There was no reason for me to ever meet Elhadji. Barely awake through a long, charmless airport layover, I didn’t have much need for the stuffed animals he was selling at his kiosk. But I asked him for directions to a makeshift stand where I’d heard African cabbies eat, and soon we were talking about his wife.
He told me about the grilled lamb she makes, how it reminds him of Senegal, how the smell of it makes him the star of the employee break room. He told me about growing up in Africa, about sending money back to raise his children, about missing them, but also about living with no regrets.
Eventually, my flight began to board. We exchanged e-mails and warm smiles and a promise to share a plate of lamb whenever he makes it up to New York.
Food is the thing that connects us, the thing that can give me and a man whose circumstances I will never understand a reason to stand together and share our lives for an hour. It’s the thing that reminds you, when you taste something new, or better yet when you taste something old again for the first time, how much bigger and better and more wonderful the world can be than we ever realize.
And so food writing has to be more than simply talking about the delicious. What we’ve planned for Salon's food section is food coverage for curious people, for people who care about people, for people who are passionate about finding new ways to look at the world, whether they are "foodies" or people who think foodies’ main contribution to our society is allowing us to call wine dorks "winies."
We’ll examine the bigger questions of what food does, of what food is: Food is art. Food is practice. Food is work. Food is politics. But sanctimony is the world’s worst dinner guest, and so food should also be fun.
We’ll tell the stories behind the food, stories about cooks and eaters, about what happens between people at the table, especially if that table is really just a shelf bolted to the side of a taco truck.
And we’ll cook. We’ll share recipes, walking you through the steps, showing you how things should look, smell, sound and feel, so that you might discover something new even in the recipes you don’t end up making. We’ll spend time with masters, trying to learn what they do, trying to see what they see.
But we’re not going at this alone. For starters, we’ve lined up our Kitchen Cabinet, a crew of seriously brilliant chefs, cooks, wine and beer geeks, explorers, and at least one dude who cuts up cows and pigs for a living. They’ll be here to help us answer your questions (send them here!), whether you want to know how to fix your shoe-tough pie crust or you want to know about the philosophical implications of butter versus Crisco.
Join us in this conversation. Cook with us! Rock out with the Salon Kitchen Challenge! And share with us your thoughts and your stories, because that’s what this is ultimately about. When we were talking about the goodness of his grilled lamb, Elhadji told me he always offers some to the people sniffing the air around his lunch. He smiled, opened his hands, and explained, "When you share, you are happy."
I thought it was a little weird that Kevin was getting ready to serve lunch, some favorite recipes he picked up in Russia while in the Peace Corps, without starting on the cake we were having for dessert. I didn't so much as give up a peep, but he saw my consternation. "This cake is the easiest thing in the world. It's what my students would bring me," he said, his tone making clear that his students were generally not to be trusted with the cooking of food. "It's what we would have when someone invited me over but with no grandma home to oversee dinner. Every Russian kid knows how to make this cake."
And it's a good one: light, tender, crunchy around the edges with pillowy, straightforward sweetness punctuated by tart, slightly caramelized apples, a sort of super-bare-bones apple upside-down cake. It's not phenomenal, mind you -- complexity and sophisticated technique have their rewards -- but it is imminently satisfying, incredibly quick to make, perfect for your spur-of-the-moment repertoire, can take some dressing-up with ice creams or sauces, and, frankly, is idiot-proof. Which is important to me, because I am a baking idiot.
"It's a simple, manly cake," Kevin says. "It kind of reminds me of that story Hemingway wrote about how to bake a pie while camping." With fondness, he recalled that story for a moment, then said, "Wait, maybe it's not so manly, because it goes something like, 'Make this and a Frenchman will want to kiss you.' Then again, maybe that's what makes it really manly."
Russian apple cake (Sharlotka)
Makes a 10-inch round cake, serves 8
3 large Granny Smith or other sweet-tart baking apples
Juice from ½ lemon
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup all-purpose flour
Pinch baking soda
Butter for pan
Let cool slightly and serve with tea."You have to have tea after a Russian meal," Kevin said. "They drink black tea. They don't drink mint tea. They think mint tea makes a man impotent," he continued, as he poured hot water over my bag of mint leaves.
