cooking proper (ish) chinese/thai food

[SuckItAndSee]

right, i know i should know better, but last night we had another disappointing sharwoods jar based chinese affair (i did stir-fry beef and veg in one of their black bean sauces and it was mostly sugar).

Can anyone recommend a website for cooking this stuff from scratch/ I would love to be able to do a decent thai curry without the so-so shop curry pastes, laska, singapore noodle, beef in black bean, or any other good noodle based stuff.

I really like Ching's books, and she has a few of her recipes on her website. They are very quick and I use them mostly for mid week meals.

You might find you need to do a bit of a stock up of ingredients at first too.

thanks, i'll see if i can get any of her stuff from the library
i don't mind have a stock-up, and we've got a massive chinese supermarket in town. i just need to get rid of the blaah sauces.

It's very easy to make your own teriyaki sauce. It's 1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/2 cup mirin and 2tbsp sugar.

great, thanks damsel

Have you seen this blog? It has load of great looking recipes.

Or this one.

thanks for the blogs - i'll rifle through them this weekend.

I really like Fuchsia Dunlop's books this and this. It's very proper chinese food (sichuan and hunan to be precise), but some dishes are very quick. I don't like those pan-chinese cookbooks because that's not what chinese food taste like. You'd never say french and italian food are similar.

For blogs, I love www.justbento.com and the companion www.justhungry.com. It's japanese and especially the justbento site emphasis on very easy to make food to pack in lunch boxes. Obviously you can serve them for midweek dinners too. The justbento website is very popular in the blogsphere and there's a book published because of it.

I have the Ken Hom stir fry book - have had it for about 25 years!

It uses all from scratch ingredients. It is pretty easy to cook Chinese food. The key thing, imo, is to have everything ready chopped in little bowls before you start cooking.

I don't know how to cook thai properly. But if you have a chinese market around your way, try the Mae Ploy brand thai curry pastes. They are much more flavourful than the ones I can get from the normal supermarkets.

The Wagamama cookbook is nice too.
I find that just using a dash of rice wine, fish sauce or tamarind in an ordinary stir fry or meat dish straight away livens it up and makes it a bit more 'authentic' tasting

China is such a vast country and the regional variations are the same,

We like Ching in our house but that is because she cooks from a similar style to DH's parents (he is Chinese)

the other thing I would add is have a look at your local sizth form college, ours runs adult learning courses and I am sure we have thai cooking saturday workshops. - may be you have one near you as well.
I have been wanting to go to ours for ages but they always seem to clash with me having other commitments!!