Sour Tamarind Concentrate

There's no recipe. I just needed some Tamarind Concentrate so here we are. I don't know if this is the correct way to make this, but it is the way I do it and my mom helped me so. I'm right, you're wrong. Just kidding, you do you.

 

Most important thing is that you have Sour Tamarind's not sweet ones.

Peel them, and add them to a pot with a disk or two of palm sugar if you want. Next time I am leaving the sugar out only because I can control the amount of sugar when I am cooking easier.

Cover with water, about 1 inch above the fruit, and then bring to a boil. Once boiling, turn down and simmer. Stirring. The seeds and the stringy bean stuff will separate from the fruit. Keep simmering until the fruit has dissolved into the liquid.

Strain through a fine mesh sieve and discard the stringy bean stuff, and the seeds. Let cool and keep covered in the refrigerator. I use it for soups and papaya salad.

Jeaow Som

Spicy, savory, sweet. Great for a dipping sauce, salad dressing, marinade.

I keep it on hand for spring/summer rolls, salad, egg rolls. On eggs. It's very versatile.

Jeaow Som

1/3 - 1/4 cup Nam Pa (Fish sauce)

1/3 cup water

1-2.5 tablespoons sugar

1/4 cup+ fresh lime juice

3 or 20 Thai bird chilies

3-4 cloves of garlic

MSG optional

Chopped cilantro to taste

ALL of these ingredients should be adjusted to taste. 

Stir the 1 tablespoon of sugar in water to dissolve. Set aside.

In a mortar place the chilies, garlic, and 1 tablespoon of sugar. Pound until the chilies and garlic are broken down.

Add stir in lime juice, fish sauce, and about 1/3 of the water sugar mixture. 

Taste and adjust your seasonings. 

Serve with summer/spring rolls, in Vermicelli salads, with egg rolls. I keep it in the fridge for yum neua, crying tiger salad.

Alternatively you can:

1. Slice Thai bird chilies and garlic.

2. Used a blender/immersion blender for this.

Pasta al Limone (With Shrimp)

This pasta dish is creamy and flavorful. The ingredients are simple and easy to find many times I already have them on hand. It's not a difficult dish to make but it is so good. perfect quick weeknight meal.

Jeaow For Sour Fruits

This is one of my favorite snacks. It's sweet, spicy, and salty, the mangoes and fruits are tart. My mouth waters everytime I think about it. It makes me crave baby mangoes and sour fruits. My cousins when I used to visit them loved this. Julie used to make this sauce for us and we would go pick fruits like crab apples and other fruits around the neighborhood to snack on. So much fun.

Chile de Arbol Salsa

This spicy salsa was posted on Facebook in a group I belong to, well the ingredient list and basic method. It's really yummy. I wanted a more smokey flavor so broiling the veggies for some char gives it that flavor. I also added dried Thai chiles. Very spicy. 

I'm going to write the recipes both ways, the original method and my way, you can try whichever you'd like.

Chili Oil (Jeaw Mak Phet) and Shallot Oil

I love using Chili Oil and Shallot Oil as condiments. They are often seen in many Asian restaurants. They are used for Dim Sum, Congee, in Noodle bowls such as Ramen, Khao Piek Sen, Pho, etc. Just about anything you want to add spice or garlic/shallot flavor to. They are also used in cooking, for stir fry and soup bases. In Laos this would be called Jeaw Mak Phet.

As with a lot of cooking there are no set measurements for these oils.  Play with the flavor combinations to come up with your favorite. In Chinese Chili Oil there is often bay leaf, star anise, sesame seeds sometimes cinnamon. I know the local Ramen place near me adds Sichuan peppercorn which I love and add to mine.  

BLT Salad With Whole Grain Mustard Vinaigrette

I love when the weather gets warmer, I tend to crave crisp lettuce greens and fresh vegetables more. I call it salad weather. I'll eat salads in the winter, I just crave them less when it's cold out. This BLT salad is simple and the vinaigrette can be made ahead and kept in the refrigerator.  The whole salad is a great for meal prep, keep all the vegetables washed and ready, the bacon can be made ahead of time, the steak is optional but it can also be made ahead.

