Chickpea Curry

Chickpea Curry

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

I have two different Thai vegetarian cookery books. My impression is that each one approaches their recipes from a different direction. One uses traditional recipes and then modifies them to make them vegetarian. The other creates the recipes from the start.

The few recipes I have cooked from the former have not been overly successful as far as flavour has been concerned. They have missed out on the rich tang of Thai cooking.

From the second book I have only made two recipes and these have pleased with the richness of the flavour though, so far, they have not, to my mind, been flavours that have been particularly Thai. Nevertheless this is the cookery book which I prefer out of the two.

In all fairness to the books I'll keep cooking from both. Once I've tried a bit further it's quite possible I could change my first impressions.

The chickpea curry from Thai Vegetarian Cooking was an easy one to make once the herbs and spices were pounded in the mortar. From then on it was only a matter of adding the ingredients into the saucepan in the specified order. A warm and satisfying meal.  

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔✔

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: ✔✔✔✔