Take Home Thai

The  is home to a delightful little secret.

It is wrapped snugly in aromatic basil leaves and milky rice paper, and lives under the Thai Kettle booth guarded by a friendly Mon. No, not Mom. Mon Chumwangwapi is the creator of my favorite lunch - the fresh, crisp and sublime spring rolls from Marin-based Thai Kettle.

Mon makes both shrimp and vegetarian spring rolls out of her kitchen in San Rafael and sells them at the Mill Valley Farmers Market. They come with a sweet and sour sauce and a peanut sauce that is, hands down, the very best peanut sauce I have ever tasted. And if you want to get your hands on these dainties, you'd better get there early. I've arrived too late a few times for my favorite lunch. I find myself dreaming of them every Friday.

Chumwangwapi also offers an amazing pumpkin curry with forbidden rice, ready to eat along with other prepared meals. And for the home cook who adores the delicate but exotic balance of Thai flavors, she packages a variety of Thai sauces to take home. Stop by her stand and she will readily offer up a taste. 

There are the green or red curry sauces, the Pad Prig Khing stir-fry sauce which she suggests tossing into green beans with shrimp or suggests serving in spinach wraps with ground turkey (see recipe below). There is the the spicy ginger sauce, which is delicious on salmon or white fish. "Cook it with butter and add the sauce, white wine and parsley," says Chumwangwapi. There is a satay marinade sauce and a Pad Thai sauce. She also sells the base for Tom Kha Gai, which is a sweet and spicy Thai coconut soup. Even if you're intimidated to cook Thai food yourself, these sauces and bases give you a pretty safe head start. Just add veggies, tofu or any protein and you've got an easy, yet exotic meal.

There is something so special about Thai food, the balance of flavors and spice of which I find difficult to describe. It's got zing.

I've come to find that there are actually five basic staples in Thai cooking: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and hot. The artful blend of these five tastes is what makes Thai food so unique. The flavors can be combined into one meal or one flavor can be more prevalent in a certain dish and simply blended in another.

The sweet would come from something like coconut or palm sugar, the sour from lime, tamarind or fresh mango. The salty from fish sauce which is a Thai specialty. The bitter from something called 'bitter melon' or raw leaves of a variety of plants and the hot from dried or fresh chili peppers.

Mill Valley Patch Editor Jim Welte just returned from a trip to Thailand, so I asked him what flavors mostly stood out to him.

"Lemongrass, ginger, coconut, lime, chilis, tamarind, garlic and pepper," says Welte, noting that overall the food was spicier and more diverse in Thailand than in the U.S. but that Bay Area Thai food held up pretty favorably to the real thing. While visiting Thailand, Welte took a Thai cooking class and learned a thing or two.

"The best meal we had in Thailand was made by me, and I wouldn't exactly call myself a good cook," he says. "Finding the balance between those staples [sweet, spicy, sour, bitter and hot] is the key and allows each element to be evident in the food - not too salty or sweet or hot to overpower everything else."

Spicy Thai Spinach Wraps with Ground Turkey 

Ingredients:
1/2 white onion chopped
1 lb ground turkey
1 tbs olive oil
2 tbs fresh ginger finely chopped
1 bunch large spinach leaves
1 container Pad Prig Khing Stir-Fry Sauce (you might not need to use it all)

Directions:
Heat oil in a large saucepan, saute onions, ginger, turkey until cooked through. Stir in Pad Prig Khing sauce. Serve with large spinach or lettuce leaves. Add spoonfuls of turkey mixture into spinach wrap and enjoy.