Thai Food: Thai Recipes: Nam Prig Pad Thai Chili Paste

Thai Food: Thai Recipes

 

 

This week I am making one of my favorite and easy Thai Recipes,  Nam Prig Pad the famous Thai chili sauce/paste that is used in Thai Food cooking and it's also famous for causing a terror alert in Soho, London England sometime back in 2007 when a Thai restaurant was making it's own Thai Nam Prik Pad. The smell of the burning chili peppers set someone off and they contacted the authorities and off the cops went only to find a humble restaurant making their own chili paste! Now if that won't make chili paste famous I don't know what will?  Why am I making Nam Prig Pad you ask? Well I guess by this point that many of you that visit my blog know that I LOVE Thai Food and I love to work with Thai Recipes. I love the flavors of Southeast Asia, Thailand, Viet Nam etc. I find that Thai Food has a certain versatility and interchangeability that food from other cultures doesn't have in my humble opinion. The flavors! The aroma's! Oh man! Just can't be beat! Well I do a fair amount of Thai Recipes and other Asian dishes on this blog of mine and I always try to add my own twist to the recipes I make. Last week I made another of my favorite Thai Recipes called Thai Pad Cha which is one of my favorite Thai Recipes. It's a seafood Thai dish. The dish uses a sauce combination of soy sauce, oyster sauce and fish sauce. I thought to myself that this was going to really salty so I decided to substitute Nam Prig Pad in place of the oyster sauce.  So I used the Nam Prig Pad and then during this last week I received about 15 email from people asking me to make Nam Prig Pad on my Youtube channel. So I did! Nam Prig Pad is good in so many Thai Recipes but, it give many other foods a great flavor as well. Nam Prig Pad makes a delicious BBQ sauce and makes for a KILLER grilled cheese sandwich! No really!  Try it!


Thai chili paste or Nam Prig Pad is the paste that is very often used in Tom Yum Goong soup and other Thai Food. It is usually a dark brown to black chili paste from Thailand. The color of the chili paste depends on how much your roast  your chili peppers. There are many Thai Recipes for Nam Prik Pad but the base of the recipe is garlic, shallots, and dry chili peppers some salt and sugar usually palm sugar and in some cases there is the addition of tamarind paste, shrimp paste and dried shrimp. You can buy tamarind paste in your local Asian market in a jar or in block form but just make sure that when you buy the tamarind that it is only tamarind and water with no other ingredients in it. If you can't find it at your local market you can get it here online.

From what I am to glean in my research about Thai Food is that what I was calling Nam Prik Pad/Pao which is how I learned to call this Thai food mixture is actually supposed to be called Nam Prig Pad! Pad means stir fried. In Nam Prig Pad the ingredients are meant to be grilled and then ground up and then fried in oil and some sugar is added. The sugar acts as a kind of preservative and that is why Nam Prig Pad can last for months on your counter top. On the other hand Nam Prig Pow is when the ingredients are grilled and then ground rather than ground and then stir fried. Most Nam Prig Pow in jars are just the ingredients of Nam Prig Pow being fried and having sugar added to it and that's that! The problem is that most people including me have used the name Nam Prig Pow and Nam Prig Pad as meaning the same thing in Thai Recipes and it's not! Lesson learned! Another interesting fact about Nam Prig Pow is that in many places it's called Nam Prig Dang or red chili paste because of the deep reddish color that comes from the redness of the chili peppers. There are many varieties of Nam Prig Pad that you can get in jars at the local Asian market but in the last year I have gotten into making my own style of Thai Recipes of Nam Prig Pad. Some smoother than others. Some browner than others. Some more rustic than others.

I have made the standard Thai recipes of Nam Prig Pad using the chili peppers, sugar, garlic, shallots, shrimp paste and dried shrimps. As I stated there are many ways to accomplish making Nam Prig Pad. I have also made it with dried squid, dried scallops and dried cuttlefish. This week I am just going to show you how to make one of  the standard Thai Recipe of Nam Prig Pad with just a couple of additions and changes. These changes are as follows. I am going to be using Molasses instead of palm sugar or brown sugar. I mean brown sugar is just sugar with molasses added to it anyway! Palm sugar is sweet  and brown sugar is sweet and imparts that sweetness to the Nam Prig Pad. Molasses on the other hand is already dark in color and will impart some darkness and richness to the Nam Prig Pad and will also all more depth to the sweetness and in my opinion more character. I will also be adding some lime juice as a preservative and some cooked lemongrass to the mix as well. So if you love Thai Food as much as I do then sit tight and enjoy the video!


