Fried Rice with Turmeric

Fried Rice with Turmeric

from Thai Vegetarian Cooking, Vatcharin Bhumichitr, Pavilion, 1991.

I’m never successful when I try to cook Asian food. I don't seem able to get the flavours right. Now I have been given a new cookbook to try and so it looks like here I go again.

The book has an introduction that is full of interest for vegetarians for the author was not vegetarian before they began the book nor are they now. However they have been won over by true Thai vegetarian meals. 

In Thailand they looked for meals that were not just modifications of meat meals with items such as fish sauce left out. They had a difficult search but eventually found places where the meals were genuinely vegetarian. The author has since gone back to London and helped open the first Thai vegetarian restaurant in Britain. 

After reading this introduction I was certainly ready to try the recipes.

I began with a simple recipe for fried rice with turmeric. Now the one Asian meal I can cook successfully is fried rice and I can do this because over time and over many repeats I have been carefully drilled into how to go about a Malaysian fried rice. I am quite proud of my efforts in this. 

So I now tried this particular fried rice with some trepidation as I knew it was not just a matter of tipping all the ingredients into the wok and stirring them together.

The dish turned out to be somewhat easier than the one I usually make. But I was very pleased with the result. It was full of flavour and very colourful. In fact I think I’ll have to make another one for the teacher of the Malaysian fried rice.

Taste: ✔✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