Friday is picture day!

I've been uploading pictures to Flickr! This one is going on the restaurant website to help people find the new blog but the truth is my favorite, favorite picture is this one.

Blogging is hard (but catching catfish is harder)

I started this blog because I wanted to write about True Thai Restaurant, but then we got so very busy I stopped blogging. Then we expanded and I was too busy to blog for a while. Then we decided to be open on Sundays and I decided it was time to blog again.

I like writing about True Thai because I've been dreaming about having my own Thai restaurant since I was a little girl. What I hear from you when you come into the restaurant is that you want more stories about that little girl, and less stories about True Thai and food. Sorry but the little girl only cares about food!

But I will compromise with you. I will tell you about how I learned True Thai's recipes from my mother.

Today's story is about how I learned to make catfish salad.


When I was young each summer my friends would go to the beach to swim and play volleyball. Not Anna. I would go to our family fruit orchard to spend the summer in a house without electricity to help my mother feed the thirty workers who cared for our durian, mango, rambutan and mangosteen trees. Did I mention the catfish pond yet?

My mom gave me a choice: I could take the net and catch the catfish, or I could cut their heads off. I chose to be the catfish catcher.

I took the net and would pull 20 catfish from our pond each morning. They weighed a kilogram apiece so I had to make many trips from the pond to where my mother and I would make the catfish salad. Sometimes the catfish would slip out of my mother's hands and it was my job to catch them again as they tried to run away. This made me very mad. I wasn't sure if I was mad at my Mom for losing the catfish, or at the catfish for not wanting us to eat them.


After I had caught all the catfish I then had to gather the green mangoes, but that is another story.

True Thai uses American catfish, and I pay someone else to catch them and cut their heads off. Otherwise it's the same recipe my mother and I used to feed our orchard workers. In Thailand, even our fruit pickers eat well!

My first ice cream

Yesterday I wrote about cream cheese wontons and last night customers kept saying to me, "hey — you serve Sebastian Joe's yummy coconut and green tea ice cream!" Yes we do but ice cream is one Western food that is very popular in Thailand. ไอศกรีม, or i-tim, comes in different flavors in Thailand than it does at True Thai. Phuket Magazine lists these favorite Thai flavors:

Millet, corn, basil seeds, red beans, black beans boiled with syrup, and laht chong, a bright green noodle flavoured and coloured with pandanus leaves, are some of the favourites.

Let me know if any of these sound good to you and we'll see if we can get Sebastian Joe's to mix up a tub or two of True Thai i-tim!

And yes, I do remember the first time I had ice cream. I was in third grade at Hui Pai Our Lady of Fatima boarding school and the nuns told us to line up. This did not make us happy because usually when we had to line up they would give us either a vaccination shot or a malaria pill because that was what happened whenever we had to form a line.

Big surprise! Instead of a shot or pill we got soft serve vanilla or chocolate ice cream. None of us had ever had ice cream but we all knew what it was from having seen Doris Day movies. I think I picked vanilla because I had learned from other third grade girls that chocolate would make your skin darker. These were the same third grade girls who told me that playing basketball would make me taller.

It was the very first cold dessert I had ever had. It was weird but I finished it because it was the most interesting food I had ever encountered. I cannot say that I remember liking it, but it did fascinate me. It was U.S. government surplus ice cream left over from the Vietnam War. There was a U.S. military base just twenty minutes from my school or I probably wouldn't have gotten to try ice cream until I was much older.

[The picture above on the right is Gordon Ramsay's Pineapple soufflé with Thai curry ice cream.]

To cream cheese or not to cream cheese

Then, before the opening, the inevitable dark dilemma: To cream cheese wonton, or to not cream cheese wonton? "For many nights I laid awake, tossing and turning, tossing and turning," says Prasomphol Fieser. "We have no cream cheese in Thailand. I am tossing and turning, tossing and turning. Finally, at the last minute I decided yes! Because kids come in just for that. So I do it for the children."

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, City Pages

When this review came out in 2003 some of my friends teased me about this part. They thought it was silly of me to agonize over whether to allow cream cheese wontons into my restaurant or not. I still do not think it is funny. Thailand is a hot country and there is no tradition of eating a lot of dairy products. This is in fact one of the reasons why Thai food is not fattening!

ThaiTable.com says this:

I love good cheese. However in Thai food, there is no milk, cheese or butter. All calories add up. Coconut milk is perhaps the Thai analogue to dairy, but coconut milk is not nearly as prevalent in Thai food as cheese, butter or cream are in western foods. Ask most western chefs: what's the secret ingredient that makes people love a dish? Butter. What makes western desserts good? Butter.

But the Thai also have a very strong tradition of making their customers happy. Can you get cream cheese wontons in Bangkok or Phuket? I don't think so. But have cream cheese wontons made a lot of True Thai customers happy over the years? I know so.