"Between getting lost in the forest hunting for mushrooms and getting lost on ice floats while fishing, that's pretty much the Russian male experience," Kevin Kaye said while preparing some of the dishes he learned to make while in the Peace Corps there. "They have this really rich foraging culture. Mushroom hunting is such a huge sport to them that the only real comparison is like baseball to us." He gestured toward the stove, where he had mushrooms softening over onions cooked so gently they seemed to melt.
"When I got off the plane in Moscow, all the Peace Corps people were like, 'Whatever you do, don't eat the mushrooms.' They told us about a volunteer who didn't eat dinner one night because she didn't like mushrooms, and then her whole host family died from a poisonous one someone picked by mistake. Then the officials passed around food they brought for us ... and they were mushroom pies."
Pretty quickly Kevin realized that avoiding them was not going to be possible, so he took his chances and fell in love with their wild, forest-y flavors and the dishes that highlighted them. Next to his quietly bubbling pan he had potatoes mashed and ready to be fried around centers of mushroom stuffing.
It's understandable if the thought of that isn't making you sweat with excitement. The Russians aren't really known for thrilling cuisine, and I wasn’t expecting fireworks either when I arrived at Kevin's home. But, as I found, these potato mushroom cutlets are earthy and satisfying, utterly delicious in that Grandma way, the product of people who might not have had much to work with, but had care and ingenuity.
Russian potato-mushroom "cutlets"
Serves four as a light lunch. When's the last time you heard "Russian food" and "light lunch" in the same breath?
2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and quartered
1 large white onion, cut into ¼-inch dice
1 large carrot, cut into ¼-inch dice
¾ pounds mushrooms, cleaned and roughly chopped (whatever you picked in the forest that day, but a mix of cremini and shiitake works nicely, or mushrooms of your choice)
2 cloves garlic, chopped finely
2 eggs
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
splash of milk
bread crumbs to coat
sunflower or vegetable oil
salt and pepper
For serving
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Dill
Sour cream or crème fraiche (which is richer and closer to Russian sour cream)
Check back Monday for Kevin's recipe for sharlotka, an incredibly easy apple cake
I've seen Kevin work. In a pressed white shirt, sleeves rolled up over thick forearms, he's a natural behind the kind of bar you always want to be in -- where the food is good, the lights are warm, and the bartenders know what you want to eat and what you want to drink. He pours the wines he likes with confidence. When he's cooking, his moves are strong and efficient; he pulls a roasting sardine out of the oven, tops it with sweet and sour onions, and puts it before you with minimal motion.
But today, at home, showing me some of the food he learned to cook while serving in the Peace Corps in Russia, his movements were looser, less precise. The stop, drop and spin was replaced by mashing potatoes in a bowl slightly too small and not worrying terribly much if he kept having to peek into the oven to check on the five-ingredient apple cake called sharlotka (six if you count the squeeze of lemon). He made "cutlets" by pressing mushroom stuffing into wads of mashed potatoes and rolling them in bread crumbs.
The restaurant where he works is a great one, one of those places that serves "simple, rustic" food as only a city in the first world imagines simple, rustic food, meaning that all the vegetables are still diced to uniform size and all the stocks and sauces are made and remade until the flavor notes are just right. But here we are, cooking really simple food, and I imagined that his French chefs in culinary school would have taken issue with the bits of filling that peeked out from their encasements. I pointed them out, but Kevin shrugged and said, "Don't sweat it. This is a pretty utilitarian cuisine."
Which is not to say that he doesn't respect it ... or didn't come to respect it, anyway.
"When I first got there, I thought I didn't want to eat Russian food. It was too much -- soup with a layer of oil floating on top. I actually liked it, and I know they were being generous, but I just couldn't eat that way and have my weight stay under three bills. And there was an influx of crappy Western goods. Lots of 'sausages,' that I knew were cheap hot dogs. They took rye bread, edam-style cheese and ketchup and toast it, and they were like, 'Pizza! It's like America!'"
I thought about the heartbreaking sweetness of that, actually, of the odd mix of hospitality and cultural aspiration bound up in that awful-sounding toast.
"Later I learned that the Communists purposely built terrible home kitchens so people would go to communal cafeterias to eat with their comrades. You know, I had a hot plate in the windowsill, an electric teakettle, a college beer fridge, and I really didn't have much less than most Russians. So if you went to someone's house you either had a terrible meal or a really good one that you know was ridiculously difficult for them to cook for you."
