r/ThaiFood

Are you happily mindlessly doom scrolling Tik Tok, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit (cough!), etc to while away your day? Movies, news, sports, games, forums, porn (cough!), etc? Or do you take advantage of your digital devices and use them to make your time productive, and your life easier? I had recently bought a new laptop, and it inspired me to learn more about its abilities to sync with my phone and take advantage of that feature to simplify my life.

I’m a Mac user, long time now, and also iPhone. I’m no expert with either, but I get by. No matter what your computer or phone of choice is, they’ll all pretty much provide similar services if used with the proper apps. And, (this was a key for me), you do need to take proper time to learn to use them properly. Those apps will only be as good as you set them up to be. It’s not hard to do, but you do need to make the effort to learn.

First thing for me was a no-brainer, and easy to do. Set up reminders for my visa obligations. I now know exactly when my 90-day check is due, and same for my one-year extension. I used Reminders app for that, and/or a calendar app would certainly work as well. When I’ve completed my 90-day report, I reset that reminder with the new date, and good to go again. With the one-year extension, I set the reminder to recur on that date every year. With my iPhone if I set up a reminder, it auto-adds it to my calendar app as well. So two birds with one stone there. And you can set up reminders a couple days/weeks/hours (if you wish) in advance for a heads-up alert.

There are other ideas I have, the above Immigrations reminders were a no-brainer like I said and good for starters. I’ll offer other ideas and suggestions as - and if - this thread progresses. And I will be watching to see what other ideas fellow expats have, and how they use their devices to simplify their lives. For those with Apple devices, they come with the Calendar, Reminders, and Notes apps, all quite good and very usable. As for Android and/or Windows users, I’m not familiar with their apps, but I’m sure they have something similar. No telling what we'll learn if we put our heads together.

I’m on the east coast US, and thai is my absolute favorite cuisine by far, but my options are pretty much limited to a few americanized restaurants in the area. Even common ingredients (holy basil, lemongrass, makrut, galangal) are almost impossible to find so I can only make half assed substitutes cooking at home, or use premixed curry pastes.

I’d even settle for frozen meals if that were a thing, but at best any grocers I’ve been to might have a mediocre pad thai if I’m lucky. My local Lidl briefly had frozen tom yum soup and I probably had one or two daily until they ran out.

I'm a pretty darn good cook but Thai was just never something I tackled. I really want to start. When I lived in NY we had so many great choices but here it's limited. To me, no cuisine can make veggies taste as good, Indian is a close 2nd, I'm far from a vegetarian but I really want to get more of them into my diet and I know that cooking Thai is the best way to do that. My wife usually ordered Pad Thai, yawn, lol, I mean it's not bad but I want all those flavors and textures, sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy, the texture of those julienne veggies, the soft noodles that maybe have a little char from the wok, those incredible Thai Chilis just blasting my taste buds!!!! OMG, I used to frequent this place called Raan Thai on Long Island, I would almost always order the Honey Tamarind Duck, it was a half duck all cut up but basically reassembled on the plate over a bed of crunchy lettuce I think, covered in an incredible sauce and topped with an insane amount of Thai Chilis because I asked for the dish to be "Thai Spicy". Still to this day it's my favorite dish in my 56 years on this earth. It was so hot sweat would drip down my face, I would start getting the burps but had to do it into a napkin to avoid burning my eyes with my own breath. Yes that happened. I even ate all the lettuce which might have been a garnish. Okay, enough of that talk. I would love to hear your recommendations, maybe a pantry list, maybe certain people to follow on social media or YouTube, your favorite Thai recipes, anything you want to offer up I'm listening!! I have a huge Asian Supermarket near me that I'm assuming will have anything I would need. I'm hoping they will have fresh rice noodles because from what I'm seeing in videos they blow away the dry stuff. Well, thanks in advance for any help.

Hey all, new here. Recently I began expanding what I could do in the kitchen and found myself enjoying thai food a lot. Pad Kra Pao really spoke to me and has become a bit of a staple when i need something quick to make. I realized that considering it’s a ground meat dish, I could also turn them into empanadas!!

So I ask, does anyone have any recommendations for flavor profiles that would complement Kra Pao?

I was leaning into the idea of creating a chutney or some kind. Maybe a mint or fruit one but I’m not sure.

Maybe it’s not so much of a mystery about the ingredient, but more the specifics of its preparation. There was a Thai restaurant I used to frequent that had great curry. They had a tofu option, but the tofu was always cut into triangles, about 1/2” thick, and had a bit of a skin with an airy interior (hard to explain, but not dense like I usually find tofu to be.) I’ve cooked with tofu quite a bit and never thought about how to replicate this until today. Any idea how to go about getting these textures?