Foodies BS Thread.

That looks great!

 

Dang she teaches hapkido too?? Shes a keeper!!

 

yup!shes a 3rd degree... been there for soo long.

 

Bought 20 lbs of FFA pears this year. They were really really good, but 20 lbs is a lot. I used the last 7 or 8 pears to make cobbler today.

All mixed up, ready to bake:


Out of the oven:


Iced. I made some cinammon roll icing since it was the last of the pears. Thought I'd make it a little more special.

 

X2!!!! Grab the ice cream!

 

Holy, this is the first time I came across this thread, I am ready to get fat.

Here's my Tom Yum Gai. It certainly can be considered one of Thailand's staple dishes, and it's damn good (translated in English is basically chicken hot & sour soup.)

 

i used to. now i just have a squeeze bottle of agave syrup laying around.

taste great..and it supposedly will not mess the hypoglycemic index for diabetes sufferers. weird..i just use it cuz it's good.

 

Nice! I make that too, but I use coconut milk in it. Made it last week but couldn't find fresh lemon grass anywhere. Galangal is easy to find though!

 

Thanks! It's supe easy to make. I think it would be almost as good with pie filling apples or peaches, too.

 

Coconut milk? That would be more of a red curry then, right? My wife is Thai, and she's been more willing to reveal some secrets since I showed the initiative, haha. We went to Thailand last April, and I gotta say, well, the street food is unbelievably to-die-for! I fell in love twice over (maybe three) and it has been an inspiration ever since. The pictures I posted were my first attempt at making Tom Yum, and my technique has been honed now, yet still getting better. She loves it, so that makes me even prouder!

Kudos to OP, I will be visiting this thread often!

 

Maybe - I dunno. It's only maybe 1/4 cup in the pot, so it's still a watery soup. My recipe is pretty simple - galangal, cocnut milk, peppers, lemon grass, lime leaves, fish sauce, chicken stock and chicken I think. I found it online and it was pretty much like the local Thai place's soup, so I didn't do any recipe development.

Feel free to share your recipe - it looks great!

 

Sure, in my quest to find the quintessential Tom Yum, I started with this:

http://www.recipesandreviews.com/recipes/tom_yum_gai_hot_and_sour_chicken_soup-79

All the right ingredients are listed. The only other thing that one might add is baby corn. In the process of deconstructing the recipe, the chili sauce can be omitted if you get all the other ingredients right... this is conceivable, I tried it last night. Why: professional Thai chefs strive to make the soup as clear as possible while retaining all the good flavors, because they want to distinguish their soup from the street Tom Yum, which always has that notorious red tint. But like I said earlier, I love the street food and red is okay by me! But what the hey, had to try it.

The recipe is "basically" right. There were a lot of new ingredients that were unfamiliar to me and I had to learn their influence. Luckily Syracuse has about 3 or 4 good Asian grocers, so the only compromise I've had to swallow were frozen kaffir and frozen galanga, and the way to deal with this is to add about 3 or 4 times the amount if you were using fresh.

There are other secrets to divulge that I have reservations to tell right now! Also, most Thai restaurants probably use a Tom Yum mix because the soup is usually served as an appetizer, and it's not worth the effort to make it from scratch for the unaccustomed American palate.

 

Yeah, I have to use the frozen kaffirs as well - something about the USDA won't allow the import of fresh kaffir leaves anymore?

 

Hmm not sure, I haven't heard about that. Ideally you would have your own kaffir plant and pull leaves off as you need them, but this would be another experiment in itself that could very well happen this household . I have read American grown "kaffir" referred to as "kefir" for whatever reason, because I didn't see anywhere that they were genetically different. For me it was one of those new ingredients that I knew nothing about and so I just googled the hell out of it. Seems legit to me. Kaffir sure is strong and beautifully pungent tho, aint it??

 

BTW looking at your sig pic, Missouri really gets that much snow?? Hehe Syracuse is the snowiest city of pop 50,000 or greater in America. Got dumped on with 2 feet just over a week ago, couldn't wait to drive the Taco into work! It was fun!!

 

Yeah, it's good stuff. A plant would be ideal, though my house doesn't really have any south facing windows and I can barely keep anything alive through the winter. I've seen the plants for sale online pretty cheap, but only with a few leaves and it would be a couple years before they look like they could spare any.

Speaking of limes, has anyone seen/used finger limes? They're crazy. I love citrus and would love to try them out. I think they're Austrailian and just now becoming commercially available in the US in the last few years.

 

Nah, we only get a couple significant snows, say 4" or more, each year. Two years ago we got 19" overnight and it shut everything down for a day. We get plenty of cold though. I wish we got mroe snow honestly, especially now that I have my truck.

I sold my Mustang and bought my truck a month before that 19" snow in 2010...I felt pretty smart.

 

Haha, ah yes, sweet redemption! Gotta love it when it works out like that