"So how did you learn to make this food?" I asked, sneaking another spoonful of the surprisingly delicious mushrooms, forest-y, sweet with onions and their finishing kick of garlic.
Kevin smiled, remembering. "Well, a friend I met had a cottage, in the DMZ between Finland and Russia. His family had been high up in the military, so they didn't have money, but they had more privileges, like a plot of land with potatoes. Russians have this idea that the villages are where you find the real Russia, and there, the grandfather built a barbecue pit, fish traps, a fish smoker. And both grandmas lived there. They cooked on this wood-burning stove, the kind you see in fairy tales. You know: It heated the house, you cooked on it, the smallest child slept on it."
The cutlets seared in hot, wispy oil, and Kevin warned me to get ready for the piercing shriek of the smoke detector.
"One of the grandmas served in the blockade, on an antiaircraft gun, with a pair of binoculars telling the gunner where to shoot during the siege of Leningrad."
"Jesus," I said.
"Yeah. She was pretty much deaf," he laughed. "But I loved talking with them, and since we were inside so much, I got to helping in the kitchen. Grandma Tonin, the other one, was very formal about it. I guess it was novel for a man to be cooking, and she was a very detailed teacher, telling me about the difference in the potatoes picked this season versus last season."
He cut up cucumbers and tomatoes and tossed them with dill for salad.
"I've always cooked," he said. "I started cooking because my mom started working again when I was in high school. I worked at pizzerias, I worked as a line cook in college. So I kept eating food in Russia and thinking I could try to improve it. But the more I learned from them, the more I learned that they had their own ways of making things better. A little lemon in the borscht makes the beets brighter red, brightens the flavor. Egg in the potatoes makes them smoother and more pliable. I'd worked in restaurants or whatever, but I never learned to take food and break it down like that. So we sat around the kitchen, and food never really comes off the table. They were always making it, and then you'd sit around after the meal and drink tea and have bread and cheese and jam. The kitchen is definitely the center of the home," he said, transferring the fried cutlets into the oven to finish heating them through.
Watching him, I added up the pans Kevin was using: a pot for boiling potatoes, a pan to sauté the mushrooms, a bowl for mashing spuds, a tray to hold the cutlets, a pan to fry them, a plate to drain the oil and a tray on which to bake, right next to the pan that the cake is in.
And here I am, taking notes on this truly "simple and rustic" Russian lunch, this humble dish of modest ingredients, and I suddenly realize that, in a one-hot-plate kitchen, or even on a fairy-tale stove, none of this would have been easy, none of this would have been simple.
Kevin plated two of the cutlets for me and some salad topped with sour cream. I broke the crust with my knife and fork, taking a genteel bite. Crisp and yielding, and the flavors were what you'd expect. They were uncomplicated, and they were delicious. I took more bites, gratefully, until there were no more bites to take.
Check in tomorrow for Kevin's potato-mushroom cutlet recipe.
I suppose I'm easily entertained, but it's hard to deny that you get a bit of a show with your lunch at the Lanzhou-style hand-pulled noodle shops popping up all over New York's several Chinatowns: You order and a flour-covered cook will wrestle with a snake's-length of white dough, wrap it around his fingers, and, like some elaborate, wheaty cat's cradle, stretch, tug, and fold its way into a bundle of noodles. It's cooking as manual acrobatics: You can watch it over and over and still be surprised at how the dough strands multiply, at how the hands move with such surety.
Of course, these things aren't made for looking, and minutes after the cook casts your hank into boiling water, it comes to you in bowls of nearly boiling soup, deep-tasting and brown with beef to its core, scented with warming spices like star anise and slicks of red chili oil, sporting garnishes and meats of many textures.
Ever since the intrepid Robert Sietsema brought New York's first and most almost-famous of these places -- the excellently named Super Taste -- into food-nerd prominence four years ago, these noodles named for an obscure city smack dab in the center of China have become a bit of a cottage industry here, with nearly a dozen shops specializing in them within blocks of each other. Ready to eat our weight in wheat, some friends and I slurped our way through four remarkable shops, and learned a little about what we were eating and who was feeding us in the process. (Check out the map below!)
