True Thai Kimchi?

I've been reading The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth and taking notes. While many Thai favorites are included (fresh pineapple, baby greens, spinach, green tea, cashews, bitter melon, persimmons, papayas, mangoes, limes, coconut, bananas, snow peas, tomatoes, hot peppers, onions, mushrooms — actually, it might be easier if I listed True Thai foods not in this book!), I am very intrigued by one item from Korea, kimchi (also kimchee, kim chee).

[photo credit]

Andrew L. Rubman: "This Korean fermented cabbage concoction spiced with capsicum provides healthy stimulus and therapy for the stomach and is often beneficial to those with gastritis, reflux . . . . "

Jonny Bowden, the Ph.D. who wrote this book, says that fermented foods are almost always good for you. Why? Because fermented food contains lactobacilli bacteria which boosts our immune system and fights inflammation.

"Kimchi is a superstar in the world of healthy foods....it has demonstrated antioxidant, antimutagenic, and anticarcinogenic activities. Pretty darn impressive for a sometimes smelly little cabbage dish. Kimchi also contains high levels of vitamins (vitamin C, the B vitamins), minerals (calcium, potassium, and iron) and dietary fiber."

I think by now you may have already guessed where this is going. Yes, this Friday we are putting kimchi-fried rice in our lunch buffet! We've been experimenting with it in the kitchen and have found that the flavors of kimchi blend very well with Thai fried rice. The only difference is that it is crunchier due to cabbage and extra onion.

But this is not a Thai dish so I do not know if we'll ever add it to the menu. Frying kimchi with rice is not my invention either. The Koreans have been eating kimchi for 3,000 years now, and have invented every kind of kimchi dish imaginable. They call their kimchi fried rice kimchi bokkeumbap.

I think I will call mine Thai-chi!

Green curry for St. Patrick's Day!

This year I decided to do some research into St. Patrick's Day to see if True Thai could get in on the action. I was very surprised to learn that St. Patrick's Day is not so much a drinking holiday in Ireland (where they call it Lá Fhéile Pádraig). I was not surprised to learn that my American friends are wrong about other aspects of this venerable Western holiday as well.

From 1903 until the 1970s, pubs were closed on St. Patrick's Day in Ireland! They did not hold a parade in Dublin until 1931 (the first U.S. St. Paddy's Day parade was in 1737). The Irish began to take this holiday a bit more seriously in 1996 and have since parlayed this once minor Irish holiday into a 4-day excuse for taking money from tourists.

Yes, the American version of St. Patrick's Day is about as authentic as Chow Mein is Chinese! But that will not stop St. Paul from having its 159th consecutive St. Patrick's Day parade this Wednesday.

To honor our Irish American friends, Anna O'Prasomphol Fieser will be featuring green curry, green melon, green beans and other green foods in our Wednesday lunch buffet. We will also serve green jasmine tea. Actually, jasmine tea is more yellow than green, but we will not be adding green dye to our tea!

Leeann Chin, rest in peace

Leeann Chin, 1933-2010

I do not think there is an Asian woman running a restaurant in Minnesota who has not been compared to Leeann Chin. From 1980 until now she was the gold standard for Asian restauranteurs. Everyone knew who she was, even Minnesotans who do not eat Chinese food.

Like Wolfgang Puck and Minnesota's Mama D, Leeann Chin is an icon. Her name will live on and her story will inspire countless more young Asians to introduce new food to buffet-loving Americans.

Leeann Chin opened her first restaurant after I came to America, and long before I got to Minnesota she was already famous. As a businesswoman she was a big inspiration to me and many other Asian women. At first I admired her for her legendary work ethic, but after opening True Thai I began to appreciate her business skills even more than her hard work.

Services will be held Saturday, March 27th, at Normandale Lutheran Church in Edina.


What others are saying:

The Star Tribune

KARE-11

The Pioneer Press

Found money

I found $4,000 today but don't get excited. It was my $4,000!

I sent my bank a check for $4,000 to pay on my credit card, but the payment never showed up on my balance. I called the bank and they told me they didn't know what the problem was. I knew what the problem was, I had paid them but they hadn't applied the money to my balance!

So last night several employees and I spent the end of the shift sorting through bank statements and receipts back in the party room. Some party! We found several interesting things and this morning I took our findings into my local branch. The manager pulled up my file and immediately figured out that there had been an entry error transposing two numbers, and that my money had been applied to another credit card account.

The manager apologized and straightened out my account, but the other missing $7,000 we identified from last summer he's still checking into. So I came into $4,000 today, but since it was my $4,000 it wasn't exactly a windfall.

Does your bank make mistakes? Mine sure does!

Another mystery solved

Sometimes things just happen, but usually I find that things happen for a reason. We have been selling more Tom Yum than usual for the last week and a half and yesterday, thanks to Google, I found out why.