Khao Poon Gai

Whole 30 Paleo Compliant Lao Khao Poon

Khao Poon Gai is a Lao curry noodle dish. It's fragrant, spicy, and so satisfying. The creamy coconut milk makes the broth silky smooth, the red curry paste gives it a aromatic kick. Traditionally this is serve with rice vermicelli noodles and there is bamboo in it. I'm doing a Whole 30 this month, and my family doesn't like bamboo, so there you go.  If you prefer rice noodles or veggie noodles I hope you'll try this soup. It's so good.

Lao Khao Poon ingredients.

All The Ranch Dressings

Whole 30 and Paleo compliant Ranch Dressing.

There are so many versions of this Ranch dressing out there that it's hard to pick just one. Here is my version for a basic Ranch that is Whole 30 compliant, and some variations. Avocado, Peppercorn, Spicy Chipotle, and Greek. This is a perfect option for when you want a little more than oil and vinegar, or a wedge of lime or lemon and salt and pepper on your salad. By the way, a wedge of lime squeezed over a salad with salt and pepper is so yum.

Pressure Cooker Hatch Green Chile Sauce

It's Chile Season y'all! The girls and I went and picked up our annual stash of Hatch Green Chile this year. We have been so blessed to have a couple of local grocery stores that stock them.Two of which will roast them in big roasters like they do back in the 505. That's New Mexico. This year my oldest chose "hot", we ended up with 40 pounds. The girls helped me peel and deseed them all. 

Greek Salad Dressing

This Greek salad dressing can be made vegan or paleo.

This Greek Salad dressing. I can drink this dressing up. It's very simple to make, the kids can do this one on their own, just some supervision with the blender! It's tangy, flavorful, and easy to make with ingredients you have on hand. To make this a vegan dressing use sugar instead of honey.
I serve this drizzled on a salad with Greek Chicken. I forgot the goat cheese in this picture! Feta would be awesome also.
You can also use it to marinate chicken.

Hatch Green Chile Sauce

New Mexico Hatch green chile makes the best sauce to smother over just about everything. But other roasted peppers can be used too, like poblanos.

Fall isn't just pumpkin season, fall is also Hatch Green Chile season and it's right up there with pumpkin to me! This sauce is versatile. I use to for eggs, enchiladas, dipping sauce, on steaks, shrimp tacos, on burgers, on chicken...
If you can't find Hatch Green Chile use Anaheim, Poblano, most any big green chile that is fresh.  This sauce can be made grain free, check the notes section.

Use this sauce for these amazing Green Chile Pepper Jack Enchiladas.

Tilapia With Cilantro Ginger Sauce

This may be the best way to have Tilapia fillets. Granted I'm not  fish expert. I assess things by how my family eats and Pixie will eat 2/3 of a fillet - which is three servings for her. She isn't a big eater, so this is pretty much crazy, have to stop her stuff. Piglet and Diva have seconds usually also. Certainly a go to dish for me to make, it doesn't take long either.
I put together this Cilantro Ginger Sauce because every time we go to a certain Chinese restaurant (China Express, you can read the review through that link) in Chinatown here we puffy heart the ginger sauce. So I decided to make something like it. It's not the same because theirs has no lime and it's got a lot of vegetable oil in it. It's so good though. We stir it into stir fry, dip dumplings into it, stir it in to bowls of hand stretched noodles. YUM.

GPAC Salted Caramel Sauce

Oh (hurricane) Sandy. Just go away already. We still have power right now. I shouldn't have said that. Oh well. It's cold, wet, and windy. I made it to the post office and the drug store. Now we're hanging out watching The Chronicles of Narnia- The Lion,the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I decided to make a Salted Caramel Sauce for the girls to dip their apples in. It's so good we burnt our tongues eating it, it's cooled down now and is warm, but it's almost all gone. It would be good with graham crackers and on top of ice cream. Drizzled on cupcakes too. I dropped off the jar and apples in the picture to our neighbors quick like, so just bakers twine and a mommy card.

This caramel sauce is very easy to make. I didn't use a candy thermometer. Just basic ingredients, and maybe 10 minutes and you're done.

Jeaw Mak Len (Lao Tomato Sauce)

 I love this sauce/Jeaw. Jeaw Mak Len literally means "sauce, tomato". It's fragrant, spicy, fresh. Perfect with meats, eggs, steamed vegetables. On a sandwich. Really! 

