I've been having mild to medium, but constant, cravings for Thai food lately. Particularly soup. Big bowls of creamy rich soup with lots of noodles and coconut milk. This has to be the kind of thing I can make for myself, though (curry is not; my curry still needs a lot of help) which means that I'm going to be checking out (more) cookbooks from the library this weekend.
I have two very good Thai cookbooks - Hot Sour Salty Sweet, which is more of a Southeast Asian travel guide with food, and True Thai, by Victor Sodsook. My satay recipe came from True Thai, as does my recipe for Tom Kai Gai, coconut milk soup with lemongrass, chicken, mushrooms, and chiles.
Brian's Thai aunt likes the place on Falls of Neuse...can't remember the name of it, though. Not far from where it changes from Wake Forest, on the right, in a shopping center with a Staples. If it's still there. That location has changed hands a lot.
Try to find a recipe for laksa. It's an absolutely lovely soup, and now I'm having a massive craving for one, so I'm going to have to find some place in Seattle that has it. Hmmmm.
Google gave me this; does that look about right? That looks like a lot of work, but really, really good.
There was a Thai place in downtown that we ate at on one of my visits last year that was a little pricey, but really good, and I can't remember the name. seattlejo, do you remember? (Of course, finding Thai food in Seattle isn't hard, just maybe the specific dish.)
If you have an Asian market in your area, you should be able to find a laksa paste, so you skip most of the difficult work of making it.
The recipe that you found looks good, but this one looks a little easier to follow (well, except that you have to convert from grams to pounds). And I never make chicken laksa, I prefer seafood laksa (which is really nothing more than replacing the chicken with seafood), so maybe that's colouring my opinion more than it should. :)
I think that laksa, like many Asian dishes with lots of ingredients (and ones that the Midwestern girl in me isn't familiar with :), looks scarier to make than it really is. They just require a lot of preparation to begin, but once you're cooking, it's not bad at all. Aside from the paste, you can make laksa in under a half-hour (and a fair part of that is boiling the rice noodles).
I keep craving Thai - fortunately there's a good restaurant not too far away from the house, because the number of ingrediants most dishes take that I'd have to go hunting around town to find intimidates me.
The library has HSSS, but not True Thai. Hrpmh. :)
There was a Thai place in downtown that we ate at on one of my visits last year that was a little pricey, but really good, and I can't remember the name.
The recipe that you found looks good, but this one looks a little easier to follow (well, except that you have to convert from grams to pounds). And I never make chicken laksa, I prefer seafood laksa (which is really nothing more than replacing the chicken with seafood), so maybe that's colouring my opinion more than it should. :)
I think that laksa, like many Asian dishes with lots of ingredients (and ones that the Midwestern girl in me isn't familiar with :), looks scarier to make than it really is. They just require a lot of preparation to begin, but once you're cooking, it's not bad at all. Aside from the paste, you can make laksa in under a half-hour (and a fair part of that is boiling the rice noodles).