Fitting for the elder statesman of the hand-pulled noodle crowd, Super Taste's menu features an extensive essay introducing its specialty to the uninitiated, and placing it in historical context:
It is said they were sold in the streets of Lanzhou as early as Han dynasty and Tong dynasty ... There are four characteristics of genuine Lanzhou Hand-pulled noodles:
1) Clear, which means that soup should be clear
2) White, means that flour must be white with t endon
3) Red, means that hot chili oil must be used
4) Green, means that parsley, garlic bolt must be fresh and green.
Beef noodles vary in their sizes. They are commonly seen as wide, wider, thin, thinner as well as the side of chive leaf.
If you read past the typos and consider the poetics of the non-native speaker, there is an animating philosophy here, an exacting tradition to be accountable to, and it's not every day one finds what is basically a feeding station with such pride in the story of its work.
But Super Taste has reason to be proud. Its noodles are pleasingly elastic, the broth is clear and deep, and former Gourmet editor and New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl considers its "Beef in Hot & Spicy Soup" fair consolation for jury duty. Still, the finest work here is one of the side orders: steamed dumplings the size of babies' fists, the skins so delicate they're translucent, the filling juicy and porky, the flavor alternating between chews with garlic chives and sweet spices. "Cinnamon!" Charlotte exclaimed, her eyes opening wide. Those dumplings are awesome. I want to date those dumplings.
Plus, despite the fact that this mere slip of a closet of a restaurant serves everything in plastic bowls, Super Taste has an environmentally friendly paperless ordering system! It involves a woman screeching orders back into the kitchen -- directly at sitting-ear-level -- in a voice that can sandblast the sides of buildings. Eating those dumplings with this unearthly wail erupting behind me, I haven't been so horrified and excited at the same time since I tried to get into industrial music in high school.
According to Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, one of the great teachers of Chinese food and the author of "Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking," all that slapping and working of the dough is to get the proteins in the flour activated and aligned. "The noodles should be very strong but not tough," she told me, and at Kuai An, they have not only integrity but a velvety feel, as if they were drawing the broth to themselves.
Kuai An is a happy-making place, and not just because halfway through our meal I saw employees gather sweetly around a freshly opened durian in the kitchen with smiles usually reserved for birthday cake. The House Special noodles floats hunks of duck, two forms of whistle-clean beef tripe and the intense freshness of celery leaves in a broth that trades clarity for meaty complexity. Gilding the lily is what my mother calls a "wallet egg," an egg fried so ferociously that it sits on the top of the bowl like a UFO covered in gold lace, so hot it's literally still crackling, the outsides crisp and chewy, the yolk cooked through and floury, mimicking the satisfying roughness of the noodles. I should warn you to eat the noodles quickly, since the hot soup can waterlog them after a while, but I don't imagine they'll last that long.
It was also at Kuai An that I learned a fascinating footnote to culinary history. One bowl of noodles in a duck and taro soup was gorgeous with the sweet and floral notes of rice wine, and I talked with the server about it. "That is a specialty from Fujian," she said. "We are Fujianese."
"Wait, you're not from Lanzhou?" I asked. Fujian is on the southeastern coast of China, about a million miles from where these noodles are supposed to be from.
"No, we are from Fujian. Our noodle master's teacher was from Lanzhou. All the Lanzhou noodle shops in New York are owned by Fujianese."
This was exactly as shocking as if I'd just found out that all the Texas barbecue I've ever eaten was made by people from Maine.
"Many masters from Lanzhou opened noodle shops in Fujian, so we learned the dish from them and brought it here," she said. And, as shown by the duck and taro soup, they put their own stamp on it too. (Jennifer 8. Lee's "Fortune Cookie Chronicles" has a fascinating chapter on how so many Fujianese have emigrated to become restaurant workers in America that whole towns there are deserted.)
Next door to Lam Zhou Handmade Noodle (you know, that whole transliteration thing is never easy) the Chinatown Lumber Co. has a warehouse, where you hear heavy pallets crashing about all day long. But if you're inside the restaurant, the noise will be coming from the corner of the dining room, from the man at the marble-topped table. He pulls, stretches, and, lifting his arms way out to get good leverage, whips the dough down with a certain violence. The slapping sound cracks loud enough to make the unaware jump from their chair, and I began to wonder if that table was put there because the kitchen was too small, or because it was useful in intimidating people. Chinatown can get kinda rough, you know.
