Week 9 - Thai

So behind on catching up from last year's challenge! I've already made Week 9's dish for this year, so I really need to get going!

The Week 9 challenge was Thai, one of our favorite cuisines but one that we haven't had as often in recent years. Although I made larb gai back in 2017 when the challenge theme was also Thai, and in 2015 when the challenge theme was ground meat, it had been so long since I'd made it that I thought it was time to try it again. I used the same recipe from Eating Thai Food, and it was just as good as I remembered. I always forget that I can make this at home, and that I should do it more often.

Our adapted version of the larb recipe consisted of ground meat (used chicken here), roasted rice powder, lime juice, sugar, fish sauce, shallots, red onion, scallions, mint, and cilantro. Usually, there would also be Thai chili flakes, which I've used in the past, but we skipped that here in the hopes that B would eat it (but I can't remember if he did). Larb just makes me so happy, so I was very glad to make it again.

Since I had made larb before for two other (unofficial) challenges, I wanted to add on something else to make this Thai night different - mango sticky rice! Larb is one of my favorite savory Thai dishes, and mango sticky rice is one of my favorite desserts, so they were a good match. It's been over a year now since we made this, so I don't remember any specific recipe that we followed, or if we mostly went from our memories of what mango sticky rice should taste like.

For mango sticky rice, you need a nice, ripe, sweet mango (and we had a perfect Ataulfo one ready for it). The other main components are glutinous rice and a coconut sauce, made from heated coconut milk with sugar dissolved in it. The hardest part of this was making the glutinous rice because we didn't really have a perfect steamer for it. I guess we could have put the rice on parchment paper in our regular steamer, but instead we tried a method I found online from She Simmers, where you put the rice on a splatter guard over boiling water, cover it with a metal bowl, and steam it. It worked far better than we expected. Whenever we get good mangoes, we may have to make this again, since it's such a great dessert. Very happy with our Thai night!