Lunch

Som Tam is a well known Thai salad made with raw papayas pounded in a terra cotta mortar–a unique way to make salad. It’s very healthy with a combination of sweet, tangy, savory and spicy flavors. In Thailand, Som Tam is everywhere from street venders to high-end restaurants and food courts. If you like Thai foods, I’m sure you will like or have already tried Som Tam before!

My family and I love eating Som Tam, and we can eat it almost every day, which we often do when we go to Thailand. However, it can be hard to make Som Tam the same way they do in Thailand if you can’t get raw papayas, or don’t have a terra cotta mortar. Where I live in the US, it’s easy to get everything I need to make Som Tam and other asian dishes. When I travel though, especially now in Spain, I can’t get raw papayas, and don’t have a mortar either.

To make Som Tum like we always do, I substitute carrots & cabbages for raw papayas. Sometimes, I add cucumbers too. These vegetables are more common and easy to find everywhere. For a mortar, I just use a regular salad bowl instead. The result is not exactly the same, but it’s healthy, and tasty in a different way.

Before we talk more about making Som Tam with cabbage, I would like to mention something about it first. Even though I grew up hearing that eating raw cabbage is not good for you, I never found out why. Instead, I avoided consuming it raw altogether.

However, a few years ago, I decided to look into the reasons. I read a few articles and found out that cruciferous vegetables such as cabbage should be cooked before being eaten as they contain chemicals that block the production of thyroid hormone in your body. Here is the link to the article I am talking about. You can use your own intuition whether to consume it raw. I still think eating it raw in moderation is ok, and I like it that way sometimes….

Spanish omelette (AKA Tortilla Patata) is one of the most famous and most common dishes in Spain. It was the first dish we ordered when we got here, and it’s a dish we often order when we eat out. It’s very filling, yet healthy. With both potatoes and eggs in it, we get protein and carbohydrates at the same time.

When I saw a Spanish omelette for the first time, I thought it must require an oven to make. It seems impossible to make anything look like that without baking, but soon I learned it doesn’t. However, there are two main things most people use to make it perfectly round and golden: a non-stick frying pan, and a lot of oil. Nonetheless, after watching our friends and others make it a few times, I knew I could make it my own way.

I experimented making it with a stainless steel frying pan, but it didn’t go well, and as a result, I burnt a few batches before getting it down. Finally, I have both the recipe and technique down to the point I’m comfortable to share it.

Like most dishes I cook, I adjust the original recipes to fit our way of living and eating better. For the Spanish omelette, I use a moderate amount of coconut oil, as well as adding some vegetables too. You can use any kind of vegetables you have on hand, but I often use spinach, broccoli and mushrooms. Even though most restaurants in Spain have plain tortilla patatas with only eggs and potatoes, some places offer various fixings like this too.

I use cooked potatoes instead of raw for making this, and it turns out better. To me, raw potatoes make it a little bit too starchy, and take longer to cook. I usually cook a lot of potatoes at a time, and have them ready to use in other dishes too. This is convenient, and fits my cooking routine well.

As far as other ingredients go, it’s hard to believe I only use salt to make it taste so good. The vegetables really enhance the flavor, especially with a few kinds together….

Vegan Miang Kham

The Thai appetizer, Miang Kham, is one of the healthiest snacks. It’s a perfect mix of savory, sweet, and tangy, along with healthy raw vegetables. It’s actually an appetizer, but we often eat it for dinner!

However, the original Minag Kham recipe from Thailand has fish sauce, shrimp paste, and dried shrimp, all of which we don’t eat. It also requires a lot of palm sugar to make the sauce thick, but I find it too sweet, and substitute a lesser amount of regular, unrefined cane sugar, that is always easy to find. To thicken the sauce, I use shallots or red onions with toasted coconut flakes, and minced crispy tofu instead. I substitute soy sauce for the fish sauce, and replace the shrimp paste with nutritional yeast. It turns out just the way I like, and I enjoy the flavor very much. It actually tastes as great as the authentic dish, but it feels even healthier and is easier to make!…

and enjoy them!

