Happy Mother's Day

I invited my family over for a late lunch on Sunday, for Mother's Day --> Mom, Dad & Stef (Bunny is still in Quebec on his french learning course). Most of you probably know that my love for Thai food knows no bounds, what you don't know is that I armed myself with some Thai cookbooks last week, went grocery shopping and attempted to make some Thai dishes for Mother's Day. :)

By now you're probably thinking, "well isn't SHE ambitious", and you're probably right. I WAY underestimated the amount of time it would take to prepare everything!!

Here's some of the items I tried together with their ratings based on taste after preparation:

Rating Scale:
1 - You couldn't *possibly* have followed the recipe
2 - Ok, but something's just not right here
3 - Good, but you've got to tweak this one a bit
4 - Pretty darn good!
5 - So good I can't stop eating!


Appetizer:
Green Mango Salad - Rating 4
This turned out pretty good. I was a bit worried at first as the mangoes that I ended up with weren't as green as I'd hoped and so they made slicing through the mangoes as suggested in the book damn near impossible, but the in the end the mangoes were just near perfect. Next time I am going to try to get a cross somewhere between the green ones I wanted and the ones I ended up with.

Cashew Nut Chicken with Steamed Rice - Rating 2
Well the rice turned out well if that counts for anything... *laugh*

Bah! I followed the recipe exactly [well I made one substitution, I used chili powder in place of chili paste - where the hell can one find chili paste I ask??!], but something wasn't quite right with this one. The soy sauce turned everything a dirty colour so presentation was the first thing to go, also I think the orange wedges I used were a bit too big, but that aside the flavour never came through that I was expecting - ah well next time I'm going to tweak this one a bit.

Grilled Coconut Salmon - Rating 3
This turned out okay, a change from the asparagus, lemons & onions salmon that Kev usually makes, but finished in half the time - yet I still managed to over grill it - altogether it was good.

Pad Thai - Rating 2/3
I couldn't decide how to rate this one, a few things went wrong, the recipe called for the noodles to be soaked in cold water for at least an hour [instead of boiling on the stove] - I soaked them for about 70mins but it wasn't enough, next time I'll do about 2 hours. The next problem was that it seemed to be missing some kind of sauce for the noodles - I'm wondering if it's peanut sauce of some kind... but it WAS a very tasty dish once you got past the not-soft, somewhat dry noodles.

Chocolate dipped strawberries - 5
I used dark chocolate for these and they were smashing. The key to heating chocolate is to take it out of the microwave before it melts completely, stirring it to finish the melting by hand. The key to perfect strawberries is to pat them completely dry before dipping them in chocolate. If you're going to try this, resist the urge to add liquer to your chocolate, this kills the texture of the chocolate.

Almond-Eggwhites-Sugar cookies - 4
These were so simple to make. I got them out of the "Heart Smart" cookbook by Bonnie Stern. There were four ingredients --> almonds, egg whites, sugar and vanilla. These turned out really well, but next time I think I'll stick to white sugar instead of brown sugar as the brown sugar burned around the edges.


What I learnt:

1. Some fresh herbs and spices such as Basil, Mint & Coriander SHOULD NOT be frozen in an attempt to keep them fresh - even if their packages are sealed. Bad, bad idea. Red peppers, green onions yes, the above list not so much. See I thought that by washing and preparing some of the items ahead of time I'd save on prep time the actual day... let's just say it's a good thing I'd left a good portion of the herbs in the fridge afterall.

2. You can make chewier cookies if you reduce the baking time on the almond cookies.

3. That the next time I think it's going to take 2 hours prep time, give myself 3 hours instead.

Everything considered, my parents ate it, no one had to be rushed to the hospital and we had a very good mother's day at home, relaxing and conversing with the folks. We also spoke with Granny ( she's in Saskatchewan) and Bunny (who had apparently spent the morning watching Scooby Doo in french - the poor kid, he has to speak french for his entire six week stay, even when they go out on the town, one thing's for sure he's probably not going to pick up any girls like that! *laugh*)

Fun times, fun times.