Here, the beef brisket soup took me instantly to my childhood. The noodles were silky and strong, the brisket pleasantly chewy, and the broth, on an impossibly cold night, so warming with star anise that it suddenly felt like my odd little childhood could be universally understood.
The pork bone soup is gnawin' food. Instead of bite-size chunks of beef or whatever as a topping, you get a big caveman-style bone, boiled clean, from which to suck the marrow and chew the meat and tendon. It's a primal pleasure for which there is no polite method. The presence of the bone shows in the broth, too, which Charlotte described as being "like a murky pond," with just a touch, a connoisseur's tickle, of barnyard stank. It's so luxurious with dissolved gelatin, so mouth-coating, you just know it gets solid when cold.
Finally, after this most animal specimen, it was a real change of pace to arrive at Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodle, located closer in the older, more Cantonese-speaking part of Chinatown. There are decorations on the walls, helpful picture menus, and a notable dedication to creature comforts like clean floors.
These things made me suspicious. I looked into the kitchen, and the man dealing with the noodles did so in soporific fashion, as if barely able to stand up, much less handle the dough with any vigor. I was even less heartened.
But then the server brought our pan-fried chicken dumplings, which were filled with juice and sang with ginger. Our seafood soup tasted cleanly, magnificently of clams and other things in shells, with yards of wonderfully structured noodles, tender and resilient. The server directed us to be generous in our beef soups with cilantro and chili oil, and she could not have steered us more rightly -- the long-cooked taste of meat and spice lightened with the fresh herbs and the rich slick of hot oil extended through the flavors. My suspicions were confirmed, but in a good way: Like the dining room, these were bowls of a more refined order.
As I left, I saw a man in an elegant wool greatcoat wiping down bowls behind the counter. I'm serious. This is a class joint! The Fujianese makers of Lanzhou-style noodles, it seems, are moving up in the world.
Do you have places that serve this dish near you? Give us your favorites in the comments!
View Hand pulled noodle grub crawl in a larger map
Super Taste
26 N. Eldridge Street
New York, NY 10013
212.625.1198
Kuai An Hand Pull Noodles
28 Forsyth Street
New York, NY 10002
212.941.7678
Lam Zhou Handmade Noodle
144 East Broadway
New York, NY 10002
212.566.6933
Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodle
1 Doyers Street
New York, NY 10013
212.791.1817
OK, so I left out a fun detail in yesterday's story about Ganda Suthivarakom's steamed salmon curry custard: The Thai recipe she was cooking from in the Swedish food magazine was actually her own.
Ported over to Stockholm for work, she grew tired of facing the 20 hours of darkness a day alone, so she geared up a charm offensive: She offered to go to people's houses and cook; all they had to do was invite enough of their friends to make it a proper dinner party. "Because who doesn't want someone to come cook for them?" she asks.
It turns out the Swedes have a real thing for Thai food. "Everyone in Stockholm's been to Thailand five times," Ganda says. "They have a lot of vacation time. And, you know, Thailand's politically stable, lots of sun, no landmines, pretty girls ... So anyway, Stockholm has lots of great Thai grocery stores. And I made lots of Thai-ish food." Which is what she called it when she spoke with a journalist who ended up writing about this funny little American's movable feast and her very personal repertoire of Thai-American-Swedish dishes.
"Well, and how did all the friend-making go?" I asked.
Ganda thought for a moment. "You know, I really wanted to be exotic there," she said. "Not like in a yellow fever kind of way, but when you're an American, you value individuality. You're in a sea of people who are all individuals, but sometimes, you want to know what it's like to be totally different. I wanted to be the brash, loud American who tells funny jokes, the loudest person in the room, you know? And it was fun. A whirlwind coming into your home and cooking a whole meal! But the Swedes didn't get my jokes."
Thai-ish steamed fish with curry custard
Serves 6 as part of a multi-dish meal with rice
1 pound salmon, skinned, cut into ½-inch slices (Ganda also suggests scallops or other non-flaky fish)
1 or 2 13.5-ounce cans coconut milk* (not "coconut cream") chilled right-side-up in fridge. DON'T SHAKE IT!
