Southeast Asian Cookbooks

[memesuze]

Kasma Loha-Unchit has a website: Adventures in Thai Cooking

[ilovenycfood]

Kasma's Dancing Shrimp cookbook is worth it just for the introduction describing Thai ingredients; but also she goes into great depth to explain the mysteries of Thai cooking with detailed recipes; I saw Dancing Shrimp available at ecookbooks.com today which suprised me because unfortunately it is now out of print (so get one while they last)!

[lapageria]

My vote's in for Kasma as well. I have both of her books and I think they're really the best for getting a Westerner's mind around some of the issues of flavoring. I alway recommend it to newbies who'd like to learn to cook Thai.

Her step-by-step methodology and clear progressions were very useful to me. The only flaw with "Rains Fishes" is that that it is too short! I ended up wanting more, more, more, but better a few things done exceptionally well than a lot done in a half-baked manner.

As for the seafood cookbook, I took it with me to Apalachicola, Florida last May (along with a carry-on filled with makrut from my garden, lemon grass, chilis, palm sugar, fish sauce--thank God I scored a granite mortar and pestle in Tallahassee during a drive-by to pick up the rental car--a guy's gotta shop, ya know!) and cooked up a storm for two weeks. My SO's nephews (3 young guys who eat non-stop) were there, too, so all I had to do was shop for it, cook it, and go on to the next thing. We in California are sorely lacking in decent seafood (believe it or not) other than crab, so I had a field day wallowing in cheap fresh shrimp, oysters, clams, etc. Pure heaven. And Kasma was a huge hit, even with these Southern Boys who'd never had Thai food.

Re Thompson, I recall poking at it, but I noticed a few glaring errors (which I can't recall at the moment) which really put me off. I think they were botanical (a sore point with me--one can't expect cooks to be horticulturalists, too, but they always jump out a horticulturally-minded me) and had to do with mis-identifying some obscure plant thing or the other, but it made me doubt the veracity of the whole deal. Hearing all these glowing reviews, I need to get over it (obviously) or find out what was bugging me.

I have a feeling it was makrut or pandanus-related, but I'm just not sure!!!!

Noel-It-All