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[aboyandhisrobot]

Hope everyone had a good start to their summer. :)

Today, I finally got the chance to meet crash2419, who I must add, is really quite stunning, with possibly the most adorable smile I've ever seen. If that's not enough though, she also seems to be one of the most charming and warm people I've met in quite a while. So needless to say, I'm very much looking

Comments

[finedaytoexit]

I'm glad things worked out! Reading this entry made my morning!

[aboyandhisrobot]

I am too. I suppose I'll just see where it goes. At the very least, I've made a wonderful friend.

[theempathogen]

Maybe it's kind of stalker to comment on something this old. But I just wanted to say that I have friends that work at Thai restaurants and they just use... I guess you could call it stock paste? To make the soup. They buy jars of it in ridiculous bulk. I don't remember if there are instructions on the jars (or even if they're in English), but I hope this helps. I think they use frozen lemongrass as well, but fresh lemongrass is better for any dish. Freezing drastically alters its taste to where it's not even worth using for some things (like the Vietnamese ga xa).

Also, if you can get fresh (or at least dried) Thai peppers, that makes a real difference over just trying to make it with run-of-the-mill crushed red pepper.

(Okay, so this is my Vietnamese user pic, sue me.)

[aboyandhisrobot]

Actually curry paste in general is pretty reliable if you know where to buy it and what you're buying. Being from the UK, my family eat a lot of Indian curries, and while good Indian restaurants are kind of hard to come by in the US, jarred curry usually has decent results. I'd imagine Thai curries and soups are much the same in that regard.

[theempathogen]

Powdered curry is common with Thai cooking as well. Just read the labels to make sure you're not taking in any MSG. Sometimes there's already salt in the powder (I kid you not), so look out for that.

Isn't there a decent Thai population in the Orlando area? Or am I confusing it with Tampa there?

I know there's enough of a Vietnamese populace in Gainesville to support a little Vietnamese restaurant in their mall. Or at least that was the case years ago. Of course a lot of Vietnamese people fled to Thailand in the 1960s, so a lot of them like the food and know how to cook it, so maybe there's some of that banging about.

The only reason I wouldn't know is because when I go to Gainesville, I'm visiting relatives, and we cook Vietnamese food at home en masse. (Though I'm being redundant there - the only way to cook Vietnamese food is en masse.) They fit the description above, it's just that we generally don't feel like eating Thai on the occasions we see each other.

[aboyandhisrobot]

Orlando has a large Vietnamese population (I think), though I could be wrong. That being said, Orlando has a pretty good mix of quite a number of cultures, it's just that kind of town.