Thailand Chicken and Cashew Nuts

Well, it is finally here, the authentic Thailand Chicken and Cashew Nut recipe. This is a meal I learnt how to cook at the Thai cooking school and it is really delicious and quite healthy too. The Thai name for this meal is: Kai phad med ma-muang (gold star for anyone who can pronounce that).

From start to finish this dish will probably only take you 25 minutes at most to prepare. It is very easy to make and very hard to go wrong, so a great easy treat for a Friday “culture food” night. To buy this meal from scratch will probably cost about £6-£8 depending on where you get it and also what you have in the cupboards already.

Ingredients (for 2-4 people depending on how hungry you are)

• 1 white onion
• 2-3 garlic cloves (depends how much you like garlic)
• A bunch of spring onions
• 1-2 red medium sized fresh chilli peppers (depends how much you like chilli)
• 2 chicken breasts
• 1 tablespoon of soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons of oyster sauce
• ½ a teaspoon of sugar (white or brown, it tastes just as good)
• A handful of cashew nuts
• A dessert spoon of oil

This dish is lovely served with egg noodles or rice. In Thailand I had it with both - it just depends what you prefer. This dish is also great with a small blob of sweet chilli sauce on the side. Read the instructions on how to cook the egg noodles or rice, typically egg noodles take less than five minutes and rice takes about 20 minutes.

How to cook it

Step one: Chop your onion up into medium sized slices and put your into a garlic crusher. Heat the oil in a non stick pan (preferably a wok) and fry the white onion and garlic until they just start turning brown.

Step two: Cut the chicken into small chunks and add the chicken to the wok. Stir fry it all until the chicken has cooked through.

Step three: Wash and cut up your spring onions into chunks of about 2cm, and then cut the red chilli(s) into tiny pieces. TIP: if you don’t like spicy food I would only add half a chilli and remove the seeds, if you love spicy food, keep the seeds and add as much as you like. Stir in the spring onions and chilli, and cook for about 30 seconds.

Step four: Add the oyster sauce, soy sauce, half a teaspoon of sugar and the cashew nuts. Stir for about 1 – 2 minutes until the food is piping hot.

Step five: Serve up on a plate with your egg noodles or rice and enjoy!

TIP: If you like Tofu, this dish can also be served with tofu in. The best kind of Tofu to buy is the pre-cooked stuff from most big supermarkets. Just add this in when you add the chicken in.

Once you have tried it let me know what you think…….. I had it for dinner tonight and it was delicious! Here is the one I ate earlier:

Whilst we were in Thailand, this dish made up about a third of everything we ate as we loved it so much. Although, I have to say in Thailand when you say “little chilli” it comes out with a full plant's worth of red chilli’s in it and it nearly blows your mouth off! Still somehow whilst you are there you can power through the spice and still enjoy the flavours!

Next blog: Not sure…. Some people have asked for Pad Thai, which is also delicious, but am tempted to move onto another country – what do you all think?

Chiang Mai cooking school…. A big adventure!

We left the south of Thailand and flew in to Chiang Mai at the end of November. It was almost like going to a different country. The humidity had completely dropped as had the temperature. We spent five amazing days in Chiang Mai and in hindsight I wish we had stayed longer. Every day was jammed packed with elephant rides, temples, pandas at the zoo, bamboo rafting, mountain trekking, it truly was fantastic.

 

We decided, well I decided, much to the contempt of my fellow traveller, that we should go to a Thai cooking school based in the outskirts of Chiang Mai and learn how to cook some of the delicious traditional food we had been eating on our travels. It cost us about £8 for the day and at 6am we were up and ready not sure what to expect.

Our chef and guide for the day “Perm” was brilliant, he had such a good sense of humour and he taught us all about the different traditional fruit and vegetables in Thailand as we walked around the food market purchasing our ingredients. The whole market smelt so fragrant, with the smell of Lemongrass and Thai Basil everywhere. The fish was so fresh it was actually still alive!

Once we had purchased our ingredients for our day of cooking we headed back to the kitchen. Throughout the day we learnt how to make:

-          Hot and Sour Tam Yam Soup

-          Green Curry with Chicken

-          Chicken with Cashew Nuts

-          Pad Thai

-          Mango Sticky Rice (which is where my love for it originated)

-          Spring rolls

-          Papaya Salad (which blew my head off with the amount of Red Chilli Pepper in it)

Perm kept asking us whilst we were cooking if we wanted a “big adventure” or a “small adventure”. Not knowing what would happen next, we eagerly said “big adventure” and little did we know he would then hurl water straight into our hot Wok and up it went in flames – nearly singed my hair off!

One of my favourite dishes that I learnt how to make whilst on this cooking class was Chicken with Cashew Nuts. I cook it at home every few weeks and it is really quick and easy to make. Come back for the next blog and I will include the traditional Thai recipe and how to cook it.

The Thai cooking school ended up being one of the best things we had done throughout the whole of our travels, if you are thinking of going to Chiang Mai, please take the time to go here and remember to ask for a “big adventure”.  Thai cooking school – definitely recommended!

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