It's so easy to make and so very good. It's a thick, almost chutney. It isn't for ladling over pasta or rice. Used to dip with rice or steamed vegetables, it is a condiment. But I won't lie, I spooned it over a steak the other day.

Often Lao meals will have items like (of course there are so many more dishes)-

Khao/Kow Neo, a sticky rice you eat with your hands. Bags of this rice will say fragrant sweet rice. 

"Ping" - or grilled foods, like whole fish, chicken. 

Sien Hang- literally, "meat, dried". Dried beef- a jerky that is cooked after being marinated and left out to dry.  

Steamed vegetables.

Laabs or Larbs- fish, chicken, beef, or pork.

Lao omelets. (there's a picture of the Sien Hang there also)

Tum Mac Houng/ papaya salad.

Herbs are served fresh, along side a meal.

and usually there is Jeaw, some sort of chutney or dipping sauce.

GPAC Satay Sauce- Peanut/nut free

This sauce ROCKS. It's so good. Perfect with chicken satay, lettuce wraps, as a dip for vegetables, and salads. Or try it over noodles. I use Sunbutter, you can use almond butter if you tolerate almonds.
Thai Kitchen makes a paleo/primal compliant curry paste.

Click to find more Whole 30

Paleo

Primal 

recipes here on Give Peas A Chance, or use the search function. 

GPAC Mango Salsa

Nom Nom. I love this salsa. So very good. We like it on fish, pork chops, carnitas, tacos, burritos, eggs and with quesadillas. Off the spoon. This is better made the day before so the flavors can develop. I just use a knife and cutting board for everything. I suspect a food processor would work, but I like this chunky.

HH6 Cooking Challenge- Spring Rolls

It's already time for the Household 6 cooking club challenge! Months are flying by and pretty soon the kids will be in school again! Bittersweet.  We've been busy. With birthdays (two so far this month, one at the end of this month and one next month! We also had my sister in law and her family visiting from Uganda. It was so fun and such a blessing for the girls to play with their cousins! Summer giveaways are in full swing, one each week so far! Check out the latest one, and keep checking back for new ones! This week is the  Dropper Stopper giveaway, open until 7/22/11.  Click, enter and share!

This is my monthly challenge post for HH6.  What/who is HH6? Glad you asked! HH6 is-

Military spouse food bloggers taking on a culinary challenge/theme every month. Email saraplicious@yahoo.com to join and receive the monthly challenge/theme and blog roll.

You can find HH6 on Facebook, HERE. I missed last months cooking challenge. It was a crazy month. Wait. This month is crazy too. Sigh. I had a cool idea for last months challenge too. I have it on my to do list. This months cooking challenge 

Since it's getting hotter and hotter as we head into full summer, the challenge is to cook a meal without using heat - oven, stove, microwave, anything.  Bonus points if your meal isn't a salad!

As soon as this idea was posted I kinda knew what I wanted to do. So I started tonight's dinner. And realized I didn't have the thinnest rice vermicelli there was to have. SIGH. Remember this part, it's kind of relevant. I wasn't about to make a grocery store run so I did without. I also used frozen cooked shrimp. Not sure if that was a no no. I hope not.  DH says it's cheating, I say it isn't because I personally didn't cook them. I  made Spring rolls, Som Tom/Papaya Salad- which is a salad, but there you go, and a dipping sauce. 

Related posts-

Vermicelli Salad

Spring Rolls 
Spring Rolls Manic Monday

Egg Rolls

Nam Pla Dressing

Vermicelli Salad Bentos/Lunches

More Lunches

Let's get this Day 13

It was a fun, lazy day here. We dyed Easter eggs and just hung out.

Brunch Green Eggs and Ham Grown up- Pancetta, eggs and Hatch green chilies I'll be posting on this soon.

Snack- Larabar

Dinner was some amazing Paleo/Primal friendly pork and shrimp satay wraps with a no peanut sauce that I can't wait to share with you all. I also had a glass of coconut milk.

Late night snack- an apple with a spoonful of Coconut Butter.

Creamy Horseradish and Pot Roast

 Usually we like straight up horseradish with pot roast. Even the girls. But I thought this would be good to change things up a bit. The roast wasn't the best, but still good. Crock pot fail. The sauce is yummy though.

 Prepared horseradish and a squirt of wasabi.

 Sour cream.

 Black, White and Spice!, parsley and dried chives.