This is a common dish for Thai office workers, the reason is simple, it is widely available from street food stalls and can be cooked very quickly in a short lunch break. It is also quite spicy so its a great way to pep yourself up for the afternoon. Fried egg is sometimes look down on in the west, but its a staple of Thai cooking.
It originates from central Thailand, but can be bought everywhere, it is medium spicy.

Ingredients
200 gms pork meat
1 Onion
1 Egg
1 Tablespoon Light Soya sauce
1 Tablespoon Oyster Suace
1 Teaspoon Fish Sauce
1 Teaspoon Sugar
2 Tablespoon oil
A pinch of pepper
5 Bird chillis
5 Large red chilli
3 Garlic Cloves
5 Kaprow Basil leaves

Preparation
1.Clean the pork meat and chop it into small bite sized pieces.
2 Slice the onion finely.
3. Peel and chop garlic and chilli until fine.
4. Fry garlic and chilli in hot pan with oil until the garlic aroma comes out.
5. Add the pork and fry it until cooked, add the onion and ingredients.
6. Add kaprow basil and a pinch of pepper.
7. Fry for a few minutes long until the onions are soft, then set aside on a serving dish.
7.Clean the pan and heat some more oil.
8. Fry the egg,the egg is usually served sunny side up.

Serve With
Hot Thai Fragrant Rice
Cucumber and tomato slices

The base for this dish is very simple plain rice soup. However the rice is just a carrier for the flavours of the side dishes. The main elements are salty duck eggs [saltiness], century/thousand year old eggs in breadcrumbs with chillies [crunch & hotness], pickled cabbage [sour], and pickled turnip, peanuts & egg [crunchy & tangy]. Stir fried vegetables are also served to bulk up the dish.
The side dishes are normally shared, everyone takes some of the side dish and eats it with their own rice. Some mouthfuls of rice are spicy, some tangy, some salty. Imagine biting into a mouthful of plain rice with almost no taste then hitting a salty duck egg yolk for a burst of salt! This is one of the most underrated Thai dishes.

Ingredients for Rice Soup 4 People
50 gms Fragrant Rice
150 ltr Water

Preparation For Rice Soup
1. Soak the rice in water for 10 minutes.
2. Boil over a medium heat, until the rice begins to break down and become soft. About 20 minutes is typical.
3. Serve with the following trimmings: pickled green cabbage, fried vegetables (like these), hard boiled salted duck or salted chicken eggs and the two side dishes explained below.

Ingredients for Fried Egg & Tangy Turnip
2 Eggs
30 gms Preserved Turnip
1 Tablespoon Chopped or Pounded Peanuts
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
1 Teaspoon Sugar
2 Tablespoons Oil

Preparation For Fried Egg & Tangy Turnip
1. Whip the eggs.
2. Chop the pickled turnip finely.
3. Mix the pickled sweet turnip and chopped peanuts into the egg.
4. Heat the oil in the pan and add the egg mix.
5. As it fries, scramble the mixture. You can see the result of this dish in the bottom centre of the the picture.

Ingredients for Spicy Century Eggs
5 Century Eggs
1 Tablespoon Flour
3 Tablespoons Water
30 gms Breadcrumbs
4 Bird Chillies
A Little Sliced Onion
1 Teaspoon Chopped Ginger Root
1 Tablespoon Fish Sauce
1 Tablespoon Lemon Juice
Oil for Deep Frying

Preparation for Spicy Century Eggs
You can see the battered eggs in the bottom row, on the left of the picture.
1. Peel the century eggs and cut them in half.
2. Mix the flour with water, cover the eggs with the mixture, then roll in breadcrumbs.
3. Heat the oil.
4. Deep fry the eggs, they only need a few seconds to cook and for the breadcrumbs to turn brown.
5. Make a sauce by mixing: chopped onions, chopped chillies, chopped ginger, fish sauce and lemon juice.
6. Serve the eggs covered with the onion sauce.

The glaze on this chicken is made from sweet chilli, sugar and wine. It adds a slight sharpness to the chicken, so typical of Thai dishes. For children we sometimes use ketchup in place of sweet chilli sauce.

Ingredients
300 gms Chicken Legs
1 Teaspoons Salt
5 Tablespoons Sweet Chilli Sauce
2 Tablespoons Sugar
4 Tablespoons White Wine
Oil for deep frying

Preparation
1. Clean and steam the chicken legs for 20 minutes to cook them.
2. Preheat the oil, to 170 degree celsius.
3. Fry the chicken legs for 8 minutes to brown them.
4. Into a small saucepan, put the sweet chilli sauce, sugar, salt and white wine, and heat gently until the sugar has dissolved.
5. Add the chicken legs and stir them to get them coated with a little of the glaze. Then serve.

