Thai Cooking Made Easy

Rating:
Summary: Not a Great Cookbook
Review: This cookbook is O.K. but is not one of the greats. Recipies fail and can be way too salty to be reasonably edible -- and this comes from a person who uses a lot of salt or soy sauce. When the salt is scaled down the recipes are not fabulous, either, though. I was misled into buying this book off the bookshelf of a store by its attractive photography and claims for ease of cooking. The main feature of the book appears to be that it conveys how to streamline the stir frying process, so that it is more of a cooking school's How-To stir fry, written in the CONTEXT of Thai cuisine. Perhaps this book is helpful for someone who is very unfamiliar with the mechanics of quick-cooking Asian dishes. But it would probably be better to get a good stir fry instructional book and then a Thai cookbook with better recipes.

One quirk of mediocre Thai cooking is dramatic inconsistency. This book's recipes can easily give poor results. A far more winning Thai cookbook is "Real Thai: The Best of Thailand's Regional Cooking," a plain paperback without pictures and bells and whistles. I have found literally dozens of simple, foolproof, regionally authentic, and delicious recipes in that great cookbook. Real Thai also covers a much broader range of dishes, so when you go out and drop a lot of $$ to stock your kitchen on the fresh herbs, sauces, and spices, you can use them up doing a lot of interesting things for many meals rather than making a couple of dishes out of "Thai Cooking Made Easy's" small selection over and over.

This might be a good supplemental book, but with so many great Thai cookbooks out there, there's no point to a mediocre one, and certainly not as one's introductory text.

Rating:
Summary: Easy to use
Review: This has some great recipes, surprisingly easy. You'll need to buy some things that you don't ordinarily -- luckily my supermarket carries many of those items. If yours doesn't, I'm guessing there is a place online to order the specialty items.

Rating:
Summary: Easy for anyone, with great results
Review: Whether it's a characteristic of the publisher or of the author, the rather unique approach this cookbook takes to presenting ingredient lists and preparation instructions is outstanding. I'd like to think I'm pretty confident in the kitchen, but there's something to be said for simplified instructions, especially when you're in a hurry. But whether you're confident and competent as a cook, or a complete novice who finds toast a bit of a challenge, you'd have a hard time screwing-up a recipe from this one.

All the recipes I've tried have come out perfectly. And for those more experienced, there are plenty of opportunities for improvising where desired, as I have on the second and third times through some of the recipes.

Of particular note is Kittivech's take on sweet and sour pork. Extremely easy, it comes together quickly, and the taste is terrific. (Though I recommend doubling the sauce ingredients so you'll have plenty when served over rice.)

Like much Thai cooking, get ready for fish sauce. If you're not used to it, it's really pretty awful when first put in the wok, but the taste and smell mellow considerably with just a minute of cooking, and it does introduce a unique and intriguing flavor.

Finally, not worth failing to mention here are the beautiful full-color photographs of all the dishes in the book. They'll invite you to try more recipes, and they give excellent cues for preparation (like fancy cuts on vegetables) you may want to try.

Definitely one of the better additions to my cookbook library...