Please accept my apology

ขออภัย

If you came to True Thai last Sunday night, you already know why I am apologizing. I did not trust our customers enough. Because of the holiday weekend and because we had light business our second week of being open on Sunday, we gave too many staff the night off and we were not prepared for all the customers who came in for dinner.

Service was not acceptable because wait staff were covering four times as many tables as usual and we had to stop letting customers in at 7 p.m. I am so sorry, especially for those of you who came with out-of-town guests. This will not happen again.

True Thai is now open every day except New Year's Day, Easter, Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I pledge we will be fully staffed the other 358 days a year.

Memorial Day

From Wikipedia:


I. The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land. In this observance no form or ceremony is prescribed, but Posts and comrades will, in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit....

Let us, then, at the time appointed, gather around their sacred remains, and garland the passionless mounds above them with choicest flowers of springtime; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledge to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon the Nation's gratitude—the soldier's and sailor's widow and orphan.

excerpted from General Orders No. 11, Grand Army of the Republic Headquarters

Every nation has such an order, proclamation or law requiring a day of rembrance for those who have fallen in battle. I am a nurse and have never been a member of any kind of military organization but I am well acquainted with war. Growing up in Thailand during the Vietnam War I spent my weekends helping my mother cook seafood dishes, vegetables and Pad Thai for the Vietnamese

refugees who were in a camp just half an hour from our home.

My mother's family came to Thailand from Vietnam and she believed that as Catholics we had an obligation to help these victims of a long and tragic civil war. Not all the refugees were Catholics but they were all in need and so each Saturday we would prepare food to take to the camp.

There were camps for Hmong refugees as well, and that is where I learned to speak Hmong. Later, after I emmigrated to the United States, I worked as a volunteer at the Center for Victims of Torture where I learned still more about the terrible things done to innocent people in times of war and political oppression.

Growing up in Thailand, a peaceful kingdom surrounded by the wars of others, I came to respect the teachings of Buddha. One of my favorite teachings of the Buddha is that you will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. Memorial Day is a good day to reflect upon the folly of war and the need for peace.

May this Memorial Day be meaningful to you, and guide your thoughts regarding the conduct of nations and the importance of finding non-violent solutions to the world's many problems.

Have a safe and happy weekend!

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Enjoy your holiday weekend and remember True Thai will be open Saturday and Sunday but closed Monday in honor of those who died defending their country.

Yamtastic!

True Thai's purple yams come from Hawaii, but I first discovered this tasty tuber by eating Malaysian food. The Filipinos call purple yam ube, and are using it as a popular flavoring in desserts, snacks, ice cream and even for milk! They also make snack chips from ube, which are then eaten during periods of religious fasting.

Sometimes if you can find purple yams at the store they will be from Okinawa where they are also very popular, not to mention adaptible. Purple yams are now popular in almost every kind of Asian cuisine. I shouldn't just say Asian as I recently found online a recipe for purple yam gnocchi!

Don't laugh, at least not until you've had a purple yam soufflé or — and I am not kidding — Purple Yam Porter from Laughing Cow Brewery.

Healthwise purple yams are chock full of Vitamin C, B6, potassium and antioxidants. That and their wonderful flavor has made them quickly grow in popularity. How popular? Google now comes up with 279,000 matches for "purple yam"!

I am still undecided as to whether or not to offer purple milk to our customers. That is a Filipino and not a Thai custom, but if it gets kids to drink their milk....

What's popular

We did some catering over the weekend and despite my concern a friend had us serve our Thai omelette to her gathering. I was not sure how well this dish would travel but she told me it was everyone's favorite dish. Minnesotans sure do love their eggs!

The Thai fortune cookies continue to be very popular, but we are still putting "traditional" Chinese style fortune cookies in our takeout orders. You can always ask for the Chinese kind with your check if you prefer. Chinese fortune cookies turned 90 years old this year, and you can read more about them at Wikipedia.

Rainbow carrots, the red and yellow carrots from California, are back. This means more colorful entrées and one more weapon in the war to get kids to eat their vegetables.

We are re-ordering the tiny candies by the cash register every month now. Even our employees can't resist these powerfully flavorful candies so no, it isn't just you.

This blog is more popular. More and more of you are reading it. Many of you tell me so when you come in, but I can also tell when I talk about a dish and we sell twice as much of it that night. I promise to use this awesome power only for good!

What's not popular? Our second week of being open on Sundays was a little bit slow thanks to the beautiful spring weather, but many of you came in later in the day and turned a slow day into a decent night. We are publicizing our new hours as best we can but word of mouth has always been True Thai's best friend so remind your friends we'll be open this Sunday but closed for Memorial Day on Monday.

I shouldn't admit this but when I look out the window and see a full parking lot at Perkins, I feel bad. For the same money those people could have had True Thai!

Frugal dining

We're reprinting the takeout menus so they have our new hours on them.

