Sunday Night Thai

I'm at a conference this week, so this'll probably be the last food entry until the weekend.

Last night we did a Thai night. I started with tom kha gai. I varied my standard approach by simmering the galangal, lime leaves, and lemon grass in the chicken stock for a while (30-40 minutes) and then straining that before making the soup. This gave a nicer flavor to the stock and avoided the "picking out the lemongrass" problem. Also: using galangal instead of ginger is good.

The other dish was a ground pork curry served over noodles (spaghetti). [I don't have the Thai cookbook with me to get the real name.] We somehow didn't have any curry powder in the house (a truly freakish event), so I substituted B&vG spice rub and some freshly ground cumin. I don't know what the dish was supposed to taste like, but what we ended up with was really, really good.