Simply It

Sometimes a lady just needs her estrogen fix. Having gone to an all-women's college, I find I miss it more than most.

And before you gag, all I mean is that sometimes one just desires the exclusive company of women. It's always such a comfort to be in the presence of intelligent, personable, accomplished ladies.

A bunch of us met up at Simply It for a dinner with lots of wine. It reminded me that one of the main reasons why I was looking forward to school was to meet all of my peers.

As far as the food itself, solid. I wouldn't go rushing back to fill a Thai craving, but the hosts were very generous, and the company quite fine.

Simply It, 2269 North Lincoln Ave., Chicago, IL

Star of Siam

Whoo whee this dinner was hard to arrange. After bombarding my classmates with an absurd number of emails, a few classmates and I were finally able to meet for some chowing down.

We opted for Star of Siam. The restaurant is by and large tasty, but it has definitely made some concessions to American tastes, and this order of spring rolls is case in point. Why oh why is there a brown sweet sauce and scallions and sliced red bell peppers atop these rolls?

I would probably search for another, more authentic Thai restaurant before heading back. That being said, I just ordered delivery for the first time from them.

I convinced my dining companions to order the Green Papaya Salad becuase it's my test of every Thai restaurant. Star of Siam was a bit too heavy with either the fish sauce or maybe they actually added some Pla Ra, or pickled mud fish, and failed to balance it with the sweet, sour, and bitter components of the dish. Either way, the dish was too fishy for people.

A perfectly decent plate of Phad Thai arrived for our delectation.

The curries were fine as well. They were heavy on the coconut cream side, but I did manage to eat so much that I felt bloated for the rest of the night. Lovely image I know.

Star of Siam, 11 E. Illinois Street, Chicago, IL

Idiot Moment

I must be constitutionally incapable of properly prepping a blog posting about how to make Thai Curry. In October 2008 I tried to write about making a Thai Dinner but I forgot to take pictures beyond ingredients.

This time at least I managed to grab a shot of ingredients after I prepped them, but there is nothing, nada, zippo of the finished product. Basically, I felt the need for a big pot of Thai Green Curry. I have a pot prepared green curry from Mae Ploy, which doesn't make me feel completely legit, but I did not have time to spend half a day pounding away with the mortar and pestle.

Making curry is simple: Heat oil in pot, throw in a few spoonfuls of curry, add coconut milk and palm sugar. Throw in meat (or if you want, sear meat a little with the curry and hot oil), then throw in vegetables according to time it will take to cook. Season with fish sauce to taste.

Well, it is admittedly sort of nerve wracking the first time around, but honestly after a try or two, it's pretty simple stuff.

Jackson Heights Food Crawl: Part 3

Last on our itinerary was dinner number two at Sripraphai. Let me tell you, that place was absolutely jam-packed, and it was the first time during our whole excursion where we saw faces that were as foreign as ours. Nobody looked like they were from the neighborhood, but Sripraphai, though well known, isn't super high on foodie lists amongst the young professional-Manhattan dwelling circles that I frequent, so I can only conclude that these were your foodies who didn't dig hype about red ropes and the name of the designer or the portfolio of the architect.

While there, I noticed (let the stereotypes roll):

middle-class Indian family also chilling in the totally not exciting Himalayan corner grocery store across the street while we roughed the 45 minute wait time;

thuggish Chinese looking dudes in their low-20s;

tattooed Brooklyn couple;

yuppy white people with their U.N. friends (aka my peers).

While we waited for our number to be called up, W and I walked up and down Roosevelt whereupon I gleefully perused every little grocery front and dollar store. I managed to get 100 plastic disposable shot glasses, and even though I'm trying to reduce my plastic consumption, I didn't want to pass up the opportunity for panna cotta tastings and gazpacho shots on the roof this summer.

At one point, no two points, I stared glumly at two fine fine looking taco trucks and shouted questions to the proprietor while our stood as far away on the sidewalk as possible, not trusting myself to prevent an order of vast quantities of soft taco goodness if I were any closer.

Thankfully, when we were finally seated at Sripraphai the food met expectations. We just ordered some basics to "test" the place. Their green papaya salad reminded me of Thailand because it had the dried shrimp and green beans. It was plenty hot for our tastes and would probably merit a mild in Bangkok.

The Tom Yum Shrimp Soup came with oyster mushrooms and was really fragrant. You could see the lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves floating in the broth, and the only downside is we couldn't drink it fast enough and it wasn't over a little burner.

This is the green curry with roasted duck. A bit greasy looking but when you could taste that they had made their own curry, there was a faint background texture to the curry as a result of all the pounded spices and herbs.

But because we were so full, this is all we managed to finish of the curry. W suffered to take it home and thank goodness we didn't get any tacos.

