Cook Book Review: Thai & SE Asia Cooking

[Red Bigot]

I found this in Dymocks today @ $24.95, it looks like a useful introduction to Thai/SE Asian food if you don't already have one or more other good cook books.

The full details are:
Thai & South-East Asian Cooking & Far Eastern Classics
Deh-Ta Hsiung, Becky Johnson and Sallie Morris
Hermes House 2004 (apprently a combination of two previous volumes by these authors)

It's soft cover, about a large novel format, with 512 pages, fully illustrated. The first 126 pages have useful detailed descriptions and pictures of Ingredients of all sorts and some basic equipment/techniques. It lists some sources of ingredients at the back, including some from most Aus states, not sure how current the list is though.

The recipes are mostly fairly simple (and simplified in some cases), but would be good for a beginner/intermediate cook interested in these lovely styles of food. It provides recipes originating from Thailand, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, Vietnam, Japan and the Phillipines.

If you don't already have Charmaine Solomon Asian Cookbook and your cook book shelf isn't full yet, have a look, it might suit you.

[Gavin Trott]

Brian

Thanks, my wife and I are booked into our first intro to Thai cooking class. Doesn't start till August, but I'm looking forward to it.

Might start with this book though!

[Red Bigot]

Since I've been on crutches my partner, Andrea has had to take over the week-day cooking again and we have been picking recipes from this cook book with a high degree of success and satisfaction.

So far we have tried:

Spicy Shredded Beef (p262), a Chinese-Hong Kong dish that is quick and easy to prepare and cook, with Chinese soy/rice wine/ginger/sugar flavours with slivered onion and carrot and a mild chilli component.

Green Beef Curry with Thai Aubergines (p268) a simple version of a common thai dish, using prepared green curry paste or the make-your-own recipe included.

Stir-fried Prawns with Tamarind (p312) a thai-style dish with similarities to the Malaysian Assam Prawns we enjoyed in KL recently.

Lemon Grass Pork (p249) - a subtle thai-style dish, we cheated and used the bottled lemon grass, it does the job quite well.

Stir-fried Beef in Oyster Sauce (p269) - labelled as a thai dish, but with many chinese overtones, mixed mushrooms, no fish sauce, corn starch to add texture, relatively mild chilli.

We've picked some more recipes for the coming week, the lavish illustrations of every recipe are very useful and can be used to guage the level of success in your own efforts.

In summary, a compact and lavishly illustrated book, with a substantial and useful introductory section on ingredients, techniques etc and a good selection of recipes that seem to lead to good results without being too complicated. Well worth buying if you are interested in SE Asian food.