more joys of cooking club

Really, one main joy can be summed up as: For supper tonight I ate Pad Thai cooked with/by a person from Thailand, and I was in the kitchen with her. So cool! Such a neat learning experience. I was quite interested in going to this meeting of the cooking club because I do love a good Pad Thai and was curious to see firsthand how it is traditionally made. We actually have a recipe for Pad Thai that we like quite a bit and tastes very much like the Pad Thai we have ordered in various restaurants. However, I've always been a little suspect about its authenticity. The main reason for that? Let's just say one of the ingredients might be ketchup. Seriously, ketchup. The first time we made that recipe I was very doubtful it would end up tasting like Pad Thai, but taste like Pad Thai it did. Needless to say, tonight's did not involve any Heinz products. This Pad Thai was tasty and did taste different from restaurant ones, mostly in that it is not nearly as sweet as what you would be served in a restaurant here. However, the person leading did say you can adjust sweetness, spiciness, etc. to your own tastes. Pad Thai in the US is often adjusted from the traditional to include chicken, whereas in Thailand it would traditionally be only shrimp and tofu. Other interesting differences between ketchup recipe and authentic recipe is that ketchup recipe has 14 -- count 'em 14!! -- cloves of garlic (and yet the dish does not come up tasting of garlic...odd) and 7 tablespoons of fish sauce (though we generally decrease it to 4-ish), while authentic recipe only used 2 tablespoons of garlic and less than one tablespoon of fish sauce, though the total amount of Pad Thai was probably slightly less than what we make. And aside from those two ingredients and sugar, what is the other sauce ingredient? Well, it is not ketchup. It's tamarind, which can be purchased as a paste.

Also joyous was again interacting with some incredibly pleasant people, including a couple who I met new tonight. It was only six of us women tonight, which I find to be a very nice group size (not to mean I want to exclude anyone else who would want to come).