Monday, September 24, 2012

In Which Connor Plays Hide And Seek With His Medical Equipment And Gives Me More Gray Hair

I'll be making a trip to our local Asian grocery store this week because I'm almost out of palm sugar and I'm running dangerously low on Thai peppers.  I've been in a big Thai food cooking kick as I try to work out how to make a lot of the dishes Ellen might be eating right now. 

It helps that the orphanage website posts a lot of the menus and that I'm able to take a look at those, but occasionally the translations don't work out very well.  Today she's apparently having something called "Prikking Fried Morning Glory."  After a bit of detective work I'm pretty sure this is Pad Prik King (a green bean curry), but it's hard to be sure.  I've been working my way through Leela's recipes over at She Simmers, and while I have no idea whether or not I'm doing them right I'm at least eating well in the process. 

So now I find myself incorporating a lot of Thai flavors into the rest of my cooking as well.  It's been fun playing with flavors like galangal and tamarind pulp in my sauces and marinades.  Connor seems to enjoy the intense flavor of a lot of the spices, but that's not really a big surprise.  This is the kid who likes to literally suck on lemons.  He's a flavor extremist.

Speaking of Connor: he went back to school today, which was pretty exciting.  He's mostly over his cold, and seems to have gotten through the entire thing seizure free.  Hooray!  Today was pretty much without incident, though he did pull his right hearing aid apart and throw the super-expensive computer portion of it over the side of his wheelchair; something I discovered once we returned home from running errands.  This prompted a frantic phone call to the grocery store and the coffee shop and a search of the whole house, driveway and van.  I finally found it when I deployed the ramp, apparently it was hidden under the vehicle when the ramp retracted and it rolled down when I put it down to take the little guy back to grocery store to search the parking lot. 

He likes to keep me on my toes.

~Jess

4 comments:

Julia said...

Yikes! I can just imagine you backing the van out and driving over the aid, smashing it to smithereens. Ben's aid is failing intermittently these days. At least he hasn't seen fit to dunk the ear mold in my tea.

Kathryn said...

that would not be good if you lost it. Also on an angry sidenote Why do school picture people think hearing aids mess up pictures or as the lady said,"the thing in your ear." At school picture day which i was clueless about i was told to remove my glasses and hearing aid(thing in ear) and i poiletly yet firmly refused to.

rbn said...

I'm guessing you know this, but morning glory is the translation of a common type of asian green (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipomoea_aquatica). When I lived in Thailand, it was served frequently in the villages. So in this case, it was just prepared in the prikking curry sauce.

Just my two cents. Happy cooking!

Jess said...

Julia, he's probably just waiting for an opportune moment.

Kathryn, that photographer sounds like a jerk. My kid proudly wears his hearing aids for all of his school pictures (and pictures in general when he's not pulling them out and dunking them in my tea).

rbn, thanks for the info! I did figure it out eventually, though it took a bit of digging. Typically when I hear 'morning glory,' I think of the common flower, which is not only inedible but a hallucingenic poison, so it wasn't an easy jump for me.

It's fun learning all the names of the Thai spices; I'm trying to learn them in Thai as well as their English names. Emphasis on trying.

Mostly I've been trying to look up recipes by their Thai names, which helps. Most of the really great Thai blogs and cookbooks include the Thai name of the recipe too, which is great because that way I can make sure I've got the right one. The English language translations get kind of creative sometimes.


 
Blog Directory