Real Vegetarian Thai
by Nancie McDermott
About the Author
Nancie McDermott is a food writer and cooking teacher specializing in the cuisine of Thailand, where she spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer. Her food articles have appeared in numerous magazines, and she is the author of the perennially popular cookbook, Real Thai.Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Delicious recipes, well laid-out book, March 8, 2004
By Klytemnestra (UK)
Vegetarians have long bewailed the difficulty of making Thai food: almost every ready-made Thai curry paste available contains shrimp or worse. Now it is possible to concoct your own! McDermott has created an Eastern cookbook with a Western eye, taking the mystery out of this delicious cuisine. Recipes are categorised along familiar lines, exotic ingredients are explained in a glossary and sources listed, unusual techniques (from opening a coconut to roasting chillis) are fully explained. This cookbook is very helpful indeed: there's even a bibliography and a list of menu suggestions, you can alter the amount of heat in a dish to taste (I'm a wimp about chillis and am doing fine), and she is not too snobbish to suggest replacements, such as ginger if galanga is unavailable. The lay-out is clear and easy to follow, and there are several interesting anecdotes about McDermott's travels in Thailand and the traditional Thai way of life.
The recipes are imaginative, healthy, straightforward to make, and they work beautifully. Many of them are vegan, and adaptations are usually suggested for those which are not. A "Basic Recipes" section gives recipes for essentials such as the different curry pastes, roasted chilli paste, vegetable stock, and "mushroom mince" (which she has invented to replace minced meat in traditional recipes).Some examples of recipes included are:
Crispy spring rolls with sweet and hot garlic sauce
Green papaya salad
Jasmine rice soup with mushrooms, green onions and crispy garlic
Red curry with eggplant and sweet peppers
Butternut squash in fresh green curry
Firecracker broccoli
Coconut ice cream
Thai iced tea
To my surprise, Thai cookery turned out not just to be possible for vegetarians and vegans (an astonishing number of recipes are here, and meat-eaters will certainly not feel deprived), but the ingredients are easy to find, the recipes easy to make, and the results are dazzling.
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Most Usefull Cookbooks in My Library, November 14, 2002
By Kevin Spooner (Atlanta, GA United States)
This book has so many great recepies for just about any palate. Sometimes the recepies can look a little daunting and complicated, but it assumes you're using all fresh ingredients, which you don't always have to. After all, cumin powder is in my opinion just as good as fresh cumin seeds. Or more available anyway. Basically, once you take the time to create a few of the "staple" ingredients in this book (red and green curry paste are essential), you can make just about anything in here quickly and cheaply. And it's GOOD! I'm never going to forget the look on my friends' faces when I came out with an eggplant curry that I'd made from this book. Everyone was amazed. So if you want to do something different, and you're a bit creative, this book is for you.
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Worth it for the Pad Thai recipe, September 19, 2002
By S. Bergstrom (Lexington, MA United States)
This is a great cookbook -- I love eating Thai food in restaurants, but it's hard to feel comfortable as a vegetarian, since I know there's often still fish sauce in foods marked 'vegetarian'. Everything I've tried from this cookbook tastes wonderful and authentic. As others have said, it's not for quick meals, especially since many recipes require home-made curry paste.
In response to the reviewer who wondered if this cookbook was on the short side because of its vegetarianism -- removing fish paste/fish sauce from Thai food is non-trivial, since it's in almost everything. In some dishes, it mainly adds salt, and soy sauce can (and is) a usual substitute. Others, I'd imagine, just don't taste right without it. That said, I'd love it if this cookbook were longer, since what it includes is wonderful.
If you're not vegetarian, the same author has a non-veggie thai cookbook as well. (According to the specs, it's a few pages shorter, but I haven't looked at it.)
How to Cook Thai Vegetarian Tofu Stir Fry : How to Cook Thai Tofu for Vegetarian Stir Fry
Learn how to prepare the tofu for a favorite Thai vegetarian stir fry recipe with expert cooking tips in this free Thai cuisine video clip. Expert: Kara Denholm Bio: Kara Denholm is a self proclai...
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