market, huge spring rolls wrapped in basil
leaves at the floating markets and freshly juiced pomegranates.
5. Remember your manners at the breakfast buffet
Food buffets bring out bad behaviour. This isn’t Thai specific, but I
found myself reflecting on the phenomena at the Centara Karon breakfast buffet. It’s
the equivalent of mass clearance sales where shoppers force their way through
Department store doors to grab the bargain. Calm the farm. If you find yourself
in a buffet, there’s food enough for all! And don’t forget to say excuse me, or
just wait your turn J
Drool over the food and drinks menu at Above Eleven here.
