Thoughts on Thai Food by bookseller

My first thought was to say, Eeeps, if you're just starting to cook, don't start with Thai food -- the techniques and the flavors are so different from Western cooking. But then I thought about it, and I'm not at all sure it's a bad place to start. Making "authentic" Thai food might be a real bear, but if you're making curries, most of the time it's just making a particular kind of stew. You make the base -- which is a handful of chopped up ginger and shallot and lemongrass, sauteed in peanut oil or coconut oil -- you add some curry paste from a jar (no need to screw around making your own), and when it all smells really good you add in coconut milk and stock of some kind (fish stock, shrimp stock -- which you make by boiling up shrimp shells -- chicken stock, etc., all of which you can buy), let it cook together for a little bit, and then throw in pretty much any protein and veg you want, and let them simmer in this very flavorful liquid until they're cooked. And that's really it. You can tweak the hell out of it -- add more curry paste next time if you want it spicier, use more or less coconut milk, add tomatoes, more shallots, etc. Thai curries are traditionally very soupy, but I like a somewhat thicker sauce and less soup, so I usually add about four times as much protein and veg as a recipe calls for (upping the number of servings correspondingly), and sometimes I thicken it at the end by stirring in a teaspoon or two of cornstarch that has been dissolved in a couple of tablespoons of water or stock. Bring everything to a boil, while stirring, and the cornstarch will thicken the liquid into a nice glaze. It is SO not hard. My favorite version probably uses a ton of fish and seafood -- chunks of monkfish, maybe, and shrimp and clams and mussels and scallops -- and a ton of veggies, like snow peas and string beans and chunks of sweet potato or butternut squash and tomatoes and greens of some kind like cabbage or spinach. It's never the same and it's always good. Thai Kitchen makes a perfectly good jarred curry paste in three or four different "colors" -- red is traditionally used for meat, but try them out and see what you like. They're available even in crappy supermarkets in New York, so I bet you can find them easily. Serve the whole thing over rice or rice noodles, Boy can eat it, happy dinner.

Remember that different kinds of veg take different amounts of time to cook. For example, if you're using butternut squash and snow peas, you'll want to cut the squash relatively small, and add it to the stew well before the snow peas, because the squash will take much longer to cook, and if you add them both at the same time, the snow peas will be limp and overcooked by the time the squash is done. Lemongrass and ginger are both very fibrous, so you'll want to peel them and then mince them really fine. If you have something like a mini-chopper, it can come in very handy here. If you use mollusks like clams or mussels, remember that you'll need to wash them ahead of time (if they're farmed, a quick rinse will be fine), throw away any clams whose shells won't close even if you tap them. And once they're cooked, throw away any where the shells AREN'T open. Seafood in general takes a very brief time to cook; aim for undercooking rather than overcooking.