Well, green curry is generally the spiciest of the bunch. If you make the paste above w/ 20 thai green chillies (birds eye chillies) and use half of the paste for your green curry dish you should be getting plenty of heat (and deliciousness ).

If you don't want to go through all the hassle of making the paste, canned curry paste is plenty good and suprisingly not full of lots of bull**** and msg most of the time. What were the recipes you used before? If heat were the only issue I would say just add ground or pulverized fresh green chillies to the paste before you start cooking and you can just adjust heat to your desire.

I'll try to get up a good green curry dish recipe soon. Might make one on friday.

I didn't end up having time to do a breakdown or get pics on the making of any of the dishes but got one not very good phone pic of the spread.
From Top down it was drunken noodles w/ shrimp, some raw vegetables for the catfish salad, papaya salad, heavenly beef (home made beef jerky for the papaya salad), Isaan style roasted catfish salad (similar to a larb but more concentrated and with some twists), salty catfish in coconut milk and tumeric soup w/ shallots and lemongrass, and stir fried broccoli w/ garlic and thai oyster sauce.

Consumed with sticky rice and lots of Chang beers followed by sticky rice w/ mango and then many whiskies. It was a good night.

Awesome thread. I want a lime tree like that.

Made drunken noodles w/ shrimp again the other night. Noodle dishes are something that I've never been able to pull off well but these drunken noodles are killer. It's called drunken noodles not because there is any alcohol used in the recipe but because the extreme spiciness of it encourages mass beer consumption.

A huge part of my previous noodle making problems was that I was simply using too many noodles. The conversion for dry to wet is about 4 to 1. Soaking the noodles for longer, making sure they are room temperature or warmer before starting and keeping the wok super hot have all helped as well.

1lb. fresh wide rice noodles or 4 oz dry noodles soaked

3/4 lb shrimp

3-4 Tbs. peanut oil

8-10 cloves of garlic, chopped

1/2 cup onion

10-15 thai chillies chopped and crushed

2-3 cups bite sized pieces of chinese broccoli or cabbage

2-3 Tbs. thai oyster sauce

2-3 tsp black soy sauce (the semi sweet kind)

2-3 Tbs. fish sauce

1 tsp. sugar

1/4 tsp white pepper

1 cup Thai holy basil or thai sweet basil

1 small tomato cut into wedges

Pics are kinda **** once again as I'm using my phone and having to move pretty fast at the same time.

Get peanut oil and wok smoking hot and then add garlic and onions

follow with shrimp

then chillies (keep everything moving pretty much constantly)

stirfry a bit more and then make sure wok is as hot as possible when adding the noodles and chinese brocoli


Add dark soy sauce and oyster sauce and toss well to spread it around. Add fish sauce, sugar and white pepper and then adjust salt/sweetness to taste. Toss in the basil and tomato wedges.

stirfry till wilted
Pic definitely doesn't do it justice. So freaking tasty. Make sure to have plenty of beer on hand. Enjoy



Thanks. Lime trees are pretty tough to maintain but they are definitely worth it IMO. Mine is not looking great after being indoors all winter but I'm hoping it will start feeling better now that its able to go back outside.

I checked 2 stores for those limes to take seeds from but neither carried them. Asian grocery store might or something? Any other herbs I should grow to do more Thai cooking? I bought Thai Basil, lemongrass and am already growing Thai peppers with my other peppers. Oh, I see you use mention 2 basil in your last recipe. I bought the sweet Thai I think.

It's supposed to be really tough to grow them from seed. You might be able to find the seeds at some asian markets but I would try to find small trees. It took me a while to find a tree. None of the asian markets here carry them and I eventually got one from a lady at a farmers market that grew lots of citrus plants. I had looked into ordering a tree online just before I came across this one and I know there were several places you could by them from.
There are some weird importing laws/issues with kaffir lime leaves now so they are really tough to find fresh around here. Makes having the tree that much nicer.

Sweet. Lemongrass, basil (yeah almost always gonna be sweet basil called horapa unless you are in southeast asia), and chillies are great to have fresh. Mint, cilantro, green onions, and the elusive kaffir lime tree would be the other big ones if you wanted to add more. Shallotes and garlic get used a ton too if you are getting crazy with it. I was thinking about adding those to our garden this year but they are just so easy to get fresh and stay fresh for a while so we ended up passing.

