Rob from Asheville, NC, emailed earlier this week asking about Thai cooking classes and I pointed him to Cooking Thai, which releases on August 25. I wish I had had this video to share with him. It’s the playback of our cookbook preview talk last Wednesday, August 12.
In the Zoom session, you’ll learn how we structured the book, worked together, and how much we love Cooking Thai. We hope you do too!
We appreciate IACP giving us the space to share our new book baby. I’ve been a member of the organization for decades. If you’re interested in joining, IACP shared this code » 20%offjoinnow « for a discount on your membership.
A zillion thanks to the PTFSers who attended from as far as New Zealand where it was very, very early in the morning! You asked standout questions on topics such as wine pairing and fresh coconut milk (Grant), tofu substitutions (Ann), turmeric storage (Jen), and the joy of cookbook collaboration (Nina). More about the book at my website.
If you have not already pre-ordered — head to a local bookshop or check out various online vendors. If you’re in the Bay Area, we’d love to meet you!
Coming up on Sunday is a pandan-strawberry and cream cake recipe I’ve been developing for too long. After going four (4) rounds with the recipe, I’m happy to report that it’s finally ready for you.
You won’t believe that these blueberry muffins are gluten-free, but they are! The recipe has much in common with my Healthy Blueberry Muffins, but it uses almond flour instead of regular flour. No xanthan gum, no starches, just simple ingredients built around one gluten-free flour.
Transitioning a recipe from conventional wheat-based flour to almond flour is never straightforward. It requires reducing the amount of liquid, since almond flour is less absorbent, and fat, since almond flour naturally contains some. It took over ten tries to get the texture of this muffin just right, but it was worth the effort.
Like any great blueberry muffin, they’re golden on the outside, fluffy on the inside, and punctuated by jammy blueberries. Unlike most blueberry muffins, this recipe is quite wholesome but still tastes like a treat.
While many things have been replaced by technology, keys are still with us: stiff, sharp metal objects we carry around in our pockets and handbags, messenger bags, and backpacks. We live in fear of losing them or getting locked out for a lack of them. While digital locks have made inroads somewhere, here in France, we live in the land of keys, and I regularly carry around almost a dozen or so every day, attached to a key ring that has fobs, badges, buttons. I don’t know if there’s a comparable word in French*, but I feel like a high school janitor.
I also recently added an Air Tag to the mishigas after I lost my keys six months ago and literally had a panic attack. Not because I was worried someone was going to find them and break into our apartment, but because it would have cost me over €600 ($700) to replace them, not to mention all the paperwork attached to getting them remade. And as I recently learned, all the time that it takes.
I’ve lived in cities like San Francisco and New York, and having a key made cost $2 a pop at my local Ace Hardware store. When I was in New York last year, I had a key made but didn’t have any cash on me. The guy just looked at me and said, “Fuggedaboudit.” Here, I would have had to submit to a prise de sang, giving a blood sample and getting fingerprinted, with a promise to give them my first-born male child, before I’d be able to leave without paying.
This Cherry Tomato Pasta recipe is for when you have more cherry (or grape) tomatoes than you know what to do with, or simply when they’re in season and most enjoyable! Little tomatoes, butter, garlic, and olive oil are simmered to make a deliciously effortless sauce that’s more than the sum of its parts. It […]
It is an error that needs correcting that in the near-20 years of plugging recipes into this url, only a few truly star cucumbers — and highly unrepresentative too, given that we are probably eating some format of cucumbers at half the nights of the week with dinner, and snacking on them throughout all of the other days. Crunchy, cold, hydrating, inexpensive, and taking well to any region of ingredients you wish to apply, I don’t need to sell you on their appeal, especially as we slog through our nth heat wave of the summer. I suspect that the lack of cucumber representation in the archives has more to do with the fact that little about cucumber salads brings out my inner obsessive recipe finetuner; usually I’m just throwing it together.
I was thrilled when Sami Tamimi told me he was coming to Paris. Sami recently released his third book, Boustany: A celebration of vegetables from my Palestine, so I invited him into my kitchen to make a recipe from it with me. And the weather was so nice, we decided to prepare it outside.
Sami is the co-founder of the Ottolenghi restaurants and delis, and the author of Falastin, one of my favorite cookbooks, which explores his Palestinian heritage through stories and recipes from his homeland. Boustany focuses ore squarely on the vegetable dishes of Palestine.
Sami’s book features a bounty of recipes that focus on vegetables, such as salads like the Fridge-raid fattoush, and there are beautifully verdant Gazan fava bean falafels. I’ve never made falafels, but his recipe and the gorgeous photo that accompanies it make me want to. Other recipes that I’ve bookmarked are the spicy Shatta condiment, Bulghur wheat dumplings & lentil soup, and Ouzi phyllo parcels, which are individual dishes filled with rice, orzo, vegetables, nuts, and spices.
