Spice Up Your Life: A Thai Cookbook

A culinary guide to Thai cuisine, as well as a starting point from which you can add your own flair and innovations. Spice Up Your Life is about bringing together the essence of Thai cooking and ingredients that can easily be found in Asian supermarkets (in Western World) in creating traditional Thai dishes or Thai dishes with a twist. All recipes in the book are inspired by the real menu items that the author created for her award-wining restaurant in Southern California.
Customer Review: Just like the restaurant!
If you've ever eaten at Amarin Thai in Mira Mesa, San Diego you know how good the food is. I've eaten a lot of Thai food and have never found a place that made curry with as much depth of flavor. I moved away from San Diego a couple of years ago, but recently traveled back for a visit and stopped by Amarin. I was so happy to see the owner/chef had written a cookbook! The cookbook doesn't have millions of recipes, but it doesn't need that many. If you've eaten at the restaurant, the book hits most of the most popular dishes and even though the measurements are metric and the instructions oversimplified, it was pretty easy to come out with a tasty final product. I am no longer searching around for Thai restaurants that can cut the mustard. Instead, I just triple the curry paste recipes, throw the paste in a jar and with a little coconut milk it's like I'm right back in San Diego at my favorite Thai restaurant.

Historically, milk was put in first to prevent cups from breaking. Only the rich could afford porcelain and everyone else used cheap china. Porcelain could withstand the heat of tea being poured directly in the cup. Inexpensive china often broke when the tea was poured directly in the cup. Adding milk first tempered the tea and prevented the cups from breaking.

When Should Tea Drinkers Add the Milk?

When the group drank tea with milk, they had no more increase in cardiovascular benefits than if they consumed 2 cups of hot water. A possible reasons is several of the proteins in milk may join with flavonoids in tea to form complexes which nullify cardiovascular benefits. This is a small, preliminary study and findings must be confirmed by larger studies.

Author George Orwell, enthusiastic tea drinker, advocated putting tea in first and then adding milk. In a famous 1946 essay in the Evening Standard, Orwell wrote "by putting the tea in first and stirring as one pours, one can exactly regulate the amount of milk whereas one is liable to put in too much milk if one does it the other way round."

Although most Americans add the milk after the tea, tea drinkers in other countries argue over the fact.

Scientists have even joined the debate. The British Royal Society of Chemistry came out with a formula for making the perfect cup of tea. The Royal Society of Chemists advised putting the milk in the cup before the tea. Milk should be added before the tea because degradation of milk proteins occurs when milk is added to very hot water.

How to make the perfect cup of tea has always been debated. One of the biggest arguments involves when to add the milk. Should tea drinkers add the milk before or after the tea? Usually, milk only is added to black teas.

But the physicists disagreed with the chemists. The British Institute of Physics say the most important factor is the water temperature and not the milk.

Reported in the European Heart Journal, the study tracked women with an average age of 59. When participants drank 2 cup of black tea without milk, they experienced an increase in cardiovascular function.