Serve With
Salad Vegetables
Thai Fragrant Rice

Does flavour or appearance mean more to you? I've photographed the duck pink with the sauce spread over it - very photogenic, but you can get much more flavour from it by frying the duck thoroughly in the sauce in the pan. The flavour blends well into the meat and the frying effect broadens the flavours in the sauce. It won't win any food photography awards, but it tastes so much better!

Ingredients
400- 500 gms Duck Breast
1 Tablespoon Ground Cinnamon
1 Teaspoon Salt
1 Teaspoon Sugar

Ingredients for Palo Sauce
3 Tablespoons Sweet Dark Soy Sauce
6 Tablespoons Water
1 Teaspoon Cinnamon Powder
1 Tablespoon Sugar
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
2 Teaspoons Cassava Starch

Preparation
1. Clean the duck, mix with the cinnamon, salt, and sugar. Leave to marinade (overnight if possible).
2. Pan fry the duck skin side down (without oil) until the skin is browned and nearly burnt. As it cooks the fat will come out.
3. Turn it over and cook for a further 8 minutes.
4. Finally, cook it in the over at 160 degrees celsius for another 10 minutes just to finish it. Then remove and let it rest.
5. Make ths sauce, heat dark soy, cinnamon, sugar and salt in a saucepan.
6. Mix the cassava starch with a little water, and stir it into the sauce. Cook it through until it thickens.
7. Slice the duck, so a little skin is which each slice.
8. In a frying pan, mix the duck and the sauce and fry it over a high heat for a further minute. Stirring the duck so the sauce coats it completely.

Another duck recipe, if you still have left over peking duck from the day before yesterday then you are Thai! If not, I've described how to make the duck again.

Ingredients
1 Whole Duck
Palm Sugar
Dark Soy Sauce
Honey

Preparation for the Duck
1. Clean and wash the duck.
2. Scald the skin by pouring boiling water over it.
3. Take your fingers and run them under the duck skin to separate the skin from the fat.
3. Pat the skin dry with kitchen paper.
4. Dissolve palm sugar and honey in soy sauce, and brush it over the duck, leave to dry and brush again to build up a good coating.
5. Roast in the oven, 1 hour per kilo in a medium oven is typical, for the last 5 minutes turn the heat up to crisp the skin.

Ingredients For Sauce
3 Tablespoons Hoi Sin Sauce
50 ml Water
2 Tablespoons Chinese Whiskey or Ya Dong (Thai herb spirit)

Preparation
1. Mix all ingredients together in a saucepan.
2. Heat until they begin to steam, then turn off the heat.
3. Layer fragrant rice, then duck, the spoon over the sauce.

Pad Thai is a fried noodle dish, although there are many dishes called Pad Thai, all are essentially the same: fried rice or glass noodles with chilli and other ingredients for flavouring. Here we use glass noodles. Be careful when choosing your noodles, they must be soaked and fried, a good quality noodles survives this cooking process, poor quality noodles will break into unpleasant small pieces. This is a quick cook dish from central Thailand, you add the chilli when it is served, so your guest can choose to make the dish spicy or mild. For the pounded peanut, it's better to choose a dry unsalted peanut, roast them it in a dry frying pan and pound them in a Thai mortar until they form smaller pieces. Alternatively you can chop the nuts by hand. These can be prepared ahead of time and stored in a cool dry place for a long time.

Ingredients for 2 people
1 Small Pack of Glass Noodle
1 Egg
50 gsm. of Dry Shrimp
50 gms. of Tofu
2 Small Red Onion
50 gsm. Soya Bean Shoots (Beansprouts)
1/2 Tablespoon Sugar
2 Light Soy Sauce
1 Tablespoon Oyster Sauce
2 Tablespoon Chilli Sauce
1 Tablespoon Peanuts ( pound to fine pieces )
1 Teaspoon Dry Flaked Chilli
3 Tablespoons Oil

Serve With
Fresh Soya Bean
Green Lettuce

Garnish With
Sugar
Peanuts ( pounded to fine pieces )
Dried Chilli ( pounded to flakes )
Lemon or Lime Slice

Preparation
1. Soak the glass noodles in water for 5 minutes to soften them.
2. Chop the tofu into small squares,
3. Slice the red onion into smaller pieces.
4. Clean the fresh soya shoots and chop off the roots.
5. Put the oil in a hot frying pan with the dry shrimp, and fry for 30 seconds
6. Move it to one side of the frying pan to make room to fry an egg.
7. Break the egg in hot oil and stir quickly for a few seconds to break it up.
8. Add the glass noodle and other cooking ingredients and stir-fry for 1 minute.