When I lived in Thailand, making my own sushi seemed impossible. I never thought I could make it at home–especially the vegetarian type. There are so many Japanese restaurants to choose from, and most of them serve sushi in amazingly tasty, Thai styles, which are convenient and fun to eat.

Talking about tasty Thai style, I’m still craving Tom-Yum Pizza! (based on the famous Thai soup). If you like Tom-Yum soup, I’m sure you’d love Tom-yum pizza, and it’s a standard fixing in Thailand. Thai people create all kinds of famous foods in Thai versions to please our taste buds. Sushi is the same, like pizza, there is plenty of great and often unique sushi available there.

Now, sushi is what I make at home almost every week, in fact, sometimes twice. It’s the favorite school lunch for my active daughter, as she can open her lunch box and munch it while busily talking with friends–an empty lunch box is guaranteed!

When we make it to eat at home, we don’t roll it, but eat it as wraps the way my Japanese friends showed me in Tokyo a long time ago. We call these Nori Wraps. I love eating sushi this way so much and have been making it for almost 20 years now. However, I do substitute a few things to suit my own style, and it’s pretty easy to make actually.

Let’s step into my kitchen for a little bit, so I can explain some main ingredients before we get the sushi-making started:…

In southern Thailand where I was born, turmeric is very common, and I grew up eating turmeric as part of my daily diet. We put turmeric in almost every dish, and we even have one dish called “gaeng leang” or “yellow curry” because we use so much turmeric in it. Whenever I helped my mom in the kitchen, my fingers got stained for days!

When I first moved to the U.S, I found that turmeric was not so common, and that made me forgot about it for a while. Like everything, when it’s out of sight, it’s also out of mind.

It came back to me when I happened to read an article about the benefits of turmeric. Some research says curacumin in turmeric has a powerful anti-inflammatory, which is a strong antioxidant that can fight or even cure some kinds of cancer. The article brought so many memories of eating turmeric back to me. How could I forget about that yellow root I didn’t like when it stained my hands?

I wanted to add turmeric back to my diet, so, I started to search for it again. To my happy surprise, it wasn’t hard at all to find turmeric powder. Sometimes, I can even buy fresh turmeric like we use in Thailand. As more people know about its benefits, it seems to be more popular nowadays.

One day, I was craving the salty taste of garlic and turmeric in my mother’s fish dishes so much. I decided to try making that dish, but replaced the fish with tofu. It turned out very similar to what I wanted, and satisfied my craving!

So, here is another way to add turmeric in your diet:…

The easiest dish I ever prepared was the dish for my daughter when she started to eat solid food. At the time, I didn’t have to do anything besides giving her plain steamed vegetables. I gave her one cooked vegetable at a time to observe her reactions with each type. I tasted everything before I fed her first, and was surprised they actually tasted good the way they were–plain. When I was finally sure that she wasn’t allergic to anything, I started to add some seasoning to her vegetables and thought she would love to eat them even more. Hmm. . . no, she didn’t like them any better than the plain ones. So, I adjusted how I cook vegetables to the way my daughter liked to eat, which was incredibly simple.

That made me realize that we are actually born to eat food close to its original form. Ever since, I have kept this idea in mind and tried to keep my food as simple as possible. I love how I can tell what each vegetable tastes like just by looking at it.

Here is one of my many plain vegetable dishes. With just broccoli, garlic & coconut oil, a pinch of salt, and lemon juice, it’s so plain yet very tasty:…

Vegan Miang Kham

Roll your own Sushi, or eat it as Nori Wraps

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About Gourmet Vegetarian Kitchen

Lunch

Vegan Miang Kham

Roll your own Sushi, or eat it as Nori Wraps

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About Gourmet Vegetarian Kitchen