City Pages had a Food Fight but didn't tell us. We were pitted against Sen Yai Sen Lek in a battle to see who had the best Tom Yum. That was not very fair to Sen Yai Sen Lek, a very good Thai restaurant in Northeast Minneapolis that specializes in noodle dishes. There are no noodles in Tom Yum. I think now you see why this was not a fair fight but thank you to Jessica Chapman for saying nice things about us:

You know the saying "Go big or go home?" True Thai definitely goes big. The product of going big is, logically, big flavor, and True Thai's got that too. Generous slices of chicken come with almost every bite and kaffir lime leaves show up about every third. Still, there's those dang mushrooms.

I also like the picture they ran but was puzzled by the fact that we have no purple tablecloths at True Thai. At first I suspected that they had adjusted the color a bit like I did when I was bragging about my cherry tomato plant last year (it's true — I boosted the color because the camera failed to capture the perfection of my awesome tomato plant!). But that does not explain why this picture shows sliced button mushrooms (we use straw mushrooms in our Tom Yum) or why I do not recognize that plate!

I think this is a stock picture. Here is our online menu picture of our Tom Yum:

See the straw mush- rooms? Notice that the bowl is not perfectly round unlike the serving bowl in the background of the City Pages picture.

I think this picture looks much more tantalizing than City Pages', but that is just my personal opinion.

I like personal opinions, especially when they come from bloggers who like True Thai! I recently found two new online reviews of our restaurant and because they say nice things about True Thai, I thought I should share them with you.

The Alchemist Chef likes our corn cakes and says that I am a "super nurse-restauranteur." I like her review a lot!

Blogger Red Pepper at Twin Cities Eats likes us too:

This is, in my humble opinion, the best Thai food that I have had in Minnesota. It is kind of shocking that I have never written about it but this changes that. I have simply never had a dish that disappoints. Apparently, many people think the same as the size of True Thai is at least double what it was on my first visits 5+ years ago.

I like that she brags about how long she's been coming to True Thai, and that she mentions our recent expansion. Friends have told me about how their friends all try to pretend they were the first to find us back in 2002. I think they are all correct. Each night I see faces I have been seeing on a regular basis for the last seven + years. True Thai has many loyal friends from across the Twin Cities and even Wisconsin and we love you all!

But almost every night I see many new faces as well and that also makes me happy. Thai people are very friendly and we like our new friends almost as much as our old friends.

Idle thoughts

Hmm. Just as I suspected we are starting to get party room reservations for groom's dinners. This always seems to happen a few weeks after Valentine's Day....

In other True Thai news did you know that Thailand has:

• 238 AM radio stations
• 351 FM stations
• 6 television stations (with many, many substations)
• 4 satellites

Hey! We're just a little country not much bigger than Minnesota and Wisconsin put together. Maybe we don't have so many TV stations as Americans, but we have many, many more Thai restaurants and much nicer beaches!

Beaches. (sigh) Don't Minnesotans ever get tired of all this snow and ice?

Chinese Valentine's Day!

Wow, wow, wow. Chinese New Year's and Valentine's Day both fall on Sunday, February 14, this year. I am not sure what it means for lovers that they are sharing their day with the Year of the Tiger but I am guessing that the lines at the better Chinese restaurants will be even longer than the lines at True Thai this Sunday. I think that couples celebrating Valentine's Day also need to know that the official gemstone for the Year of the Tiger is the diamond!

Were you born in a Year of the Tiger? Here is a chart that will help you to figure it out:

• 8 February 1902 - 28 January 1903: Water Tiger
• 26 January 1914 - 13 February 1915: Wood Tiger
• 13 February 1926 - 1 February 1927: Fire Tiger
• 31 January 1938 - 18 February 1939: Earth Tiger
• 17 February 1950 - 5 February 1951: Metal Tiger
• 5 February 1962 - 24 January 1963: Water Tiger
• 23 January 1974 - 10 February 1975: Wood Tiger
• 9 February 1986 - 28 January 1987: Fire Tiger
• 28 January 1998 - 15 February 1999: Earth Tiger
• 14 February 2010 - 2 February 2011: Metal Tiger

What does all this mean? Mostly it means that Chinese astrologers make good money this time of year. This, by the way, is not just any Year of the Tiger, this is the Year of the Golden Tiger! Here is what they say about people born in the Year of the Tiger:

Tiger people are sensitive, given to deep thinking, capable of great sympathy. They can be extremely short-tempered, however. Other people have great respect for them, but sometimes tiger people come into conflict with older people or those in authority. sometimes Tiger people cannot make up their minds, which can result in a poor, hasty decision or a sound decision arrived at too late. They are suspicious of others, but they are courageous and powerful. Tigers are most compatible with Horses, Dragons, and Dogs.

The Los Angeles Times says that Chinese New Year's has fallen on Valentine's Day only three times in the last hundred years, and will not do so again until 2030.