Sripraphai, 64-13 39th Avenue (near 64th Street), Queens, 718-899-9599

Phuket: Get a Driver

Two years ago we took a family trip to Phuket, Thailand. This was our second time visting the island, and the round we wised up. Or rather, I wised up and did some research and found a driver recommended by people posting on TripAdvisor.

Our last day in Thailand, it was a bit rainy, and we couldn't do any more scuba diving since we would be hopping on a plane soon. We scheduled a trip to an elephant refuge, and for meals asked our driver to take us to his favorite places on the island.

When we arrived at each restaurant, we just had him sit with us, order whatever he thought would be good, and then we went to chow down.

You just dip these suckers in the sauces that's in the next picture.

I need to learn how to make more Thai condiments. The thing that's great about Thai food is that it makes you feel alive. All the contrasting flavors of sweet, salt, sour and bitter really wake up one's senses.

For breakfast we stopped at this place, and I ordered pad thai. It comes enfolded in this thin egg crepe, with toppings on the side.

Open sesame!

These crabs aren't in Phuket. They're in China. This is just to illustrate that this species is bizarrly bright red even before it's cooked.

This crab is in Thailand. See still red.

It actually doesn't even come close to beating out a good old Dungeness.

Clams, spicy. We also had a salad that had roe from a horseshoe crab. Not so good, and I love roe.
Green papaya salad, my favorite. We got one that was mild, it was too hot for my parents and brother. I wanted more, so we asked for one that was a little hotter. My whole face was red, and I could feel my ears ringing slightly. When finished, I asked the driver how hot it was. He's from Bangkok. He mused for a minute, that's about medium. He saw the crushed look on my face. I wanted to be able to stand up to the Thais. "That's pretty hot," he reassured me.

Thai Dinner: a Sad State of Affairs

Not the Thai dinner. That was a clear success in my own inestimable opinion. No the sad state of affairs is an early incarnation of the continuing sorry state of pictures on this blog. I really don't like taking pictures of food. It really distracts from two of the primary roles food serves in my life. One, the pure sensory enjoyment. Pausing to take what are inevitably some prettty crap pictures while a plate of steaming food is cooling before your eyes is a small tragedy. Rushing to take the picture, so that I don't impose too much on the flow of dining just means that I don't even pause long enough to enjoy the visual presentation. Two, good food is a means of facilitating human interaction, mainly, fine conversation. The interjection of the camera and the necessary flash going off in a busy home kitchen or a dim restaurant is jarring and interrupts the flow of a meal.

So my early attempts at pictures for this blog often consisted of a few snapshots taken when it would not intrude mightily on either of the above two factors. Hence, these largely unhelpful and uninteresting photos of the ingredients I had purchased for a Thai dinner I made.

Well, they might have been interesting if I had bothered to take pictures of the final dishes, but of course, I didn't. See that lemongrass, that's from the Bangkok Center Grocery in Chinatown. The lemongrass is Thai lemongrass, which is slimmer and more flavorful than its American-grown counterpart. The powdery package wedged behind the limes and the dried shrimp (for the green papaya salad) is powedered kaffir lime rind, which apparently is a key ingredient in curry, which I had no idea about. I picked up many helpful tips while bombarding the poor clerk at the Thai grocery store.

Among them was the recommentation to Chao Thai and the tip that Sripraphai is no longer the place to go to for local Thais. Oh, another tip that I have for you I didn't pick up from the kid behind the counter. It is my own legitimate tip. Coriander root is a key ingredient in making your own curry, which I pound with a pestle in a large stone mortar I purchased especially for this purpose. It is mighty difficult to get coriander root around here. I even tried begging the Chinese market men to give me their reject roots because they sell cilantro with the roots sliced off. I was informed that the cilantro ships with the roots removed. Well lucky lucky you, you're reading this blog, and I can tell you that the Fairway on Broadway and 74th sells cilantro with the roots! Now don't you feel so much more knowledgeable in the ways of a the wiley chef?

This? This is just Thai eggplant. Oh yeah, what was all of this stuff for? Green curry with seafood and Thai eggplant; Red curry with Peking duck (my one cheat, I purchased from Chinatown premade) and pineapple; fish cakes; miang kam (sort of like make your own Thai burritos, where you can choose amongst peanut sized pieces of lime, dried shrimp, toasted coconut, peanuts, sliced mouse shit chilis, pickled garlic, pickled shallot, fried shallot, fried garlic, cilantro, and a coconut/peanut/shrimp sauce, wrap it up in a salad leaf and shove in mouth); green papaya salad; squid in an herb salad of mint, cilantro and basil.

I don't go to Queens on a whim

Tonight, I had a Friday night date with myself. Michael Pollan was speaking at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens.

