Adventures in Cooking: Thai Edition (plus CHICKENS)

Good evening, dear readers! I would like to update you on the happenings in our kitchen over the past week. Last Saturday, my beautiful girlfriend Alberta came over and I cooked a Thai meal for four. I used Iain's The Food and Cooking of Thailand by Judy Bastyra and Becky Johnson, which Iain got, weirdly enough, in a white elephant gift swap. Weird because it's an awesome cookbook. How lucky we are! This cookbook has a lot of cultural notes in the beginning and talks extensively about the ingredients and preparation. The recipes themselves are pretty straightforward, presented with large, colorful pictures. Unfortunately, they are in weighted measurements, which is pretty obnoxious to this Yankee chef who has no scale in his kitchen. But we approximated well enough and it worked out splendidly.

The first course was a Hot and Sweet Vegetable and Tofu Soup:

The next one got a little more interesting. I made Noodles and Vegetables in Coconut Sauce, and just eyeballing the recipe, it seemed that it wouldn't make enough for us. So I came to the co-op intending to quadrouple it. Then, looking at the veggies, I thought that doubling it would be about enough. Little did I know........

Yikes!! As I was adding the coconut milk, someone asked me if it was really 4 cans that I was putting in, and mentioned that that would mean one can of coconut milk, per person, as well as about 2 zucchinis per person. But I was proud and it still tasted good. Heh. Just a fun learning experience!!

Here's Emily with the expression we all shared as we realized this together. We were all laughing so hard:

The next day, Iain and Emily cooked a mighty Southwestern brunch, which I'll let them fill you in on. My only postscript will be a photograph of my chicken stock sitting in my freezer. I made some more from the carcass of a small, sustainably & ethically raised chicken from a farm that had to close down because of the recession. I had roasted the chicken for a feast and saved the bones to make some yummy stock with leftover veggie choppings (skins, stems, roots etc.). All three of these containers are full of chicky broth:

Yeah!! From chickens!!!!!!!