Tom Kha Awesome!

Hello hello!

I hope you all had a splendiferous Thanksgiving! We did — wow, I LOVE hosting! (which I guess might not be that surprising for a bossy Leo!) Of course, it helps that we had excellent guests, who were very helpful and patient and lovely to have around. And the food turned out surprisingly well, which we achieved by doing nothing complicated and letting people bring us a trillion pies, most of which we still have.

There’s AN ENTIRE PECAN PIE sitting unopened on top of our fridge! Adam is in charge of taking all the sugary leftovers to work with him. I don’t mind if he eats the entire pie himself there in his office, as long as it’s not here, lounging around the kitchen, tempting me to eat the whole thing, which I could easily totally do.

The most surprising part is that the Great Thai Food Experiment of 2007 was actually pretty successful! On Sunday we made tom kha gai soup (chicken coconut soup with galangal) and bananas in coconut milk, and everybody liked it! Yippee! (Of course, the flaw in this plan is that we fed them that instead of leftovers, sooo…now we have LOTS of leftovers.)

So, in honor of that, I’ve decided to skip ahead in my honeymoon photos to share our thrilling Thai cooking class with you. Oh, yes we did! We took a Thai cooking class! We cooked Thai food, which was awesome and fun, and then we ate it, which was awesome and AWESOME.

Lookit! We’re making Thai food! In THAILAND!

You may notice that the stylish name tags and sexy sun hats have been replaced by snazzy aprons. AND we got to KEEP the snazzy aprons! Wooo!

Green curry with chicken (and wacky little pea eggplants! I know, what?). The instructor’s assistant was completely appalled at how mild I made mine, but dude, green curry is off the charts spicy, and I have a delicate palate, so there.

Aww, look at my manly husband manfully making manly spicy soup!

Tada! Hot and sour prawn soup! Bear in mind that you can’t eat about a quarter of the things floating in there, such as the galangal or the leaves or the chilies (well, it wouldn’t be advisable!). But it’s still good! Not as fabulous as tom kha gai soup, though, which is why I decided to make that instead this past weekend, from the adorable recipe book the instructor gave us at the end.

Yeah, I totally dominated this soup.

Verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry carefully sliding our egg rolls into the deep fryer.

You are so moments away from being eaten, egg roll.

TADA! And guess what? They tasted like REAL EGG ROLLS! It was absolutely flabbergasting.

Guess why I’m smiling? Because we’re making DESSERT! HUZZAH!

Well, what did you think bananas in coconut milk was going to look like?

We did this in Chiang Mai, which was the next city we went to after 5 days in Phuket. Chiang Mai is the second biggest city in Thailand (after Bangkok) and it’s up north in the mountains, but we’d already seen jungles and elephants, so we decided to spend one of our two days there taking this cooking class:

Air Thai Kitchen

and if you go to that site, you can actually find more photos of us doing the exact same thing, but from different, alarmingly less flattering angles (you can see my Extremely Serious Cooking Face, which is apparently much like my New York I Know Where I’m Going And Don’t You Even Think About Talking To Me, Tourists and Murderers and Construction Dudes Face). The photos are under our names in the Gallery. (oh, yeah, I didn’t change my name, even though I’m all maaaarried and stuff now. hey, I didn’t want to confuse my fans! all three of them!)  🙂

So now we are Expert Thai Chefs, so long as we manage to go by an Asian market first and acquire fish sauce, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, chilies, oyster mushrooms, lemongrass, coriander root, and coconut milk. No problem! All right, so it might not replace ordering in anytime soon…

In other, much more current news, I must admit I haven’t been quite as excited by The Amazing Race or Dancing with the Stars this season. [Spoiler alert if you Tivo’d the DwtS finale to watch later!] I didn’t really mind Helio winning, since he’s adorable and sweet and Julianne is the awesomest, but I really wanted Mel B. to win! Spice Girls rule! Woooo!!! And of course Sabrina should have been in the finale, BIG SIGH.

As for Race, I just don’t love anybody yet, except maybe the mini-hippies (Rachel and TK) and the very very pink Goths, or at least the girl one, Vyxsin (yes, Vyxsin…SERIOUSLY?). Plus, what is up with all the bicycle challenges? There is one thing I would be outrageously bad at on the Race, and that is ANYTHING involving bicycles (OK, or cow lips) (or driving in India) (or goulash) (or water skiis) (OK, many things, but mainly bicycles!). This one time, in high school, I fell off a bike (or rather, crashed into my best friend on her bike — steering is not my forte — and then fell off) and cracked a rib or two (bright side: no more running in gym for me for the rest of the semester!), and that was still probably the high point of my biking career. Give me a horse or a tuk-tuk or a camel or a kayak instead, please, anything but a bicycle, and this was like the third one in as many episodes! Well, I hope that means they’ll get it out of their system before I’m on the show. Right?  🙂

At least Kid Nation continues to be spectacularly hilarious. I totally want Sophia to be my best friend. And Alex might be the cutest, smartest little guy on my TV right now, holy bananas.

I would add something wise and insightful about scripted TV, which is my true love, but I’ve been hoarding episodes in case the writers’ strike goes long, so I’m way behind on everything important, like Chuck and Heroes and House. But I’m sure I’ll catch up eventually!

Er, but first! I have a manuscript to finish! Yes, sir! This one is about Almanzo Wilder, who grew up to marry Laura Ingalls and save a town and generally be heroic and splendid. See, the Kid Nation kids just need a 13-year-old like him! So it’s a little harder than Nellie, because he’s such a good guy, but it’s also really fun because at least he has friends. (Poor Nellie!) All right, more about that later!

Quote of the Day:
Mel B.: Oh, God.
Maks: You can just call me Maks.
— Dancing with the Stars