I've done Thai suki-yaki before, this is the simpler Isan variant, which uses a tom-yum pan, and plenty of meat. The main elements of this dish are a meat plate, a vegetable plate, a soup and 3 seasoning sauces. The meat is cooked in the soup, together with the vegetables at the table.
To cook this dish, the soup pan needs to get hot. If that is not possible, then you should precook the meat and vegetables before bringing them to the table. The best option of all is a tom-yum pan without the centre hole (not like the one shown in the photograph), together with a proper charcoal or oil burner. You can then cook the meat on the centre plate to brown it first, them move it to the soup. Unfortunately for me, I only have a regular tom-yum pan and have to make do with cooking the meat in the soup.

Ingredients for Meat Plate
500 Pork Meat (or your preference)
100 gms Pork Liver
2 Tablespoons White Wine
1 Tablespoons Toasted Sesame Seeds
2 Tablespoons Light Soy Sauce

Preparation For Meat Plate
1. Clean the pork meat and pork liver.
2. Slice them very thinly and mix with the white wine, light soy sauce and sesame seeds.
3. Leave to marinade for at least 30 minutes.

Ingredients for Sweet Chilli Sauce
5 Tablespoons Sweet Chilli Sauce
4 Bird Chillies
3 Garlic Cloves
2 Tablespoons Fish Sauce

Preparation Sweet Chilli Sauce
1. Peel the garlic.
2. Put the garlic, chillies, sweet chilli sauce and fish sauce into the blender and blend until it's well mixed.
3. Alternatively pulp them in a Thai mortar.

Ingredients for Green 'Seafood' Sauce
5 Bird Chillies
4 Garlic Cloves
2 Tablespoons Vinegar
1/3 Teaspoons Sugar
2 Teaspoons Lemon Juice
2 Tablespoons Fish Sauce

Preparation for Green Sauce
1. Peel the garlic.
2. Put all the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth.
3. Alternatively pulp them in a Thai mortar.

Ingredients for Sukiyaki Sauce
6 Tablespoons Sweet Chilli Sauce
2 Tablespoons Vinegar
2 Tablespoons Light Soy Sauce
1 Tablespoon Sugar
30 ml Sesame Oil
2 Tablespoons Toasted Sesame Seeds
2 Tablespoons Chopped Coriander
5 Garlic Cloves

Preparation for Sukiyaki Sauce
1. Peel the garlic.
2. Put everything in a blender except for the toasted sesame seeds.
3. Blend everything together.
4. Add the sesame seeds on the top as a garnish.

Ingredients for Soup & Vegetable Plate
800 ml Water
1 Chicken Stock Cube
30 gms Chinese Radish
40 gms Celery
40 gms Carrot
40 gms Chinese Cabbage
40 gms Coriander Leaves
40 gms Spring Onions
40 gms Cauliflower
40 gns Glass Noodle

Preparation
1. Clean and slice all the vegetables and put onto the vegetable serving plate.
2. Boil the water with stock cube, add the chinese radish and bring to the boil to form a stock.
3. Light the burner in the serving pan.
4. Empty the stock into pan.
5. Each person takes some of the meat and vegetables and cooks it in the sauce for 5 minutes.
6. Once cooked, they remove it into their plate and dip the meats into the sauces to their own tastes.

Note: if you don't have a hot burner, hot enough to cook the meat, then cook the meat and vegetables in the stock by simmering it for 3-5 minutes before serving it.

This noodle curry dish is standard faire among Isaan Thais (North Eastern Thais). The predominant taste is of fish sauce & chilli rather than curry, but this can be a bit overwhelming so you may prefer to increase the chicken and peanuts if you are not accustomed to authentic Thai food. You can use either pork or chicken in this recipe.

