A Taste of Thailand

Saturday night we had our neighbors over for a Thai inspired dinner party. We had a fancy shmancy 4 course meal, along with some good wine and good conversation. Some of our conversation centered around a discussion of using cloth shopping bags, after mention of this huge area of plastic "stew" fouling the Pacific ocean and killing marine life. If you aren't already using cloth shopping bags, shame on you. Read this article and you may change your mind!!



Anyway, on to the food. We started our evening with Mango-Snow Pea Shoot Spring Rolls. These rolls were filled with rice noodles, cucumber, mango and snow pea shoots. I served them with tamari for dipping. Yum!!

Our next course was the Thai Coconut Corn Stew from Eat Drink and Be Vegan. This soup is absolutely incredible!! All of the flavors are just perfect together. This dish is definitely going to come into heavy rotation here!! The flavors of this soup are so fresh that it'll even be a nice soup to serve through the summer. Rob and I ate the left-overs for lunch yesterday, and I actually think the soup was better after sitting over night.

For our main course I made the Orange-Chili Stir-Fry that I've blogged about before. This time I left out the mushrooms from the stir-fry and added asparagus instead. The stir-fry was served over Coconut Basmati rice. I really love cooking my rice in coconut milk, it really adds a nice subtle flavor to the stir-fry.

And to finish, I made the Frozen Coconut "Thaiphoon" with Mango and Lime from Vegan Planet. It's basically a dairy free ice-cream made from coconut milk and pureed mango, with some lime zest and lime juice stirred in at the end. Topped with toasted shredded coconut. It's the perfect dessert for a Thai inspired meal. It's flavors are nice and refreshing, and will be great for cooling off on a hot day.