Kao Soi (Yummy Thai Food!)

Kathy and I love Thai food, and eat it often.  There are quite a number of Thai restaurants in San Antonio that are very good but San Antonio is 60 miles from here, so we have learned to make a number of Thai dishes ourselves.

When I worked in Chicago, there was a Thai restaurant near the office that served a dish call Kao Soi that I ate every chance I got. Kao Soi, also known as Chiang Mai Noodles, is a delicious combination of soft and crispy noodles with chicken in a coconut curry broth. We have found no Thai restaurant in San Antonio that serves it, so I did some research and developed this Kao Soi recipe.

If you go to most Thai restaurants in the U.S., you will get food from the southern part of Thailand.  If you are lucky, though, you may find this dish, which comes from the northern Chiang Mai province that stretches from Myanmar (Burma) to Laos.  The food in this region, and Kao Soi in particular, has influences from the south (coconut milk, red curry paste, chicken), India and Myanmar (curry powders, including a hint of turmeric), and China (the wheat noodles).

It is pretty straightforward to find the ingredients in Chicago or Houston, but not so much in places like Kerrville or Bangor.  It is worth the trouble to search, though, and if you can't find what you need locally, you should remember that the internet can solve a lot of problems.  We have even been known to buy some of the ingredients from Amazon.com. I think you will like Kao Soi enough that these ingredients will become pantry staples. 

Don't be afraid to substitute if you can't find what the recipe calls for. If you can't find tamarind, just add some more lime juice to taste.  If you click on the photo above, you will find Kim Chee, a pungent Korean cabbage pickle, which substitutes as a garnish for the pickled Chinese cabbage.  Palm sugar is best, but use turbinado or even plain white sugar if you must. (No - scratch the white sugar....)  And in the first picture above, you will see that we use crispy  La Choy chow mein noodles for a garnish - totally wrong, but it tastes great, and saves the mess of frying your own.

Stone Sour

If you haven't figured it out yet from previous posts, Kathy and I are partial to cocktails made with rye whiskey.  If you like a good cocktail, and have not experimented with it yet I would highly recommend trying it - either a Sazerac or a Manhattan would be a good place to start.   

If you would rather have something citrusy, here's another rye drink to add to your collection. The Stone Sour is a whiskey sour variation from California, but don't hold its origin against it - it is very good. Best with one of those homemade cocktail cherries.

If you don't have any rye in the cupboard, I'm sure this would also be good with bourbon.

The Island

Back in July, I shared a rough sketch of an idea we had for a new kitchen island.  Doing the sketch ended up being the fun part.

When we first started thinking about an island, we had researched local cabinet makers and visited a couple that had been recommended or whose work we had seen around town.  The fellow we talked to at the cabinet maker we chose was pretty impressive, and the company did a lot of work for good home builders and businesses around town, so we decided that they would be a good choice.  Things came up, and we put things on hold for a while, and when we went back the fellow we were working with had left for greener pastures.  

We had spent a lot of time thinking about details of legs, drawers, colors, work surface - even made a mockup  the size we were thinking about to make sure it would work well in our kitchen.  Discussed and compromised on surface height.  And we (mostly Kathy) went through way too many iterations of specification documents. Eventually, the specs were right. (As an aside, we were also working in parallel with them on built in shelving, with all the same frustrations.) Among other things the specs included trimming a bit off the top of the legs we had selected.

Picked granite for the top in San Antonio, and made arrangements with the fabricator in Fredericksburg. (When you live in the Hill Country you learn quickly that you have to go all over the place to get what you need - thank goodness we have the internet and email to reduce the pain a bit.)  Looked like we were set.

Then a bit of reality set in. Color samples came back wrong, problems with specified drawer glides, miscellaneous other small problems, and we ended up having to settle. Nothing major, but a lot of preventable irritations. (On the parallel project the shelving had to be rebuilt.)  And despite the specs, the cabinet maker did not trim the legs, leaving the final product about an inch taller than what we had asked for - a height that I had originally thought would a good working level, but not ideal for Kathy. We decided to accept the island rather than fight it any longer.

Craftmanship on the final product is great, and think it will work very well in our kitchen.  But I suspect Kathy will always be a bit irritated by it.