Thai food

This is the most exotic stuff I've ever cooked, and the most difficult when factoring in sourcing of ingredients.  I hope cooking Thai food will get easier as I get more familiar with the ingredients.  All the dishes follow recipes in David Thompson's book Thai Food.

Fermented bamboo shoot salad.  This is a classic Lao/Issan (NE Thai) dish.  I fermented sliced bamboo shoots for two weeks on my window sill along with lemongrass, kaffir leaves, galangal, and bird chillis.  Then I combined the bamboo shoots with fermented fish paste, lime juice, ground roasted red chilis, ground toasted rice, Thai cilantro, mint, scallions, and shallots.

Fermented fish is known as "pla ra" in Thailand, "padek" in Laos, "prahok" in Cambodia, and "mắm cá" in Vietnam.  It's thicker and more pungent than the more well-known "fish sauce" (which is the pressed liquid from less-fermented fish).  If pla ra tastes like anything, it's some stinky French cheese.  Here's a picture of one commercial variety, made from a Southeast Asian freshwater fish called gourami and mashed to a creamy consistency.  Several other varieties with different consistencies and made from different fishes can be found in Southeast Asian grocery stores.

Trout and apple eggplant salad.  The most common variety of Thai eggplant looks like a little green apple (or closer still, a tomatillo).  David Thompson refers to these eggplants as "apple eggplants."  Oddly enough, they taste like a cross between eggplants and apples.  They can be eaten raw or cooked.

Oyster and banana blossom salad.  Banana blossoms have the texture of cabbage and taste vaguely likely bananas.  The oysters and banana blossoms are bathed in a warm sauce based on coconut cream, which I bought from the wonderful store Rawesome on Rose Blvd in Venice.

Black sticky rice dessert.  I steamed half black sticky rice and half white sticky rice for three hours, then added sugar and aromatic pandanus (screw pine) leaves and steamed for a bit, then removed the pandanus leaves and stirred in coconut cream.  Black sticky rice leaks its color everywhere when it cooks, so the white sticky rice is no longer conspicuous.  I figure the white sticky rice is in the recipe to make the dessert softer--black sticky rice is chewy (even after 3 hours of steaming).