Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Cultural Experience

I love thai food! If you haven't tired it, you are missing out. It's 1,000 times better than any chinese food you can buy. Salt Lake City has a really yummy place in Fort Union called Thai Spice. I haven't been able to find something as good here in Texas.

One of the things I love to eat is their fried bananas dessert (it sounds gross but it's actually really good). Everytime we go out to eat to a thai restaurant I fill up on the meal and don't leave room for dessert. So I haven't had any in a while.

I found a couple of recipes online that I wanted to try so I went to Honk Kong Market Place, an asian grocery store, to buy the ingredients i needed. It was a great cultural experience.
I could smell the fish before I entered. The entire back wall was filled displays of fish, some were still alive. Emilia loved looking at them swim in the tanks.





All the isle signs were in asian characters and english but even the english translation didn't mean much to me. They sold more types of eggs than I even knew existed - quail eggs, duck egg, etc. They also had a whole isle dedicated to different types of rice.The smallest rice bag you could buy weighted 20 lbs. I really felt like I was in another part of the world.

While meandering through I thought of my brother in law who served the vietnamese people of Georgia during his mission. He would have been a very helpful guide.

Anyway, tonight for dinner I tried two types of recipes and I was pleased by how well one of them turned out -the other one was a minor disaster :(

It's really easy, you just have to cut a firm banana into fourths and wrap a slice in a spring roll wrapper, fry them until golder and you're done. I love to eat it drizzled with caramel and with a scoop of coconut ice cream - sinfully good but a little rich! Now you know why I can't have both the dinner and dessert at a restaurant.

Here is a link to the recipe.

http://thaifood.about.com/od/thaidesserts/r/Friedbananas.htm

Let me know if you try them.