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Thai Food: Pad Thai: Pad Cha!

Thai Food: Pad Thai

 

When I think of Thai Food I like many people think of Pad Thai first. Pad Thai is one of the most popular Thai dishes around, perhaps only second only to Tom Yum Goong soup. So this week I decided that I am going to be making Thai Food! I know that many of us eat out at Thai restaurants all the time and have eaten and just love Pad Thai and it is for that reason that this week I'm making a dish called Pad Cha! Pad Cha you say! Yes! Pad Cha! A seafood Pad Thai dish.

Most people are familiar with dishes such as Pad Thai when they eat Thai food and this week I was doing my research to find something a bit different and I came across a Pad Thai recipe called Pad Cha! It's not made with beef or chicken as in other Pad Thai dishes. Pad Cha is a Pad Thai made with seafood or fish.

One of the things I love the most about Thai Food is that you can make it what you wish it to be. This Pad Thai dish can be made with fish fillets, or squid as in Pad Cha Muek or with any kind of seafood mix that you have on hand and this week that is what I had on hand was a 2Lb. bag of really good seafood mix containing shrimp, cuttlefish, oyster, squid, clam and mussels. All the delicious seafood that would make a really good seafood Pad Thai dish.

So this week it's Thai food. Usually this Pad Cha dish is served on rice like sticky sushi rice or Thai jasmine rice. This week I will serve this dish on rice noodles! Remember! "There are no rules in cooking." I thought it would be a nice change of pace to have this Thai Food on rice stick noodles rather than on plain rice which is how it's done all of the time.

This Thai Food dish starts out with a very spicy and pungent mixture of red chilies, shallots and garlic. Then as this Pad Thai cooks I will add lemongrass, kaffir lime, and brown sugar. I can smell it already. The sauces usually used to make this Pad Thai is fish sauce, soy sauce and oyster sauce. In this case I am going to make this Pad Thai with a sauce called Nam Prik Pad or Nam Prik Pao. I am using this particular sauce in my Thai Food because this is a seafood Pad Thai and when I made Tom Yum Goong soup some time back the sauce that is used to impart that Tom Yum Goong special flavor to the Thai Food is Nam Prik Pad or Prik Pao! Since my Pad Thai is seafood based I wanted to add that little something extra to the taste and leave the saltiness of the oyster sauce out of my Pad Cha!

Like I said Thai Food or Pad Thai are very versatile indeed. In my opinion the best way to make Thai Food like Pad Thai or Pad Cha is to have certain things made in advance so that you don't have to fumble for things as you make one serving at  time. It's always good to make more of something that you need in case you end up Jonsing later on.

In Thailand I am told from friends of mine that live there the street vendors have their sauces made in advance so that they can just cook and not worry about measuring out one serving of Thai Food at a time like Pad Thai.

This is the way I make my Thai Food and in this case my Pad Cha. I made my flavor base of red chilies, garlic and shallots hours ahead of time to allow the flavors to marry and then I made my sauce of fish sauce, soy sauce, brown sugar and Nam Prik Pad ahead of time for the number of servings I planned to make and in this way I don't have to worry about grabbing a bottle of this or a pinch of that to make my servings. So let's watch my Thai Food video and see how Pad Thai: Pad Cha is made. Enjoy!


 

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Rabbit Recipes: Rabbit Stew Recipe: Coniglio In Umido Con Peperoni E Cipolle

Stew: Rabbit Recipes

 

 

This week I am cooking up one of my favorite Rabbit Recipes! I am making Rabbit Stew with peppers and onions or coniglio in umido con peperoni e chipole! Rabbit Recipes aren't really all that much different than chicken recipes, in fact they are basically interchangeable!

