Thai Dinner at the beach, 9 courses

Lemongrass sausage finishing on the BBQ

Cooking for foodies is hard, especially if there's a lot of 'em. We treat it as a challenge. For this year's beach week, we settled on Thai as we've been doing a lot of cooking from the Pok Pok book and testing our work against local traditional Thai restaurants. Unfortunately, it's hard for us to decide, so we don't: we just include everything we can think of; this time it was 9 dishes, including a substitution for a friend who's a swimming-vegetable eater.

We're pretty comfortable on the cooking side, but realize that timing, sequencing, and menu balance are things that require just as much attention. You can't fry food and hold it, you can't be running to the kitchen during dinner, and things that require long lead times might require starting hours or days ahead.   Unfortunately, we were so busy cooking that I didn't take as many pictures as I should have -- I really should have had one per dish :-(

We went with cool appetisers so we could largely make them a bit ahead, buying us some time. These were served with Bill's "Hokkaido" cocktail:

• Spring rolls with local shrimp, cellophane noodles, cucumber, carrot, cilantro, mint, and a peanut dipping sauce
• Shrimp laab (larb): minced shrimp cooked in shrimp stock, flavored with fish sauce, lime juice, parched rice, served in lettuce "boats". Zingy, crunchy, chewy, and refreshing.

Irene soaking spring roll wrappers

Spring rolls, half gone

While folks drank cocktails and nibbled on the apps, we had a couple hours to finish the main courses to be served at the big table:

• Chicken and coconut cream soup (Gaeng Dom Yam Gai): rich but a complex flavor from a balance fish sauce, lime, cilantro and a touch of hot chilis.
• Lemon Grass Sausage, from the Pok Pok book: pork shoulder, pork belly, lemon grass, cilantro, and other fragrant seasons, stuffed into a natural casing; cooked sous vide to set the spiral shape, then finished on the BBQ for color and crisping.
• Grilled corn with salty coconut milk flavored with mint and bay leaves
• Neua Naam Tok steak salad with lime, cilantro, crushed dry roasted local peanuts -- really fresh tasting and vibrantly flavored, this was devoured almost before I got to take a seat, definitely popular. We cooked the flank steak sous vide all day at 130F to tenderize it but keep it rosy red inside, then seared in a bit of coconut oil on a bitchin' hot cast iron pan to develop a crust, then sliced thinly for service.
• Stir fried local greens with shitake mushrooms, fish sauce, black pepper, and a hit of liquid smoke to emulate the "wok hay" that only serious heat can deliver.
• Jasmine rice

Neua Naam Tok: steak salad

Local veg with shitake stir fry, with some sneaky liquid smoke

For dessert:

• Coconut cream ice cream -- no actual cream at all, just canned coconut cream, a bit of sugar, a bit of corn starch to provide the right texture, blended to prevent grittiness, chilled and churned. It didn't last long, I'd definitely make this again.