Ingredient for Family
200 gms Chicken Breast
50 gms Red Curry Paste
50 gms Peanuts
3 Tablespoons Fish Sauce
3 Tablespoons Sugar
1 Teaspoon Salt
300 mls Coconut Milk
200 mls Water
200 gms Flat Rice Noodles

Serve With
100 gms Cabbage
50 gms Cucumber
50 gms Green Beans
100 gms Lettuce
35 gms Coriander
20 gms Mint

Preparation
Curry Sauce
1. Put coconut milk in a boiling pan and bring to the boil.
2. Add the red curry paste and mix.
3. Mince the chicken breast then add to the curry pan.
4. Cook until the chicken is thoroughly cooked.
5. Add the water and bring to the boil again.
6. Add the fish sauce, sugar, and salt, and cook for 10 minutes.
7. Meanwhile, toast peanuts in a dry frying pan to bring out the smell. The pound them in a mortar, or chop them into smaller pieces and add to the curry sauce.

Noodles
1. Soak noodle with warm water for 15 minutes.
2. Steam for 5 minute, then rinse with cool water.

Vegetable
1. Slice cabbage for into small strips.
2. Cut the cucumber into small triangles.
3. Chop the green bean into short 1cm lengths.
4. Chop coriander into 3cm lengths.
5. Clean the mint, and take only the leaves.

To Serve
1. Place all the vegetables on the plate.
2. Top off with the cooked noodles.
3. Ladle sauce over the noodles until the sauce covers the whole dish.
4. Serve.

This is a rich Thai dish, duck in a sweet sauce made from sugar with sour tamarind water to balance the sweetness. The skin of the duck is almost candied when it's cooked, but despite this the dish isn't very sweet. In Thailand this is always served with rice, duck is expensive, rice is cheap and we eat lots of rice and a little duck unlike the photograph!

Ingredients for 2 People
200 gms Duck Breast
1 Tablespoon Honey
2 Tablespoons Oyster Sauce
2 Tablespoons Light Soy Sauce
2 Teaspoons Ground Ginger

Preparation
1. Clean the duck and dry the skin with kitchen paper. Put it into a plastic freezer bag - we will use this bag to coat and marinade the duck.
2. Put the light soy sauce, oyster sauce, ginger and honey into the bag.
3. Shake the bag to mix the ingredients and coat the duck with the sauces.
4. Marinade in the fridge for 5-8 hours.
5. Grill slowly for 30 minutes turning several times, to cook and brown the duck. Alternatively you can also oven roast it, again until completely cooked.

Ingredients for Duck Sauce
2 Tablespoons Tamarind Water
2 Tablespoons Palm Sugar
1 Teaspoon Dark Soy Sauce
1 Chicken Stock Cube
2 Teaspoons Corn Flour
120 ml Water

Preparation for Sauce
1. Boil the water, add stock cube and dissolve it in the boiling water.
2. Add the tamarinf water, palm sugar and dark soy sauce.
3. Mix the corn flour with a little water and add to the sauce.
4. Bring back to the boil, stirring (the corn flour will thicken the sauce).

Serve With
Spring Onions
Cucumber
Coriander Leaves
Thai Fragrant Rice

Finally I can time to catch up on my recipe site! Todays recipe is a selection of grilled or barbecued meats and seafood, marinaded with Thai flavours. Summer is still strong in Thailand, and there's plenty of good weather to enjoy outdoors, so a grill seems a good thing to do! For this recipe we marinade pork, beef, pork with fat, liver (also pork) and squid overnight to get some good strong flavours into them. For each of the marinades, simply blend or pound the ingredients together, mix with the meat and leave in the fridge for grilling the next day. The pork with fat should be grilled long and hard until the fat becomes crunchy!

Marinaded Pork Ingredients
200 gms Pork
1 Teaspoon Green Peppercorns
1 Tablespoon Dark Soy Sauce

Marinaded Beef Ingredients
200 gms Beef
2 Pieces of Galangal
1 Tablespoon Oyster Sauce

Marinaded Pork With Fat Ingredients
200 gms Pork With Fat
1 Teaspoon White Pepper
1 Teaspoon Salt
1 Teaspoon Ground Dried Chilli

Marinaded Liver Ingredients
100 gms Pork Liver
5 Kaffir Leaves
1 Tablespoon Light Soy Sauce

Marinaded Squid
200 gms Squid
2 Pieces of Gar Chay
1 Tablespoon Black Vinegar Sauce For Dimsum ( Jig Cho Sauce )

This is about as simple a recipe as is possible. It uses the spicy sweet chilli or plum sauce normally used as spring roll dipping sauce as a glaze and marinade for roast duck! The sauce is perfect to give it a sweet/spicy glaze, and duck is the perfect meat to glaze since the fat crisps up on the outside when glazed and the spice cuts through the fatty taste.