This weeks Rabbit Stew Recipe is influenced once again from the North of Italy! I guess some of my readers know that I have a penchant for the food of that region ever since I worked for a man from Bari, Italy named Franco Mele'!

My cooking has always been influenced by the recipes I learned at his restaurant Stomboli in Los Angeles California. Rabbit Stew wasn't always on the menu at Stromboli as I was a seasonal thing. I can see why because if I told you what I paid for organic free range rabbits grown in Oregon I think you would faint!

I do love my Rabbit Recipes though! So this week I thought I would make for you a Northern Italian influenced Rabbit Stew Recipe that is delicious and nutritious and something that you can make your own with just about any kind of meat you want.

Stew is just a staple of life no matter where you go in this world and no matter what culture you encounter there is a recipe for a stew of some kind. I have eaten Rabbit Recipes from France, Italy and Germany and I love them all and hopefully if my wallet provides I will make Rabbit Recipes for you from all of these regions!

One of the best parts about Rabbit Recipes is that rabbit is a lean meat and not very high in cholesterol as other meats are. I will in the coming weeks make some other Rabbit Recipes for you from the discarded parts of the rabbit that did not make it into my stew. You can look forward to Rabbit Recipes such as rabbit soup and rabbit pate or terrine! Both just delicious! You see the fact of the matter is that for the expense of the rabbit you do your best to minimize waste. Everything that can be used should get used!

Coniglio In Umido Con Peperoni Cipolle is a dish of the common people of Northern Italy. Isn't it amazing how the quote, unquote peasant dishes of cultures are the one's that you find is some of the most expensive fine dining venues in your area? I find this to be very interesting.

Now one of the first things I did to this Rabbit Stew Recipe is the cut up my rabbit by separating the rear legs, the front legs, the skirt and filets. Now you can just go ahead and cook the rabbit in this recipe the way it sits but in this case I marinated the rabbit for 48 hours in simple marinade of white wine and some herbs and spices. The recipe is below.

As the side dish I am making some lovely creamy polenta! My friends and family think I make the best polenta in the world and so I guess I will just have to agree with them. I use chicken stock instead of water in my polenta recipe. Check the recipe below I am sure you will LOVE this polenta!

So come with me and learn how to make one of my favorite Rabbit Stew Recipes! Coniglio In Umido Con Peperoni E Cipolle! Enjoy the video!


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Rocky Mountain Oysters: Asian Style Taco Recipe

Rocky Mountain Oysters Taco Recipe

 

 

This week I am making Rocky Mountain Oysters in an Asian style Taco Recipe! I was looking for something different to do this week and I was looking for some thing that had some balls to it. So I decided to heed the words of some of the wiseguys from back in New York where I am from. They have an old saying: "Mess with the bull, get the horns!" Well, this week I went out looking for a bull to mess with and I didn't get the horns. I got the balls! Hence this week I am making bulls balls! Rocky Mountain Oysters in an Asian style Taco Recipe!

Rocky Mountain Oysters are called many other things depending on where you are in the country at the moment. Prairie oysters, Montana tendergroins, cowboy caviar, swinging beef, swing steak, calf fries, criadillas, mountain oysters, and even lamb fries to name but a few. No matter how you cut it these bulls testicles are a true western delicacy! Now don't get me wrong the Western United States is not the first place in history to eat Rocky Mountain Oysters. I am sure that back in Roman times they were called something completely different but the fact remains that men and women have been eating animal testicles since the Roman times and maybe even before!

There are many forms of testicles for the eating. lamb testicles, yak testicles, water buffalo testicles which I am sure are hard to find in the United States. As with many cultures that have and do eat Rocky Mountain Oysters or other animal testicles there are those that believe that the testicles of animals have curative powers or that eating of the testicles can enhance sexual performance is some way. In Japan Rocky Mountain Oysters and the testicles of hogs as well as other sexual organs such as Tiger penis are prized for the supposed powers that they instill in men that eat them. I don't know how much credit to put to those claims, I just like the taste.