Last time I was in Queens, it was because my parents were in town, and we had to go have Chinese dinner with some cousins. In the Bay Area, a good Chinese restaurant for a eating-obsessed family as my own, is a constantly moving target. Picking the right restaurant means having similar minded friends who are helping you track all of the key factors that go into a good meal outside of home and ask the correct questions: what restaurant has just fired their star chef, which restaurant poached that chef, is there some other restaurant that has recently brought someone over from Hong Kong or the mainland (maybe that's better than a reject chef), which dishes should you order (just because a place can cook some things well, does not and will not mean it can cook all dishes well), and most importantly, has the information source actually eaten there and vetted it personally? The family-obligatory meal in Flushing, suffice it to say, was not with people who live to eat. They did not properly choose the restaurant. It was not exemplary, which meant it was not worth leaving Manhattan.

Today, however, Michael Pollan seemed like a good enough excuse to venture beyond the usual boundaries. To help make the trip more worthwhile, I decided to check out Chao Thai in Elmhurst. I suspect my desire to go to P.S.1 and then go to Chao Thai is not unlike a New Englander finally heading to L.A., and then thinks she might as well swing by San Francisco since she'll be in the neighborhood anyways.

Thank goodness for multi-tasking because when I showed up 20 minutes before doors opened, the line wrapped around for the equivalent of three blocks.


Three people in front of me, was this man with his bicycle seat shoved into his backpack and some green political pin that instructed me to vote for Nader. Oh boy, it was going to be one of those sorts of gatherings. But wait, wait, the three women in front of me included one who kindly complimented my skirt (Club Monaco), one had a Prada bag slung over her shoulder, and I overheard them empathizing with how the other was on vacation in Hawaii when she found out that Bear Stearns went bankrupt, and she consequently was out of a job. (Don't worry, I think she's okay, before I stopped being such a nosy turd, I heard her assure them that she'd be happy to take a year off and just do whatever she wanted, so I think she won't be in the food bank line anytime soon.)

Of course, the venue quickly reached capacity. They moved it indoors because the organizers were afraid of rain. (Speaking of which, watching the organizers and the people behind the casher try to deal with an unforeseen circumstance that they must have known about for at least 30 minutes made me feel both discouraged and smug. Discouraged that these people were so incompetent at taking a leadership position and quickly and decisively dealing with the situation. Smug because I knew and was thankful that I wasn't so incompetent in my own life.)

People packed into every available space in the room, sitting on the floor, up against the wall, and spilled out into the hallways surrounding the lecture space, which was where I camped out. Looking around, it looked like a scene from the past, to see all of these people who had taken time out of their busy schedules, to go to Queens, sitting on the floor with their heads bowed, with thoughtful quiet looks on their faces as they listened to what Mr. Pollan had to say. The modern version of Roosevelt's fireside chats.


As soon as Michael Pollan stopped speaking I rushed out, not waiting to hear the audience questions. I want to arrive at Chao Thai with plenty of time to order and chow down.

Chao Thai is very small. Thai karaoke was playing on the tiny television set installed in a corner of the restaurant. Along the wall, on little ledges, were a profusion of cheap Easter decorations that might have come from the Walgreen's around the corner and would have been perfectly at place in a northern Florida suburban elementary school display.


I ordered the Som Tum (green papaya salad). It's my Thai test dish. Dim sum test dish: har gow (shrimp dumplings. French bistro test dish: steak frites, steak tartare, or tarte tatin. Sushi test dish: don't have one. I know I'm supposed to order tomago nigiri, but I've never willing eaten it and have no idea what it's even supposed to taste like when well made.

Back to the Som Tum. How spicy should I have it? After reading the New York Times review, I asked her to make the Som Tum medium by her standards, but spicy by anyone else's around here. Besides, the spiciest Som Tum I'd ever had was in Phuket, when we had our driver take us to his favorite restaurants on our last day. It was so spicy my ears felt as if they were rining a little. According to our guide, it was "medium."

Mistake to think the nice lady at Chao Thai understood this. The flavors in the Som Tum were well-balanced, but it was not very spicy. It also bothered me that there were no peanuts or dried shrimp, like there normally are when I order the dish in Thailand. I should have just begged her to make it spicy, and trusted that she'd never give a non-Thai something that was spicy by Thai standards.

For an entree, I also stuck to basics and got the green curry with squid. There was a huge amount of curry, maybe twice what you would normally get in a restaurant order. I tried valiantly to get the maximum curry to rice ratio with each bite, but even so, I managed to finish maybe half of the dish. I took to just sipping spoonfuls of curry directly, as I wasn't ready to let go.


When I headed home, I was feeling rather svelte, perhaps riding on the strength of that skirt compliment from earlier in the day and because I was so proud that I hadn't ordered the mango and sticky rice dish for dessert. Then I walked into my bedroom, looked in the mirror, and realized that my stomach stuck out as far as my breasts. My torso looked like a tree trunk. Thank goodness tonight was a solo date.