Ingredients
150 ml Spring Roll Sweet Chillies Dipping Sauce
400-500 gms Duck Breast
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
200 gms Sliced Leek
1 Teaspoon Butter
1 Tablespoon Oil

Preparation
1. Clean the duck breast and prick the skin with a fork.
2. Pour over the sauce and sprinkle with salt, marinade for a couple of hours then roast in a medium (190 degree) oven till it's cooked the way you like it.
3. Optionally, it looks nice on a bed of fried leeks. Slice the leaks finely, and fry in butter lightly with a little salt.

Just as England has its own version of French and Italian dishes, so Thailand has its own version of Japanese dishes. This is Thai Suki-Yaki, a self assembly dish consisting of a wok of boiling chicken stock, into which you cook your own ingredients at the table, and eat them with a Thai spicy chilli sauce. It's entertainment and a meal all in one. In Thailand, we prefer to drop the egg into the stock to make a poached egg, rather than eat it raw like the Japanese. If you have Thai salty eggs ready, try cracking one into the stock to make a salty poached egg, the flavour combination of extremely salty egg yolk, Thai chilli and Suki sauce may cause your brain to overload when you eat it, but it's not fatal!
You will need an electric wok to cook this at the table, alternatively you can cook it on a stove and bring it ready-cooked to the table, but it's just not as much fun. The sauce is known as Suki-yaki sauce and is available in Asian grocers, if you cannot locate it, Teriyaki dipping sauce is a passable substitute, or there is a recipe in the ingredients section to make it.

Lets start with the Suki Meat plate, the recipes for each of these can be found on this site. This plate consists of Fish Balls, Pork Balls, Raw Pork Meat Patty, and Seaweed Fish Rolls. Not shown is the Shrimp dumplings which are the same as the pork dumpling recipe, but using chopped shrimp. You can also add cleaned shrimp to this dish if you like. Most of these can be made well ahead of time and frozen, you can take them straight from the freezer to the plate ready to cook. The above plate is enough for 2 people.

Here is the vegetable plate. Again there is enough in the photograph for 2 people. It consists of celery, baby corn, green cabbage, chinese cabbage, spring onions, carrots, shitake mushrooms, glass noodles and coriander leaves. The dumplings shown in the photograph are shrimp dumpling explained above. If the mushrooms are dried, soak them for 15 minutes in water, chop the cabbage, cut the spring onions into lengths and peel and chop the carrots.

Next to the sauce, in Thailand we eat 'MK' sauce, MK is the name of a chain of Suki restaurants with their own special sauce. You can find this sauce in Asian supermarkets, there are also many variants available both from Thailand and Vietnam, all are called 'suki-yaki' sauces. If you cannot find suki-yaki sauce, you can substitute a teriyaki dipping sauce but it's not quite the same.

The Thai version uses chillis and garlic, normally it is served in a separate plate so that each person can choose to add more or less chilli to their sauce. Chop the chillies & garlic and place in a serving bowl.

Ingredients
5 Garlic Cloves
3 Red Chillies
5 Small Bird Chillies
1 Lemon Slice
1 Raw Egg

Serving The Suki-Yaki
So far we've prepared the meat plate, the vegetable plate, the sauce and the Thai chillies & garlic. You should also serve a raw egg, or salty egg if you have one.

Ingredients
2 Litres Water
2 Chicken Stock Cubes
1 White Chinese Radish

Equipment
1 Electric Wok
1 Bowl per Guest
1 Sauce Bowl per Guest
Chopsticks

Preparation
1. Peel and slice 4-5 slices of radish. Use the large Chinese radish, not small western salad radishes.
2. Put the water into the electric wok, add the stock cubes and radish and bring to the boil.
3. At this point, it's up to you what to add, you cook the ingredients as you wish in one batch or several batches.
4. Carrots, baby corn, shitake mushrooms and frozen meats will take longer to cook, so should be added earlier. The other ingredients cook quicker and can be added later.
5. Once they're cooked for a few minutes, use a sieve or slotted spoon to remove the items and place them in your bowl.
6. Take some of the Suki sauce in your sauce bowl, add some chilli as you wish, a squeeze of lemon and some garlic - this is your personal dipping sauce. Take items from your bowl, dip them in the sauce and eat.