Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Asian grocery stores are a beautiful thing

We have been seriously missing Thai food lately, and despite our best efforts to make it at home, we always lacked what we need to make the delicious cuisine perfect: Thai bird chillies.  The regular super markets have only jalapeno peppers, serrano peppers, and twice per year, (if you’re lucky) you can find Scotch Bonnet peppers (habenero chillies).  The bird chillies from Thailand have a great flavour, and are just a little bit less spicy than the habeneros, but have WAY more kick than the jalapenos.  Neither of the other chillies will substitute.  Sure, you can add more jalapenos to accomplish the spice factor, but the FLAVOUR is wrong. 

Anyway, we took a trip to the Eastern Market.  We have found bird chillies there before, but they were often dark green and no matter how long we left them sitting around, would rot before turning red.  And if we used them green, the flavour was all wrong and the heat just wasn’t there.  Poor us.   This time was different.  Thanks be to Raptor Jesus, we found a big ole bag of RED bird chillies.  These things looked as good as or better than the ones we could buy at the market in Thailand.   See for yourselves:

chillies Anyway, Monday Matt made me a red curry (my personal favourite of the curries), and tonight is noodle bowl night.

Raptor Jesus, bless the Eastern Market.RaptorJesus copy

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