1 tablespoon Thai red curry paste** or more to taste
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (might be unnecessary)
1 egg plus 1 yolk
1 teaspoon cornstarch
10 kaffir lime leaves
12 Thai basil leaves
1 small hot chili
1 teaspoon palm sugar (or light brown or even white sugar)
salt and fish sauce, to taste
Special-ish equipment
6 6-ounce ramekins (preferable, but bowls or cups work)
steaming rack, which can even be a wire cooling rack set in a pot with a tight lid
* The brand of coconut milk, Ganda says, "Must be Asian; Latino brands have much less fat, and definitely don't get any in UHT paper boxes. That stuff is thoroughly useless." Also note that coconut "cream" is iffy -- often "creams" are sweetened or worse, homogenized. It's key in this dish that you be able to separate the coconut fat from the milk, so don't use them here.
**Mae Ploy is a good brand, if a little gutless, but whatever you get, try to find a kind with shrimp paste in the ingredients.
We'd eaten dinner, five friends in Ganda Suthivarakom's apartment, and as good guests of a better host, we pretended to start cleaning up while she insisted we stop. The food was lovely, a home-style spread of ground pork sparked with fish sauce and lime juice, mellow cucumber soup and shredded carrot salad: dishes she learned to cook growing up a family of Thai immigrants.
I cleared some ramekins off the table, which had until recently held the evening's greatest hit: tender salmon, its rich flesh heightened by aromatic red curry, steamed in a soft custard and covered with a thin cream of coconut and slivers of hot chilies. Trying to make room for them in the overfilled sink, I caught a glimpse of the curry recipe lying on the counter, in, of all things, a Swedish food magazine.
"Um, so…" I started, not knowing how to be delicate about this dish's provenance. I pointed at the ramekins. "Was that the food of your people?" Delicacy is not really my thing, I guess.
"Nope," she said quickly, as if singing staccato. "My mother is from the northeast of Thailand; they don't eat much curry there and I didn't grow up with it. I learned to make that from watching Yan Can Cook."
I laughed. She didn't, and she's usually quick to share a laugh. "Wait, you're serious?"
"Well, it's not like..." She started, drawing in her breath ponderously. "In myyyyy family, we've made this for generations... It's a funny thing. I meet people and often the first thing they say is, 'Oh, Ganda, what kind of a name is that?' And then it's, 'Oh, I love Thai food! Do you know how to make pad Thai?'"
I wanted to say there's something lovely about that, about an attempt to connect with a stranger over their culture, as hamfisted as it might be. But then again, I don't know if it's any better than when I was in grade school and the first thing kids asked me was if I knew how to break boards with my kung fu.
"I never saw pad Thai until I was a senior in high school," Ganda said. "That's not something we made at home, so it's not like being born into a Thai family means the world of Thai food is yours. All those different foods weren't my birthright. In some ways I learned about Thai food along my non-Thai peers."
"So what's the story with the fish curry?" I asked.
"Well, there was one show when Martin Yan was in Thailand. My Dad gets so excited whenever he sees Thailand on TV. He'd always call us all into the room and he'd be like, 'Look! I can't believe people are paying attention to us!' So Martin Yan was at this famous market, he ate this steamed curry wrapped in banana leaves and his facejust lit up. 'That looks very good.' I thought. 'We don't have that in my house. I would like to eat it.'"
"So I did a bunch of research, made the curry paste and looked online for videos to make the boat shape with the banana leaves. Traditionally you pound everything together and the whole thing is a custard, but I liked the idea of using slices of fish so there's a different texture. The thing is, when I learned to cook this, I might as well have been making boeuf bourguignon; it wasn't like I had some insight into it. When I was younger, the idea of authenticity was something I romanticized, like 'Phhht, that's not real Thai food.' But what the fuck do I know from real Thai food? I know what I know from my family. Now that I'm not some 20-year old know-it-all, I know my family made food from what they could find in the States, and maybe it's not exactly what people grew up with in my Mom's dirt road village. My Mom makes her own version of papaya salad with cucumbers, because she couldn't get good green papaya when she first moved here. Is that Thai? I don't know. But does it matter when it tastes so good?"
Just then, something occurred to me, recalling the lushness of dinner. Salmon is a cold water fish. "Hey, do salmon even exist in Thailand?" I asked.
"I don't think so," Ganda said. "I just use it because I love how the pink color blends into the curry."
Check back tomorrow for Ganda's steamed salmon curry recipe
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