Recently I have started cooking Thai food. I like cooking and Ann, my wife, is Thai, so really it's an easy quinella for me. In this effort I have been helped by (the previously-mentioned) Cooking With Poo, the, er, butt of many jokes. Ann has also given me advice on this and that and the advantages of using a mortar and pestle. I listen because it improves the dish, making it more Thai than farang Thai.

Yesterday I made the very popular Phad Ga Pow (Moo). I doubled the recipe-suggested number of chillies though Ann felt I could have quadrupled them. I thought it spicy enough (my tolerance for chilly peppers has vastly increased in recent years) and that putting 20 chillies in the mix would have created a weapon of mass destruction. Ann took it for her lunch today so clearly, I did something right.