Where does chocolate fit in? Well, like tomatoes and squash (which are lavishly featured in the book), chocolate is also technically a fruit. And besides, who doesn’t love chocolate?
Since I’ve been in the chocolate mode, thanks to The Great Book of Chocolate coming out, I was glad Sami was up for doing some baking and showed up ready to make hisTahini, Halvah, and Coffee Brownies.
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Pan-baked tahini, halva & coffee brownie (Qahwa w Halaweh brownie)
“Imagine yourself sitting in one of many coffee shops dotted around the souk in Jerusalem’s old city, having a piece of chocolate and a strong, sweet Arabic cardamom coffee. One mouthful of this dessert can almost definitely transport you there. It’s a dessert meant for sharing, to be spooned straight from the pan. A great, easy, chewy and fudgy brownie which can be ready in under 20 minutes. It hits all the right spots for chocolate lovers like me.”
“This is the recipe exactly as it appears in Boustany. If you have watched me make these, you will know I improvise. I add more coffee if the batch I have is weaker, that sort of thing. The recipe below is the version I trust, so start there and make it yours.” - Sami Tamimi
Rounded ½ cup / 150g tahini paste
½ cup / 120ml lukewarm water
Heaping ½ cup | 3% oz / 110g granulated sugar
2 large eggs
½ cup / 20g unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tbsp instant espresso coffee
¼ cup / 1 oz / 30g all-purpose flour
½ tsp ground cardamom
½ tsp ground cloves
½ tsp baking powder
salt
1½ oz / 40g dark chocolate chips or chocolate roughly chopped into ¼ inch | ½ cm pieces (70% cocoa solids) (½ cup chopped)
For the toppings
1½ tbsp sesame seeds
1½ oz / 40g dark chocolate chips or chocolate roughly chopped into ¼ inch | ½ cm pieces (70% cocoa solids) (½ cup chopped)
⅓ cup | 70g plain or vanilla halva, broken into chunks
vanilla ice cream
Preheat the oven to 375°F. Grease a 8-inch | 22cm square baking pan or dish with sunflower oil and set aside.
Put the tahini and water into the bowl of a stand mixer, with the paddle attachment in place, and mix on medium-high speed for 2 minutes, until pale and smooth. Reduce to low speed, add the sugar, then the eggs, one at a time, and mix for a further 2 minutes.
Sift all the dry ingredients, using a fine sieve, and add them to the tahini mixture, along with aheaping ¼ teaspoon of salt and the chocolate. Mix for a minute more. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.
Sprinkle the top with the sesame seeds and chocolate and dot with the halva. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the edges are set and the center is not runny (it needs to be slightly wet). Set aside for 10 minutes before serving.
Serve with vanilla ice cream.
The brownie can be stored in the fridge for up to a week.
Ate morning ramen at O-Tsubaki Shokudo in Koganei! Got the negi ramen and negi rice. It’s the real deal when it comes to the "Ramen Shop" lineage, but the soup's flavor and balance are on another level—totally deserves its rep as one of Tokyo's best. The crisp green onions paired with that killer broth hit the spot so well in the morning, and the negi-rice combo was so good I couldn't put my chopsticks down!
Ramen is a process, noodle guides the process. so grab your ingredients to process don't overstuff the bowl, overstuff the process. the noodle process.
Thai Basil Mock Duck is one of my favorite dishes to order out at a Thai restaurant. I’m no vegetarian, but I love the way the savory mock duck tastes alongside Thai Basil, Thai soy sauce, and vegetables! Our go-to Thai restaurant charges $19 for a small plate of their Thai Basil Mock Duck stir-fry. […]
Oh boy — I’m late with this dispatch because our water heater pooped out yesterday. It was basically on its 10th birthday. We tried trouble shooting it and eventually called the plumber, who labeled it planned obsolescence. We’re switching to a top-of-the-line tankless Navein unit which he says is energy efficient and lasts a very long time so long as we do regular maintenance and repairs.
Before sharing today’s recipes, I’m spotlighting cool ideas from PTFSers!
