A couple of years ago, wanting to learn more about my favorite cuisine, I purchased a copy of Cracking the Coconut by Su-Mei Yu. This cookbook focuses on authentic Thai home cooking and had been very highly praised. Since then, I have gotten into the habit of, every few months, picking the book up off my shelf, reading through it, drooling over many of the recipes and then putting it back down again without actually cooking anything from it. This is not a criticism of the book. The recipes certainly look enticing but the ingredients lists are very long and call for lots of exotic items and the recipes are highly labor intensive. To make any of the recipes would require much time and planning so, for me, this had become a book full of beautiful recipes that I fully intended to cook “some day soon.”

Earlier this month, I finally decided to stop pretending and force myself to make one of Su-Mei Yu’s recipes. I settled on Squid with Roasted Chilies in Oil which seemed somewhat less complicated than the other recipes. I took a trip down to my local Asian market to stock up on ingredients and proceeded to spend a good part of that Sunday soaking dried red chilies and tamarind, roasting fermented shrimp paste, frying (separately) mass quantities of shallots, garlic, dried shrimp and dried red chilies and then pureeing all of these ingredients together with palm sugar and fish sauce. All of this effort resulted in a small jar of thick, black paste called Nam Prik Pow. Once the paste was done, the rest of the recipe was a snap, requiring nothing more than a quick stir-fry of garlic, nam prik pow, soy sauce and squid with some thai basil added in at last minute. It looked great, the little rings and tentacles bathed in a deep ruby-colored sauce.  Unfortunately, it way too salty (and, coming from me, that’s saying a lot because I love salty foods.) I would have been sad that all of my hard work had resulted in such a disappointing dish but I knew that I still had enough paste for 5 or 6 more dinners, surely enough attempts to allow me to achieve perfection. Last night, I made the same dish with shrimp instead of squid. I used a full 2 tablespoons of nam prik pow (double what I had used before) and a combination of soy sauce and water in place of the full amount of soy sauce. It was delicious! The shrimp was juicy and deeply-flavored, sweet and just a little bit salty. It went wonderfully with the brown jasmine rice and stir-fried gai-lan that I served it with. Finally, an authentic and delicious Thai dish from my very own kitchen! I am now re-inspired to try more of Su-Mei Yu’s recipes. With one successful dish under my belt and a large tub of fermented shrimp paste sitting in my refrigerator, I have no more excuses.