3 Way Thai

I know it's not true, but I feel like I've exhausted all Thai possibilities at this point. What I really mean is that I don't think I can stomach any more lime juice and fish sauce concoctions until next year. I made one more go at it, at least for this month, with Thai Basil Chicken. This was another one of those dishes that my brain kept telling me I didn't like, but that I continued to shovel into my mouth and then eat the leftovers of. It has all the elements of hearty comfort food (like chicken noodle soup!) except it doesn't agree with my palette. Alone the chicken wouldn't win any awards, but paired with the noodles and a bit of soy sauce and it was actually remarkably edible, even if I am only saying that in hindsight. The hot and sour thing is growing on me.

I'm sort of under the impression that I should have a Thai Cucumber Salad with any spicy Thai dish, so I went about it a different way this time with a Cucumber Peanut Salad. It consists of almost entirely different ingredients than the previous Thai cucumber salad while still passing as almost a replica. Red onions are like shallots, lime juice is like vinegar, and so on and so forth. I just ate it alongside the chicken whenever I felt my mouth was burning. It didn't really help with that, but it did cleanse my palette a bit.

I had some leftover asparagus stalks from (frighteningly, over a week ago) the Mushroom Moose Steaks (with asparagus) dinner. I made Thai Asparagus Spears which were, as expected, quite woody, having over a week to toughen up in the fridge. Likely due more to the recipe than the aged asparagus, the flavor sort of struck me as an anonymous Asian green, rather than asparagus itself. Sort of like what any given vegetable in chop suey tasted like before I'd ever eaten a bean sprout outside of a restaurant. It was good, but I think I'd feel like I was wasting good asparagus if I prepared it this way again.