[.ca] Thai Cooking Made Easy (ISBN 0941676285)

Not a Great Cookbook:
This cookbook is O.K. but is not one of the greats. Recipies fail and can be way too salty to be reasonably edible -- and this comes from a person who uses a lot of salt or soy sauce. When the salt is scaled down the recipes are not fabulous, either, though. I was misled into buying this book off the bookshelf of a store by its attractive photography and claims for ease of cooking. The main feature of the book appears to be that it conveys how to streamline the stir frying process, so that it is more of a cooking school's How-To stir fry, written in the CONTEXT of Thai cuisine. Perhaps this book is helpful for someone who is very unfamiliar with the mechanics of quick-cooking Asian dishes. But it would probably be better to get a good stir fry instructional book and then a Thai cookbook with better recipes. One quirk of mediocre Thai cooking is dramatic inconsistency. This book's recipes can easily give poor results. A far more winning Thai cookbook is "Real Thai: The Best of Thailand's Regional Cooking," a plain paperback without pictures and bells and whistles. I have found literally dozens of simple, foolproof, regionally authentic, and delicious recipes in that great cookbook. Real Thai also covers a much broader range of dishes, so when you go out and drop a lot of $$ to stock your kitchen on the fresh herbs, sauces, and spices, you can use them up doing a lot of interesting things for many meals rather than making a couple of dishes out of "Thai Cooking Made Easy's" small selection over and over. This might be a good supplemental book, but with so many great Thai cookbooks out there, there's no point to a mediocre one, and certainly not as one's introductory text.

Amazingly easy, simple, and very yummy recipes:
I received this book a couple years back as a gift from somebody who knew I liked to cook simple, fast stuff, and also knew I liked Thai food. It has turned out to be my favorite cookbook so far, with a 95% success rate for the recipes I've tried. (One recipe, I forget which one, was kind of boring.) My only previous exposure to cooking Thai food before I got this book was a class that I took that focused on Thai curries. There are not a lot of curries in this book, which is fine with me. I have tried about 25% of the recipes in the book so far, many of them 5 times or more. I do have to comment on another reviewer's review below, his review is titled "not a great cookbook." I heartily disagree. He complained that the recipes were too salty. NONE of the recipes in the book call for ANY salt! Of course most DO call for fish sauce. Not all fish sauce is the same, if your fish sauce is too salty, switch to another brand or use less of it. As an introduction to Thai cooking, this book is just great! If curries are the most important thing to you, then you can probably find a better book for yourself. There are a few curry recipes in here, and they are good, but it's not the main focus. Most of the recipes in the book only have about 3 steps, and often even these steps are very easy ones. The pictures are useful and pleasant, and the pages are glossy enough to survive being used by a messy cook such as myself. The cover itself is plastic coated too, which helps. This all makes a difference, since this is the most stained & well used cookbook of all in my collection.