Cooking at Home has Ruined our Eating-out Experience

We love the cuisine of southeast Asia... Butter Chicken, Thai Yellow Curry, Garam Masala... heck... anything with curry!

Used to be that one of our favourite treats was to eat-out at either our favourite Indian restaurant or our favourite Thai restaurant. But then... with a tailbone injury... my partner was unable to enjoy the sit-down experience at restaurants, so we switched to take-away or take-out. Still super yummy and we would alternate between Thai and Indian. Sooo good.

Now, of course, with Covid-19... eating out is fraught with issues so take-out is taking off. But, to be honest, take-out (and eating out) is expensive and... our experience with the meal prep service (FreshPrep in this case), opened my eyes to the fact that... cooking ain't that hard.

After trying and succeeding at various Indian curries... I decided to tackle one of our favourites, the Holy Grail if you will... Thai Yellow Curry. It didn't look that hard... yellow curry paste, coconut milk, tofu (instead of chicken), onions, potatoes, carrots, pineapple. Easy peasy. Or so it looked.

The trick with most of these things is the spices... and in this case... the yellow curry paste. You could make a yellow curry paste from scratch but... that requires all sorts of ingredients which I was not going to hunt down. Far better to just hunt down yellow curry paste. Can't be that hard, right? Wrong.

Mae Ploy
Best Thai Yellow Curry Paste

None of the regular supermarkets (including Superstore) carried yellow curry paste. They were well stocked with green and red curry paste... but not yellow. I finally ran a tiny jar to ground in Walmart, having seen it listed online. I was not pleased. But a bit of research revealed that my answer lay with Amazon... which had the BEST yellow curry paste... or so the reviewers said. I ordered Mae Ploy Yellow Curry Paste... and waited patiently for it to arrive.

I could have used the Walmart stuff but, to be honest, it looked more red than yellow and... I wanted this experiment to be a success. After I got the Mae Ploy (which was indeed yellow!), I tracked down a Thai Yellow Curry recipe with great reviews. The recipe looked dead easy and... it was. Dice up an onion, sautee the paste, add coconut milk (we used light coconut milk), add in the carrots... make sure to cook the potatoes separately, otherwise you'll have mushy potatoes... fry up the tofu separately... and then add in the pineapple and tofu towards the end. Serve over rice...

Verdict? OMG... super yummy!!! We licked our plates... it was sooooo good. A cooking success!! Score it a 10/10...

Except... a week or so later, my niece and sister were visiting us, and on one of our outings, we decided to pop into our favourite Thai restaurant and order take-out... it was just easier. We got Thai Yellow Curry and my sister and niece got Pad Thai (another favourite of ours)... and we ordered some veggie spring rolls (thin pastry wrapped around a veggie mixture and then deep fried). We came home and tore into the food but... the yellow curry was meh... not that great. The spring rolls weren't how we remembered them and... the Pad Thai was yucky.

OK... so maybe they were just having a bad day. A few weeks ago, we decided to try a Thai place in a neighbouring town, as we were heading home after a day trip. They got great reviews and so we ordered... yellow curry with spring rolls. The spring rolls we munched on the way home and they were OK but not great. And the thai yellow curry? It was thin and watery and tasted almost exactly like the stuff from our favourite restaurant. Not great.

We cooked my thai yellow curry again and... it was amazing! Sooo... it's not our taste buds... but we have wrecked the whole take-out Thai food business for ourselves. I found a Pad Thai recipe the other day (again... it's all in the sauce) and... it was amazing. Sooo... we find ourselves in the enviable position of being able to cook better Thai food than the Thai places. Sigh.

This has been my Mom's complaint for as long as I can remember, not about Thai food, but about eating out in general. She's always disappointed when she goes out to eat... it's never as good as what she can cook at home. And now... I commiserate with her... Why pay $50 for a take-out meal when I can make the same stuff for $10... and it will taste way better?!

Spring rolls

Except for the spring rolls of course... that is our sticking point. And samosas too...

Except... as I wrote that, I opened a new browser tab and typed "spring roll recipes"... and... voila dozens of recipes. I selected one at random and the author gives two options... fry them in an oil bath in a wok (we have a wok!) or... bake them. Huh... that's definitely an option...

By the way... there are two types of Spring Rolls... the fried ones and then the cold ones which are usually wrapped in translucent rice paper and eaten cold. Two very different things. We made the cold spring rolls (a.k.a. Salad Rolls or Summer Rolls) last year and they were super yummy as well!

Suffice to say... we may be tackling the fried spring rolls next... then we can say good-bye to our favourite Thai take-out place... 

Oh, and Butter Chicken (minus the butter and the chicken)... is also on my To Cook list... maybe with Samosa and then we an bid good-bye to our favourite Indian place as well...