When a chef of the stature of Veena Arora conducts a culinary session on Healthy Thai Recipes, one can rest assured that it is going to be a full house. Those of you for whom the name does not ring a bell, Chef Veena Arora is the person behind the success of the iconic Spice Route restaurant at The Imperial, the restaurant which first introduced Delhi to the myriad flavours of South East Asian Cuisine and which was heralded as the top ten restaurants in the world by the Condé Nast Traveller.
The dishes that the trail blazing chef chose to demonstrate at the Imperial Culinary Club, before an eager and enthusiastic group of women cutting across all age groups, were not the regular Tom Yum soup and Red & Green curries which one finds at most Thai restaurants in India. They were the popular street food dishes of Thailand which Chef Veena Arora grew up eating, as she was born and raised in Thailand. Easy to cook recipes, often requiring nothing more than a wok and a few ingredients, these are extremely healthy dishes which can be conjured up in a jiffy.
The first dish which Chef Veena Arora taught was the Yum Mamuang –Spicy and Tangy Raw Mango Salad, showing how to julienne raw mango without the help of any fancy peelers and just with a simple knife. In winters raw mango can be substituted with carrot or cucumber. She showed how a Thai salad is always eaten rolled up in a lettuce leaf so that one does not feel the spices.
The next dish was Laab Kai–Thai minced Chicken salad with roastedglutinous rice. She got an ordinary grinder from home to show how easy it was to mince the chicken without taking recourse to fancy heavy duty mixer grinders. For the Kaeng Cherd Tauhu which was a Silky bean curd soup with chicken dumplings, one could use the commercial stock cubes available in the market.
In the Phad Phed Kai– Wok fried chicken and green beans with redcurry paste one need not make the curry paste from scratch as all ingredients are not easily available in India. The packaged variety will impart as good a taste. The green beans used in this dish are not French beans but what we call “lobhia ki phalli” in Hindi.
Three other dishes which she taught were Phad Thai Chae– Stir fried Thai rice noodles with chives and leeks, Kai Kraphao– Wok fried mince chicken with basil, red chillies and oyster sauce. Kerala stylePrawns were thrown in on popular demand.
While cooking Thai food, it is the most important to balance the four important elements like sweet, salty, sour and spicy, as Thai cuisine is an interplay of these fundamental taste senses. The sequence in which one adds the sauces like fish sauce and soy sauce is not important. Vegetarians can substitute fish sauce with light soy sauce. In the same way palm sugar can be substituted with regular white sugar but not “gur” or jaggery.
Most ingredients used for Thai cuisine can be sourced from the INA market. A point she emphasised was that one should always use one’s own judgement while following any recipe, especially while adding the measured amounts mentioned. These and many other invaluable tips were given out to the culinary enthusiasts of the ImperialCulinary Club. These dishes seemed so easy to make that I just couldn’t wait to get home and try them out.
As with every session, this too ended with a buffet featuring all the recipes taught by the Chef. There was a lucky draw where vouchers were won for free meals at the well known restaurants of the Imperial. As I was leaving the venue I could hear everyone enquiring about when the next culinary session was going to be held which spoke volumes about the popularity of this highly successful initiative.
