C. sapidus

menuinprogress: looks like some gorgeous things came from your grill. Braised lamb with potatoes and tomato sauce, dried chiles, browned onion, turmeric, cumin, cinnamon, cloves, and a little brown sugar. Parsi meat and potatoes, essentially. Cabbage koshumbir with grated coconut, chiles, red bell pepper, lime juice, sugar, and a tadka of sizzled curry leaves and mustard seeds Fragrant rice with bay leaf, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, and ghee Parsi green chutney with mint, cilantro, grated coconut, chiles, cumin, lime juice, and sugar.

The recipe is from Camellia Panjabi's excellent 50 Great Curries of India. A nearly identical recipe is here: fish in coconut milk (clicky). Enjoy!

Kim, you are always so kind -- thank you. If you don't happen to be in our neck of the woods and want a quick introduction to Indian flavors, check out Madhur Jaffrey's Quick and Easy Indian Cooking. If you enjoy that book and want more, I might have a few recommendations. Best wishes for your dad. I hope you get a chance to indulge in a little cooking therapy, it might be just what the doctor ordered. Edited to add tonight's dinner: Thai grilled beef salad.

Neua nam toke (spicy grilled beef salad) from Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet. Local ribeye steaks seared on the grill, sliced bloody, and then briefly simmered with beef stock, lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, and roasted rice powder. When the steak had barely changed texture I tossed it with mint, shallots, scallions, and bird chiles. Served with jasmine rice, cucumbers, lettuce, and (for me, anyway) a squirt of Sriracha. For a special (but non-Thai) dessert, Mrs. C picked sweet, delicate strawberries from the back yard.

Carne asada: charcoal-grilled flank steak with an compelling sauce (and marinade) made from toasted/soaked guajillo, New Mexico, and pasilla de Oaxaca chiles, roasted garlic, black pepper, cumin, and Mexican oregano. Frijoles refritos: Canned pinto beans, white onion, garlic, and olive oil (no lard or bacon grease readily at hand). Garlicky greens with seared onion and queso fresco, substituting a mix of chard, mustard, and other Asian greens from the farmer’s market instead of lamb’s quarters. Arroz blanco with corn and roasted, chopped Poblano chiles, leftover from last night.

Mmm, everyone has shared so many lovely dinners. Madras style beef curry, cucumber raita, red chutney, and fragrant rice (from Camellia Panjabi’s 50 Great Curries of India); stir-fried green cabbage with fennel seeds (bhuni bandh gobi, from Madhur Jaffrey); and a green salad. Dinner guests left quite full and reasonably happy. This was my breakfast plate, but it seemed more appropriate on the dinner thread.

kitchensqueen, glad to hear that your tod mun pla was a success. Gautam, as always, is a font of fascinating and practical information. Perhaps this is a moot point by now, but David Thompson’s recipe from Thai Food (click for a reasonable approximation of the recipe) sounds similar to what you described, except he calls for fish sauce instead of salt. Last night (clicky) was my first time making tod mun pla. Our Asian market was out of long beans, so we had to substitute green beans. I have rarely ordered this in restaurants, so any suggestions for improvement would be welcomed.

Interesting. Which do you prefer -- richer or thinner?

Jasmine rice and dinner from Thai Food: Coconut chicken soup (tom kha gai) with galangal, lemongrass, shallots, cilantro stems, bird chiles, lime leaves, palm sugar, and fish sauce. Two parts chicken stock to one part coconut milk made the soup taste relatively (deceptively?) light. I added oyster mushrooms and sliced chicken thighs, cooked until done, and served the soup with a squeeze of lime and a dollop of roasted chile paste. This is one of my favorite versions of one of my favorite soups. Fish cakes (tort man pla): I used the food processor to puree raw fish with egg, red curry paste, fish sauce, and a touch of sugar. I then repeatedly hurled the fishy puree into a bowl until the texture changed, mixed in slivered lime leaves and sliced green beans, and then deep-fried the fish cakes. Hotter oil might have crisped the outside a bit more, but the texture turned out light and spongy (not heavy like most restaurant versions). The boys unfortunately disapproved, but younger son made his palatable with tartar sauce.

Grilled chicken thighs (ga nuong) marinated with lime juice, fish sauce, black pepper, garlic, sugar, and oil. Asparagus and shiitake mushroom stir-fry (mang tay xao nam huong), jasmine rice, and nuoc cham dipping sauce. I grilled the chicken until nearly done over medium heat, and then finished over high heat to crisp the skin.

In line two, replace "and another saucepan" with "or another saucepan" (and I apologize for not reading more closely before linking).

Thank you, I hope you enjoy the book. I read through it on the train to NYC, marking every recipe that looked interesting. I still have quite a few to try.

Well-stated as usual, Sam. Some cooks follow your progression, learning simplicity and restraint; others progress by learning to balance strong flavors into a harmonious whole. Entering my third decade of “everything is better with a million cloves of garlic”, I would be greatly surprised if my tastes evolved towards simplicity or, perish the thought, restraint and subtlety. My preferences are hardly unique, of course. Many non-European cuisines stubbornly refuse to evolve from the “million cloves of garlic” stage, and those are the cuisines that interest me most. Would a Thai curry paste be improved by removing a few cloves of garlic from the mortar? In Thai Food, David Thompson recounts the Siamese ambassador’s visit to the court of Louis XIV in Versailles. The Siamese ambassador described French food thusly: One order of piquant wholesomeness for me, please. And to keep within shouting distance of the original topic, Marcella Hazan’s tomato and anchovy sauce (click) can be made with pantry staples (you just need to make sure that anchovy fillets, garlic, and parsley are pantry staples).

