Bringing Thai Street Food Home

A couple weeks ago Julius bought me this most gorgeous coffee table book - Thai Street Food by David Thompson.  As I was flipping through it, the beautiful pictures were enough to make me drool.  Thankfully there were recipes as well.  For the size of it, this book certainly belongs to a coffee table. I do imagine it will  soon be covered with splatters as I attempted the various recipes.

Ramen Soup with Crab Meat Dumplings and Barbecue Pork

The soup is a pork bone soup which has very simple ingredients: pork bones, daikon, coriander roots, spring onion ends, star anise, soya sauce, salt and pepper.  It took a few hours to reduce the stock from 3 litres to 2 litres.  I was tasting it along the way because of the aroma in the kitchen was just too tempting.

The crab dumplings were made from crab meat, minced pork, coriander and chopped chives buds (my addition).  I learned a lesson about dumpling wrappers: I was using leftover ones which I defrosted from the freezer and they turned out to be a mess.  Parts were dry and chipping while parts were soggy.  Never freeze leftover wrappers again.

Disclosure: we bought BBQ pork from T&T but one day I will try to make that myself.

The ramen was dried organic brown rice ramen that I found at Sobey's and I added some Shanghai Choy Sum.

It was simply srumptious!

Stir Fried Geoduck with Black Bean and Chilli Sauce

That morning I woke up thinking about razor clams, sadly they were not in season and I had to substitute with frozen geoduck.  Geoduck is also a clam, in fact one of the largest clam that are very popular in Asian cuisine, it is in fact best eaten raw when fresh.

Like I explained to our guests John and Nick, it is very typical for Asians to eat a bowl of noodle soup with a dish of stir fried seafood in any street food stalls for a simple meal.

As I was shopping for dinner, I also picked up some chives buds.  They are one of my favourite Asian vegetables for its texture and taste, and they have these cutest little buds at the end.  

The frozen geoduck turned out much better than I anticipated but it took a few extra minutes to cook on our cooktop.

This was a perfect compliment to the ramen soup and we cleared our bowls and plates!

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/201153/thai-street-food-by-david-thompson

http://www.lifestylefood.com.au/recipes/2941/stirfried-razor-clams-with-black-bean-and-chilli-sauce

Ramen Soup 9/10

Geoduck 8/10