Cafe Liz

In the back of my fridge is a slowly shrinking bag of green mush that I've been guarding jealously. It's the remainders of the half-kilo of handmade green curry paste that we purchased from our favorite restaurant in Chiang Mai, longer ago than I should probably admit (OK, it was a year and a half ago). How could I use it generously when I knew that once it was gone, the only replacement I'd find was something imported in little [...]

When I discovered the Thai House‘s recipe for pad thai, I felt like I was discovering the dish anew — with a sauce of only soy sauce and sugar, this recipe was amazingly simple, produced way better results than any other pad thai I had ever made in the past, and tasted great. In fact, the pad thai I was making at home was so good that I didn’t even bother to order the dish on my first few days [...]

We’re now the proud owners of a brand new ice cream maker, and I decided to try out our new toy by making a flavor you won’t find in any ice cream shop I’ve ever seen — Thai tea ice cream. The results were fabulous.

Poor me, I have three ripe mangoes that need to be eaten very soon. What am I going to do?

OK, I admit that I consider any recipe that involves ketchup to be cheating, but the results here are so good, that you could say the ends justify the means. This recipe for sweet and sour tempeh takes its sauce from a recipe I learned in Thailand (yes, it turns out that Thai cooks use ketchup), while tempeh is a fermented soybean product from Indonesia with a rich, almost meaty (or mushroomy) taste. It’s a nice alternative to tofu, and [...]

This is my favorite kind of Thai curry. Luckily, it’s not too complicated — most of the taste comes from the basil-rich green curry paste. You can think of it as a kind of Thai pesto — in Thailand they pound the spices together by hand, but here you can just buy the curry paste ready-made, in a jar. And since I’m no longer in Thailand, I had to adapt the dish to the vegetables available locally (bottom right photo).