I am not Chinese so this all seems kind of silly to me. Thai people, however, do celebrate Valentine's Day. This Sunday True Thai will focus on Valentine's Day, a holiday they will be celebrating in Bangkok in much the same way Americans do. (This is a family blog so I will not go into details!)

Dried fruit for Chinese New Year's!

The new ya pears are in and I just had some mangosteens for lunch but for me the most exciting food news of the week is that True Thai is going to have dried persimmons in our lunch buffet this Friday!

OK, maybe you would rather have ya pears and mangosteens but they're in season now and will be around for a while. Dried persimmons, on the other hand, only come once a year and are eaten by Asians to help celebrate Chinese New Year's which will be this Sunday, February 14.

Maybe you have not heard of dried persimmons before, but if you put them into Google you get 229,000 responses. If you use the Chinese words for dried persimmons [干柿子], you may get even more. In China, there are over 2,000 kinds of persimmons. Chinese immigrants brought persimmons to California in the mid 1800s. Persimmons do not like snow, and are not fond of extreme heat.

Since there are so many different kinds of persimmons, there are many different kinds of persimmon trees. I thought this one looked pretty:


So remember: this Friday True Thai will celebrate Chinese New Year's by having dried persimmons in our buffet. Friday I will post again to let you know more about Sunday's Chinese New Year's/Valentine's Day celebration at True Thai.

Seward Market donations tallied

If you google the Seward Market shootings now, you won't find any recent links. Crime happens and then people move on.

But not in Seward. Here our thoughts are still with the families of the victims. I am proud to say that True Thai's customers donated over $600 to the memorial fund set up by Seward Redesign.

I think of you as my family now, and I am very proud of how we responded to this terrible tragedy. This is a good neighborhood, and recent events have proven that to me. The people of Seward did not hide in their homes after the shooting. Hundreds of you came out for the candlelight vigil, and hundreds more dropped money into collection boxes for the families.

I thank you on behalf of the victims' families, and I thank you on behalf of True Thai Restaurant where we are proud to be a part of the Seward community.

Eggs: not just for breakfast anymore

Anna with a plate of Thai Eggs

When I had our kitchen staff come up with an egg dish to put on the menu, everyone told me that Minnesotans would not eat eggs except for breakfast. Wow, were those people ever wrong! Even our vendors have commented on how many eggs we've been going through.

True Thai's Thai Eggs aren't quite like anything I've had in Thailand. There are many Thai egg dishes, many of which use eggs that do not come from chickens. I think maybe our most famous recipe would be the infamous Son-in-Law Eggs (Khai Look Koie). They are very round, and there is a reason for that.

“The mother-in-law will cook these for her son-in-law if she thinks he is being unkind to her daughter − it will remind him that his family jewels could well end up fried on a plate if he doesn’t clean up his act,” laughs Cecilia Brooks Brown, author of “World Vegetarian Classics” (Pavilion, $24.95). “But the dish sure is a treat to eat!”

I suppose I could put these eggs on our menu as well, but I'm not sure the story that goes with the eggs is appropriate for mealtime reading.

The story of True Thai's Thai Eggs is that you should do what you think is right, even when people disagree with you.

True Buffet!

Each day from 11 until 2 True Thai serves a lunch buffet. Did you know that you can pick buffet items for your group?

If you are planning to bring a group to True Thai for lunch on a weekday, email me two days in advance with your buffet preferences and we'll do our best. No, you can't pick out the entire buffet, but with your input we'll try to serve as many of your preferred dishes as possible.

True Thai has always focused on quality, not quantity in our lunch buffet. Less than a dozen items, but each one given the same careful preparation as an a la carte menu item.

My suggestion? If your group is daring, ask us to prepare some off-menu items. If your group is not so daring, pick a couple of dishes you know they'll like and we'll do our best. And if you'd like something really spicy, we'll make sure to make a dish or two that will meet your needs.

True Thai is Thai the way you like it.

Seward Market reopens

The Seward Market reopened Thursday. I walked over about eight to do some shopping and to show some support. There were seven guys behind the cash register. I was the only customer. It was very sad. I even cried a little.

I know that it is not easy being in a new country and trying to make a living. But I know it is good to have a community to support you. I don't think there were seven guys working at that market last night. I think there was one guy working at the market, and six friends showing their support.

There are many ways of showing your support. The jar by our cash register is stuffed with donations. Or you can do like Bob Olson did. He was a long time Seward neighborhood resident who recently passed away at the age of 82. He left his money to his neighbors, the City of Minneapolis, and the University of Minnesota's libraries.

When you invest in your time and money into your community, everyone benefits. Right now the families of the three shooting victims need our help.

Seward Market Memorial Fund
c/o Seward Redesign
2619 E Franklin Avenue
Minneapolis MN 55406

Thank you for whatever you can do.