So this week I thought long and hard (no pun intended with the use of Rocky Mountain Oysters) as to what I wanted to make this week. I know that there has been a craze in the last few years with Asian style Taco Recipes made famous by the Los Angeles food truck business called Nom Nom! I have actually eaten off of their truck when I go to visit my brother in LA! The tacos they make are delicious and a real twist on flavor. Well, I like Asian style Taco Recipes like Nom Nom and so I thought to myself that maybe they don't have the balls to make an Asian Taco Recipe using Rocky Mountain Oysters but I do!

So in the style and with the greatest respect for the delicious Asian tacos from Nom Nom I am going to make my Asian style Taco Recipe using Rocky Mountain Oysters and I am going to make a delicious Asian pesto sauce to use on the Taco Recipe as well! So I hope you enjoy the video and I hope you make this Rocky Mountain Oysters Taco Recipe!


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Beef Jerky: Thai Chili Lime Beef Jerky Recipe

Beef Jerky

 



 

This week I am making Beef Jerky. That's right I am making Beef Jerky because a friend of mine named Paul in the East Coast of England contacted me and asked me if I would do one. I asked him why? and he told me that he and his family LOVE Beef Jerky but that it costs them $4.00 for 25 grams of jerky. I almost fainted when I heard that! I tell you why I almost fainted is because 25 grams of Beef Jerky is not even a full ounce of jerky. A standard United States ounce is 28 grams. This means that my friend Paul is paying more than $64.00 for a pound of Beef Jerky!

So I decided to do a Beef Jerky Recipe this week. So into my closet I went because I remembered that years ago a friend of mine gave me a dehydrator for the holidays and I seemed to have never unpacked it. I got the box out of the closet and opened it up to find a 4 shelf Excaliber food dehydrator. I knew the good times were gonna be rolling really quickly.

So I went out onto the net and did some research on cures and found that just like many of the finest steak houses in the United States that Beef Jerky lovers either chose the dry cure method or the wet cure method of preparing the beef for either smoking or dehydrating. Paul actually asked my if I could do a video on how to cook Beef Jerky and I told him that we don't cook Beef Jerky, we either smoke it or dehydrate it or like I have done in the past I have air cured beef out in the open desert floor here in Nevada.

As I did my research I found that most people preferred the wet cure method over the dry cure method of making a Beef Jerky Recipe. I did also find that most of the recipes I found no matter where I went were all basically the same: soy sauce, sugar, Worcestershire sauce, liquid smoke and garlic and pepper. I wanted to get away from all of that "standard" fair and do a flavor that was different. I like being different. I looked long and hard at what kind of ingredients I had on hand as I do have an extensive herb and spice collection in my pantry.

I searched and searched and then decided that since I am a big fan of the flavors of Southeast Asia that I was going to put make a Southeast Asian inspired Beef Jerky Recipe! What really sealed the deal on the flavor of the Beef Jerky that I was going to make was the fact that I have some KILLER dried Kaffir lime leaves from a fellow Youtuber named Slim over at Statenislandslim Channel I had cooked another Thai dish called Tom Yum Goong Soup sometime back and used lime zest which works well and when Slim saw the dish he loved it. He contacted me and offered to mail me some Kaffir lime leaves and I was more that happy to get them. Here in Las Vegas they are hard to come by as all the restaurants snatch them up before anyone can get to them. So I appreciated Slim sending me the lime leaves. You should check out his channel I think you would like it.

So the Beef Jerky Recipe I came up with finally is going to be a Thai Chili Lime Beef Jerky! It is going to have the flavors of Thai Chili for the heat and brown sugar for the sweet as well as some salt and of course the flavor and aroma of those lovely Kaffir lime leaves! So check out the video and enjoy this wonderful Beef Jerky recipe!


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Spam: Spam Musubi De Kine Hawaiian Food

Spam Musubi

 

This week I think I am going to Spam you guyz! That's right! I am going to Spam you guyz! Well, not the kind of Spam that you are thinking about. No I am not going to fill up your mailboxes with junk mail. What I am going to do is fill up your stomachs with Spam! Spam Musubi De Kine Hawaiian local grindz!