PTFS community tips
I’m thrilled whenever you send me a great tip. Here are ones from this past week!
and I are obsessed with artisanal Tin fish sauce from Vietnam. Its producer dates back centuries and the flavor is excellent — smooth and not too intense. My mom loves it too, not just because it’s from Phan Thiet, where my dad once served as provincial governor. If you’re in the Bay Area, Maia spotted it at the Costco on Almaden. It is imported by the Lee’s Sandwich people, I’m told, so I was also able to buy it at Lee’s Supermarket in San Jose after the local Costcos quickly sold out.
used my Kewpie Dupe Mayo recipe to make a dupe of Duke’s mayonnaise! Duke’s is delicious and unavailable in many parts of the U.S. It’s got a cult following in the American South. Get Steph’s tips in the comment section of the Kewpie Dupe mayo recipe (🆓 at le blog!)
shared an article about 10 must-Try Vietnamese foods. Bánh xèo (sizzling rice recipes) is on the list. Nina took my recent best bánh xèo class and commented that the crepe in the article did not look as good as the one from my recipe. ☺️ My response is that now, she’s making them better than many cooks in the world! 😉 I love being an enabler — especially whenever people make my recipe theirs.
Speaking of making a recipe your own, I recently test drove a cold soba dish that’s just sensational. It’s not the classic zaru soba, which always leaves me feeling hungry. This sesame soba is super satisfying yet light and special tasting.
It’s Goma Dare Soba (Cold Sesame Soba) — a cold noodle that’s served with lots of veggies and seasoned by an umami-rich, nutty sesame-soy milk broth. A pop of wasabi at the table enlivens the whole thing. It’s hearty but light. If soba isn’t handy, make it with different noodles or even a capellini or spaghetti (but change the name into something like “Cold Sesame Ramen”).
The recipe comes from Japanese Comfort Cooking, a great new book by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. I made minor tweaks and took their cues to play with the toppings. The recipe uses dashi so you can now make more of the wondrous Japanese broth! Slurp up the 🆓 Cold Sesame Soba recipe at my blog.
Cold or Cool Noodles?
Ya know, such Asian noodle dishes are never served super cold or even coolish, though they are cooling. They are room temperature.
But compared to a steaming hot bowl of ramen or pho, Japanese goma dare soba and Vietnamese bún are ‘cold.’ If you’re dealing with diners who like to split hairs, stick with the dish’s native language name to avoid misleading them.
Or maybe is has to do with Japanese and Chinese cultures?
In Vietnamese, we don’t have the “cold” or “cool” notion of noodles like in other East Asian cuisines. Certain noodle dishes feature supple tangles of noodley carbs at room temp or slightly warm. If you chill rice noodles, they break! Identifying the temperature of the noodle isn’t important to identify a dish. We want to know what noodle is served. That’s why a ‘cold’ noodle dish like bún chả is just about the noodles and the other main feature.
With that in mind, we are deep in grilling season so it’s time to lean into Vietnamese bún rice noodles. They’re on repeat at our house for rice paper rolls and bún salad bowls.
Just last week, my mom served us Hanoi-style bún chả grilled pork and rice noodles. Southern California was having a minor heat wave and the noodles comforted us without adding to the heat of the day. Make my traditional bún chả recipe with pork or take the veggie path with my meatless version. Heck, combine the two, like I have!
Want to freestyle your bún bowls? Play with my bún rice noodle bowl template to create your own (lots recipes and tips included in the 🆓 post on my blog!).
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That said, Viet people are not wedded to their noodle dishes. My mom requested the Taiwanese sesame noodles for her birthday luncheon last week! She made most of her 6-course meal but wanted me to add the noodles. In East Asian culture, noodles symbolize long life and she wants to stick around to eat more good food!
My grand nephew asked to help out with the cooking so I let him put on the final touches. He’s three years old. His parents took leftover noodles home for dinner.
My mom’s a formal lady and I was surprised that she was so smitten with these casual noodles from Taiwan. She loves them and so does the rest of our family. Make the Taiwanese sesame noodles for an easy one-dish meal, or include it in a party menu — present it on a communal platter and ask someone at the table to toss and serve! Along with other dishes, each batch will serve 8.
Meet me at upcoming Cooking Thai events!
Cooking Thai releases soon on August 25. If you haven’t checked out the book, the early assessments and praise by heavy hitters like Yotam Ottolenghi, Ruth Reichl, David Lebovitz, Dorie Greenspan, and Hetty McKinnon are stunningly positive. I’m thrilled, totally stoked.
Event-wise, things are unfolding and thus far, I’ll be joining Pim at these events:
Wed., Aug. 26, 6:30pm book talk @ Omnivore Books, SF, pre-order your copy if you can’t make it in person
Tues., Sept. 1, 7pm, book talk and tastings @ Bookshop Santa Cruz, pre-order your copy if you can’t make it in person
Coming next weekend for paid subscribers is a stupendous pandan roll cake that I’ve been tinkering with for months. It wowed my family at mom’s birthday party. My taste testers (the neighbors!) love it just as much. I hope you do too!
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