As a follow-up, I finished off the single serving’s worth of leftover tomato-butter-onion sauce for lunch. To jazz it up, I sauteed cayenne and not one but two largish cloves of minced garlic in butter (like there isn’t nearly enough butter in the sauce already, right?), added the sauce and simmered until the spaghetti was done. My tongue continues to tingle from the cayenne, and I will probably share garlic fumes with the volleyball league this afternoon. With due apologies to Marcella, Sam, and centuries of Italian culinary tradition, I greatly preferred the jazzed-up version. Perhaps taste buds far more attuned to a controlled riot of flavors miss out of the virtues of simplicity.

I also want more from a tomato sauce – chiles, garlic, herbs, anchovies, something. Different strokes, I suppose, and I did simmer the sauce for 45 minutes or so. Elder son’s reaction last night: “The tomato sauce was good, but I like that other one better.” Now I just have to figure out which "that other one" was.

Ann_T: That is the most beautiful picture of a steak I have ever seen. That is the ur-steak. Our dinner, courtesy of Marcella: pan-roasted chicken with rosemary, garlic, and white wine; spaghetti with onion-and-butter tomato sauce (yeah, us and everyone else); and Mrs. C’s roasted asparagus. The asparagus, from the first farmer’s market of the season, was completely delicious just eaten raw. I forked two wheelbarrow loads of compost into the vegetable garden and planted tomatoes, chiles, and three kinds of basil (also from the farmer’s market). If those plants don’t grow, it will be their own dang fault (or maybe mine, if I forget to water). Da boyz shoveled the crumbly black compost out of the bin, accompanied by considerable bickering, drama, and contrition.

Thanks! Both recipes are from Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, which I recommend highly. Chicken stir-fried with lemongrass and chile Napa cabbage and shrimp soup Enjoy!

Fish molee (fish in coconut milk), beans porial (stir-fried green beans with grated coconut), bhindi pyaz (okra with chopped onions), and basmati rice. Another highly enjoyable dinner from 50 Great Curries of India. The okra was a small Mother’s Day present to Mrs. C, who has transformed from an okraphobe to an okraphile. After dinner we sat out on the porch swing, sipping wine and wrapped in a blanket for protection against the cool spring evening. Edit: splenlig

Mmm, beautiful steak and eggs. Another culture-clash fried rice, made from doggie-bagged chicken tikka and the declining contents of the vegetable drawer (carrots, green beans, habanero chiles), flavored with garlic, shrimp paste, roasted chile paste, fish sauce, sesame oil, and a finishing squeeze of lime.

Gorgeous breakfasts all, but Ann_T’s biscuit sandwich is calling to me with particular insistence. White-collar bricklayer’s eggs: Pasilla and guajillo chiles, toasted and blended with garlic and shallot, and then fried down to essence of chile. Lower the heat, mix in eggs, top with Mexican oregano and crumbled feta cheese, and serve over a toasted whole-wheat English muffin.

I would probably have to burn my fingers again before doing something sensible like that.

The homeboys came to town for a few rounds of disc golf. To feed them, I smeared two pork butts with mustard sauce before sprinkling on the rub, and then smoked the butts overnight with hickory smokewood. In the morning I basted the pork and added a fresh load of hot coals. While we were flinging plastic, Mrs. C basted the butts, finished them in a low oven, and then wrapped them in foil and held them in a cooler until we returned. Elder son proclaimed the pork “the best ever.” Props to Mayhaw Man for his Western NC BBQ sauce replica (clicky). Excellent stuff, and more than half disappeared. It rained steadily through the day, so we arrived home cold and soggy. Mrs. C greeted us with hot coffee, mulled cider (spiked with white wine), and a roaring fire, all much appreciated . The menu (simple but effective): Pulled pig sandwiches Vinegar and mustard slaw (with a little mayo - sorry, that's how I like it ) Western NC BBQ sauce replica Mrs. C's devilled eggs (edited to add this - how could I forget?) Assorted chips and store-bought hummus Assorted beer and wine S’mores for dessert, with younger son manning the fire pit

Susan, any luck identifying the herbs? And more to the point, what did you do with them? Chicken stir-fried with lemongrass and chile: I haven’t made this since the foodblog, but I love the technique of stir-frying with aromatics, spices, chiles, and a small amount of coconut milk until the liquid reduces to a glaze. Served with jasmine rice. Napa cabbage and fish soup. Both dishes from (or adapted from) Into the Vietnamese Kitchen.

Not Sam, but here is a link to a recent peer-reviewed article: Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2008, 42 (10) pp 3508-3513. Scroll down and click to view the full-text HTML version of the article.

We put our dinner guest to work slicing pineapple, threading skewers, and manning the grill. The result was a mostly-Thai meal. Mom Leaung’s beef satay (Thai Food): Probably my favorite satay. Strip steak sliced fairly thick, marinated for a few hours, and then skewered, grilled, and served with an incendiary dipping sauce. Garlic-black bean pan-fried fish (Dancing Shrimp): This is one of my favorite ways to cook fish, and after making this a few times I have figured out how to keep the fillets from falling apart. Jasmine rice, Mrs. C’s Asian-style cabbage salad, and remarkably sweet grape tomatoes completed the meal. For dessert, we dipped pineapple slices in coconut milk and cinnamon sugar, grilled the slices, and served the pineapple with vanilla ice cream. We enjoyed dessert by a crackling fire pit, with younger son tending the blaze. No leftovers, so unfortunately no pictures.