Sunday - Thursday, 11am - 10pm

Friday - Saturday, 11am - 11pm

But we did violate one time-
honored restaurant custom: we did not raise our prices. Our costs have gone up but thanks to our faithful customers we've stayed busy and volume is letting us keep our prices low. True Thai appetizers range from $3.75 for Vegetable Fried Egg Rolls to $8.50 for the Golden Wheel of Shrimp and Ham Delight. Soups start at $3.95 and are mostly under $10 except for our seafood-rich Potak Combination Seafood Soup.

Salads are from $5.50 for the tofu-lettuce Yala Muslim Salad to $12.95 for our signature Crispy Catfish Salad with Fresh Green Mango. Curries are in the $8.95-11.95 range, with Stuffed Squid with Panang Curry our most expensive menu item at $15.95. Wok items are priced much like our curries with some exceptions for pricier seafood. Noodle and fried rice dishes are $8.95 to $10.95.

There are cheaper "Thai" restaurants in town, but we think our prices are the most reasonable of all the fine dining Thai establishments. We are committed to holding the line on higher prices because we'd rather have a full house and modest profits over high prices and empty tables.

True Thai also understands that even our modest prices can be a little steep for some people in these tough times. Don't be shy about splitting an entrée if you're not big eaters, and recognize that the best values are always the vegetarian options. You can also buy our curry and sukiyaki stocks to fix at home.

And if you're still doing OK, think about your friends who are having tough times and maybe treat them to a meal at True Thai now and then. Gifts you get to share are the best kind.

Starting the day right

Reading an old newspaper I saw that a very bright young man just graduated from the University of Minnesota at the ripe old age of 13! Congratulations to Caleb Kumar for becoming the UM's youngest graduate ever.

Wow, and I thought I was precocious for having graduated from high school at the age of 15!

I don't know about Caleb, but I was the victim of a very harsh upbringing. Instead of getting to eat donuts and junk food like all my friends, my mother made me start the day by eating her special salmon dish. On our menu it is known as My Mother's Salmon because it's exactly the same recipe as what I ate each morning as a schoolgirl in Thailand.

Did it work? Well, none of my donut-eating friends graduated until they were 18 and by then I was off to America to study business at Kentucky Business College.

As for salmon, we now know that it is a great way of getting Omega-3 fatty acids into your diet. These are excellent for your brain, and they also have anti-inflammatory properties that can help reduce joint pain. Minnesotans are already familiar with these health benefits as the next best sources of Omega-3 fatty acids are sardines and herring!

Everything you ever wanted to know about rice (and more!)

I am always amazed at how much some Americans know about their favorite food and drinks. Beer and wine lovers are walking encyclopedias of beer and wine trivia, and have invented their own language to discuss the various qualities of different breweries and vintners.

I do not drink alcohol, but — like most Asians — I know a lot about rice. Unlike many Asian restaurants, True Thai doesn't take advantage of the fact that most Americans know very little about rice. These restaurants will serve you long grain rice. It's OK, but it's not as good as Thai jasmine white rice, which often costs up to three times as much as plain long grain rice. If you've ever eaten really good bread from an excellent bakery, that would be like jasmine white rice with long grain rice playing the role of Wonder Bread.

There are two undisputed premium kinds of rice: Basmati rice from India, and Jasmine rice from Thailand. WiseGeek explains the differences:

Jasmine rice has been cultivated in Thailand for centuries, and it is considered the rice of choice by many Thais. The rice is very aromatic, with a characteristic slightly floral scent which enhances many dishes; most people eat hulled jasmine rice. Basmati rice is an ancient Indian aromatic rice variety which has also been in active use and cultivation for centuries. In some parts of the world, these rice varietals are protected, which means that only rice from a certain region may be labeled “jasmine” or “basmati.”

If you are a fan of Thai food, you know that we also serve another kind of rice: sticky rice. Sticky rice is glutinous, but that does not mean it contains glutens, only that the cooked rice is very sticky. Most Lao rice is sticky rice. In Southeast Asia sticky rice is eaten with the hands because it is very hard to eat with a fork or chopsticks. If you order la'ab, you may use lettuce or a slice of cucumber to pick up the sticky rice and beef or chicken.

Sticky rice did not just happen. Sticky rice was created by Asian farmers through selective growing, just like American farmers have created hybrids of corn. Sticky rice also has a very important difference from regular rice: it contains amylopectin, a starch.

The Thai eat sticky rice with la'ab and other protein-rich dishes, but we also use it in our desserts. I often talk about Thai food being sweet and salty and spicy and sour, but sticky rice has a fifth kind of flavor: umami. That's a Japanese word that does not translate well into English but for Americans umami is like the taste of mashed potatoes and gravy, very filling and satisfying. Thanksgiving turkey would be another good example of umami, as well as being a very good example of sticky rice's secret ingredient: tryptophan!

Yes, the same amino acid that makes you fall asleep during your Thanksgiving Day football game is present in sticky rice. So much so that sticky rice is now considered to be a natural cure for insomnia.

In another post I will teach you the difference between making sticky rice and jasmine rice. The cooking methods are as different as the rice!