The reason I am making Spam Musubi is because I told this guy named Wayde over @ WAYDESWORLDHAWAII which is a Youtube channel geared toward the Hawaiian lifestyle and Wayde's Poor Man's Guide To Hawaii that I would make it for him because I was very impressed with his channel and he subbed my channel and I subbed his channel!  From what I can see Wayde lives De Kine lifestyle in a beautiful place like Hawaii. Surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery in the country and killer beaches. If I ever get to Hawaii, I will be making use of Waydes services for sure!

So I told him that I would be making Spam Musubi de kine Hawaiian food and that I would be putting in my own little twists and turns to the recipe! No! This will not be typical Spam Musubi made with sugar, soy sauce and mirin with a slab of Spam thrown in the middle! I am going to spice up my Spam Musubi and I will be making multilayer Spam Musubi! It's gonna be de kine local grindz as Wayde would say!

So I was able to make eight very large bricks of Spam Musubi from one can of Spam and I used other ingredients like Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, scrambled eggs, pepperoni, sun dried tomatoes, Cheddar cheese, kimchi, roasted red bell pepper strips, Dijon mustard and pickles! I have been cooking Asian dishes for a long time and now am only getting into Hawaiian food and I am finding it to be very diverse. Now I have been making Spam Musubi for a long time on the other hand and I use my Musubi mold for all kinds of sushi style dishes. I find my Musubi mold to be an invaluable tool in my kitchen. So without further adieu lets watch how to make spam musubi on my video! Enjoy!

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Pasta: Orecchiette Pasta With Sausage Sundried Tomatoes Basil And Scrambled Eggs

Pasta: Orecchiette Pasta

 

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The first time I learned of Orecchiette was when I worked at an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles called Stomboli! It was owned by a man named Frank Mele' and he was from Bari, in the north of Italy. The Pasta originates from Puglia which is in Southern Italy. In Italian the word orecchio means ear. The Orecchiette is bowl shaped and about the size of a nickel. When you use Orecchiette try to find a superior brand as you can find Orecchiette in the stores but what you are looking for is Orecchiette that has cuts on the bowl shaped bottom of this pasta as this helps the Orecchiette hold the sauce you use and Orecchiette that is smooth on the bottom is just not as good! Now I know this is a nice little snippet of foodie history but there is a reason for it. Please allow me to elaborate. This weeks recipe is a pasta dish made with Orecchiette pasta. I chose this Pasta type because I have so much pasta in my house the Prime Minister of Italy would be proud!

I have SOOOOO much stuff in my pantries and cabinets that I could survive the Zombie Apocalypse for some time without having to go out and forage for something to eat! If you don't believe me then you should watch my video called Tag Your It. On the other hand of being SOOOOO well stocked is that it can become a foodie administrative nightmare! And it has! So this weekend I decided to go though all my kitchen cabinets and pantries and check dates and reorganize them to make them more useful to me at this point.

I also decided that if I am going to be reorganizing that I would not be buying food each week to make recipes with because I obviously have enough stuff hunkered down in my house that I could make recipes for weeks without having to go shopping. Well, this is what I will be doing for a couple of weeks or more in order to thin the herd of stuff I have in my pantries and cabinets so that I can refresh them later.

So this week I must have found like ten bags of Orecchiette pasta. Man! I had no idea! Ten bags! Then when I saw the rest of the pasta I had I thought to myself that I might as well open an Italian restaurant at this point! So this week it's going to be Pasta. This week I am going to be making Pasta Orecchiette With Spicy Andouille Sausage, Oil Cured Sundried Tomatoes, Fresh Basil And Scrambled Eggs! This Pasta dish is not a traditional Italian or Sicilian Pasta dish but it is made of influenced from both and I promise this Orechiette pasta dish will be delicious!

Now to be totally honest in Apulia and Puglia Italy this type of Pasta is generally served with chopped greens and other vegetables and if memory serves the combination of vegetables will be different between Apulia and Puglia and depending on which city you are in there might not even be a sauce on your Orecchiette. My Orecchiette will not have a sauce on it as the sauce will come from the juice of the sausage and the beef stock used to do the final stage of cooking of this dish. I think Mr. Mele' would be proud of me if he were still here today and hopefully he is no  matter where he is! Here's the video! Enjoy!

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