Yeah I may buy one online or something. If I can't find any you may have to mail me some seeds from a lime heh. I already grow mint, onions, cilantro.

Oh man that drunken noodles recipe is happening tomorrow!

Really nice work.

Kaffir limes are available at OSH. The suppliers is Four Winds Growers in Fremont, Ca. The small (five gallon) ones are $20+/-.

Usually they use dwarf rootstock, but mine got about 14 feet high.

I supply a couple of Thai restaurants with my tree.

Ha, well hopefully mine will recover and I will get more lime's this year. Sounds like you'll have a sweet garden. This is the first year that I am attempting a full garden instead of just using pots.
Thanks! Let me know how it goes.

Are you saying that your kaffir lime tree is 14 feet high? I had no idea they could get that big. How many limes do you get in a season? Where are you growing it? Any tips?

I had gardens growing up but not since I turned 18 really. This is 1st year I will have an actual garden. Ive been using a bunch of homemade earthboxes the last 4-5 years now.

My yard looked something like:



I made my own earthboxes though and made the trellis a bit different and about twice that height. I used Burpee netting too, not metal.

...against a south facing stucco wall. It "was" 14 feet tall until a storm blew it down last fall. I figured I lost it, but it has new growth this spring. It's now 8-9 feet after topping it (and staking it). In theory, mine is a dwarf.

A friend has one as well and 14 feet is not unusual though I don't know if her's is dwarf rootstock.

I just checked and my lime count is at six with one in the grass. I'd say the most I get is four dozen.

I general the tree does much better in the ground that in a pot. Mine was in a 24" terra cotta pot for six years or so and only get 4-5 feet high. In the ground it hit 14 feet in a season or two of growing.

Found some seeds on ebay for just a few bucks.

That's crazy, man. Mind if I ask where you are? You can't put them in the ground here in North Carolina unless you are gonna dig them up and bring them in in the winter. I assume you weren't bringing a 14 ft tree in for the winter. I had read that they maxed out at 5 or 6 feet but, yeah, now I am seeing mention of them reaching 4-5 meters in their natural habitat.

Nice! Good luck with the lime seeds. Here is our first attempt at a real (non potted) garden. Dug about 6 inches out of the ground and then used 12' tall boards for the border of a raised bed and filled that with compost and garden soil. Child labor FTW.

S.F. Bay Area

sigh... better greenery all around on that side. So it was OK outside in the winter there?

Generally we do well with citrus. Once every decade or so the temps get low enough to be a problem, but I've never had a citrus tree die on me.

All the seeds on ebay were from overseas so I found a nursery on Amazon shipping me a 2 year old plant. Awww yeah.

Get there yet?

How'd the noodles work out for you?

Cool dog and thread. Had Thai last weekend here in Indianapolis, I'm sure it was authentic lol. Ordered orange chicken, was real good, except the chicken quality was average at best. Is that even Thai? Overall though, yes Thai food is ill and I envy your culinary skills.

Thanks. He IS an awesome dog.
Well, thai food essentially is fusion food but I've always thought of orange chicken as just being a straight up Chinese dish.

My "culinary skills" are really minimal. I'm mostly just following recipes to get down the basics and trying to tweak here and there to get to how I like it since great thai restaurants are few and far between in this area. Generally I come up short but I've gotten a few dishes down to where they are IMO much better than I can find in restaurants here. Basically, just obsessed enough to spend the time on it and sometimes I can prep stuff while waiting for action

Boom



Just read that 85-95 degrees is optimal soil temp. Yikes. I'm probably going to have issues here lol. I know other people that have grown indoor citrus in my area and put them outside though so we'll see I guess.

We have a thai/garden thread and salsa/garden thread goin on.

Nice! Did it come in that pot? It seems possibly too big. They are very prone to root rot so a few things you can do to avoid that are to
Make sure the pot isn't too big
Use coarser well draining soil
Put gravel in the bottom of the pot to help with drainage and
Make sure the roots have time to dry in between waterings.