Treat Yourself to Something Thai

I love cookbooks. I read them for pleasure. I particularly love large, lavishly illustrated Asian-food cookbooks complete with descriptions of regional preferences and customs and photographs of food, junks, temples, crowded city streets and, in the case of “Thailand: The Beautiful Cookbook,” monks in saffron and yellow robes.

This 256-page book with an image of Bangkok’s famous floating market on the cover is large and weighty, too. A coffee table cookbook.  I bought it at a library sale for $5. What a find.

There’s another plus. The recipes look pretty authentic to me: stir-fried pork stomach with liver; and further on: stir-fried Chinese broccoli with sun-dried fish. But I passed these up for obvious reasons (until I get a chance to talk to Suchada Palmer, my Thai friend in Danbury, I don’t know how to put my hands on some of these ingredients; also, pork stomach might be a hard sell with my husband, although I would try it in a flash) and settled on a Thai pork omelet.

That’s because it’s a fast dish and it requires Maggi, a liquid seasoning that Western cooks use to brighten up gravy and Vietnamese and Thai cooks use to brighten up lots of things like sandwiches and, well, omelets. It is composed of water, salt, MSG E635, vinegar, glucose, yeast extract and aroma, the bottle says. 

More I cannot tell you.

In any case, I use Gravy Master because I cannot find Maggi around here, although it is available from Amazon, of course.

Here’s how to make kai meow moo say; yummy little omelets for two.

Combine two eggs with 2 tablespoons of Asian fish sauce (available at ordinary supermarkets), 1 teaspoon Maggi seasoning (or Gravy Master), 1/4 cup chopped scallions and 8 ounces of ground pork (chopped by hand is better, but ground is OK).

Heat an 8-inch frying pan or a wok. When really hot, add a tablespoon of peanut oil. Lower heat and ladle 1/4 of the egg mixture into the pan. Twist the pan to allow the eggs to spread out. The omelet will brown quite quickly. Turn over with a large spatula or by flipping the omelet if you are good at that. These cook fast, but be sure the the pork is done. Do it again three times more, garnish with cilantro leaves and serve on a bed of sliced tomatoes dressed in a vinaigrette.