My Thai Dinner Party Guide | Marion's Kitchen

There are so many recipes and videos on singular Thai dishes but how do you pull those dishes together to make like the ultimate Thai dinner party for friends? I wanted to put together the ultimate guide, well like my guide, to making a really cool dinner party for your friends. Let's do it. The cornerstone of my ultimate Thai dinner party is a Chiang Mai pork curry called Hang Lei. This curry is super interesting. It's sweet and sour. It's something that all of your friends will be talking about. Then we have a whole array of supporting characters here. A Thai chicken fried rice, a spicy salmon salad and then this really great Thai Nam Jim sauce which creates a kind of like Asian prawn cocktail situation if you like. Every Thai dinner party needs to have rice. If it didn't, my Asian ancestors would come down and I would be in big trouble. I'm going to do a fried rice. You could do plain rice as well but fried rice is very easy to make and you could do this you know an hour or so before everyone arrives. Start off with your stir-fry sauce. Mix together some Thai soy sauce. I prefer to use a Thai soy sauce when I'm making Thai fried rice. I find the flavor and the color completely different to say a Kikkoman or a Chinese soy sauce. Have a look at my video actually where I tested out all the soy sauces. You can see how much of a difference there really is. That's actually really good fried rice. Mix that with some fish sauce and some sugar and that's your stir-fry sauce. To cook the fried rice, I'm going to heat my Mako wok over a high heat and then add some oil. Then in go my onions, the garlic, toss that around then some chicken thigh. Toss that around again 2-3 minutes until that chicken is almost cooked. Add in your gai lan or Chinese broccoli. I like to slice the stems on a diagonal here because that helps the stems to cook the same time as the leaves. Stir-fry for another 2 minutes or so. Now move everything off to the side of the wok. Add in a little bit of extra oil and then pour in your whisked egg. Let it set, kind of flip it around a little bit, move it around the pan and then just scramble it all up. Then toss through your tomato. Toss it through everything and then now add your rice. So here's a little tip. I always like to use day-old rice and I like to set it out in a tray and keep it uncovered in the fridge to dry it out a little before I stir-fry. That saves you from having a soggy fried rice. Pour in your stir-fry sauce, toss it all together until every single grain is beautifully coated. Here is your Thai fried rice and I mean for me this is like one of those nostalgic dishes that I love so much. It's that wok flavour you know that you get perfectly cooked rice as well. So good. For our next dish I'm gonna let you in here on like a very treasured family secret. It's not so secret because we're about to make it but it's my mum's famous nam dim sauce. So it goes like this. You start off with some very spicy chillies. These are bird's eye chillies and some garlic. A little salt. Now pound the chillies and garlic to a rough paste. Something that looks a little bit like this. Then add palm sugar, fish sauce, coriander and lime juice. Give that a stir. So here we go. Sort of cocktail prawns but not because it has the most amazing Thai nam dim sauce here. I'm just gonna try the sauce. It is so full of flavour. It's spicy and garlicky and like herby and tangy and so good. Hang lei starts with dried chillies. These are like the typical ones you get in your Asian supermarket and then soak them in hot boiling water for 15 minutes so they're nice and soft. Give them a squeeze. Now don't throw away that chilli water. We're going to use that later on. Chop up the chillies themselves and then pop them into a small blender. Now add in your lemongrass and your galangal. So galangal is interesting because often you'll find videos saying oh here go galangal but you can just replace it with ginger. You cannot. They're not the same thing. They don't even look like the same thing. Now if you're looking for galangal out and about, what you're looking for is like the pink stemmed version of ginger if you like. These are the 2 side by side. They actually taste completely different. Your galangal has a really fresh piney kind of flavour. Very firm as well whereas ginger is kind of a lot more mellow and kind of comforting. So do search it out. It is widely available in a lot of Asian grocery stores and it's really easy to freeze as well. Also add in some Asian red shallots and then some dried spices here. So garam masala and shrimp paste. A little bit of salt and now blend. Okay so you're going to get to the point where like the blender doesn't quite blend properly. This is where the chilli water comes in. So spoon in the chilli water like 2 or 3 tablespoons and then blend again and you can keep like scraping it down and then adding a little bit more because the water will evaporate when we cook the curry paste later on. This is a much better option than adding oil. So this is the texture that you're looking for and the colour and this smells really amazing FYI. But I do need to add one more thing and that is turmeric. Add it in at the last minute in a glass bowl so that you don't turn your entire blender yellow. That happens to me all the time. Now let's talk about pork belly. Not all pork belly is created equal. When you're out and about looking for your pork belly, look for a piece that has nice layers of meat. A little bit of fat is good but you obviously don't want too much fat. Now take your pork belly and cut it into fairly generous sized chunks. The pork belly will soften really beautifully later on so you can afford to go a little bit larger here. For the curry itself, heat up a little bit of oil in your pan. Add in some finely sliced shallots. Just give them a stir until they're a little bit soft. Now the curry paste, oh my goodness it smells so good. Stir it around for one or two minutes just to let those raw aromatics soften up and mellow out a little bit. Then add in your pork. Toss it around, get a little sear happening here on your pork belly. Then you can add in your tamarind. So I prefer just to use like tamarind paste. It's very easy to find, very easy to store. Search for it online or find it at your Asian grocer. I need some sweetness here too so add some palm sugar, some sweet dark soy sauce and then a cup of water. Stir all of that, let it come back to a little bubble and then reduce the heat to low. Cover with a lid and then let that pork simmer for an hour or until it's really tender. So at this point, your kitchen should be smelling amazing. I mean you should be really hungry right now. Take the lid off, add in your fish sauce and then young ginger. So young ginger looks like this. It's very pale. You'll notice it's a lot different to your regular old kind of ginger. Now if you can't get young ginger, that's okay. It just means you should use a little bit less because your older ginger here has a lot stronger flavour. Now you also want to add in your pickled garlic. You can find this in the Asian grocery store or check it out online. And a little bit of that pickled garlic juice. Now stir that around. Only needs like a couple of minutes to simmer and then we are serving. A little sprinkle of coriander and you are done. Here we are. We have made a Chiang Hang Le curry from scratch. Your friends are going to be so impressed. This is the kind of thing you can do the day before though. So make all of this up. Keep it in the fridge. Just reheat it before you serve it. Now the magic thing here is what has happened to that pork. I mean look at this. Check this out. Look at how tender that is. Oh my goodness. So good. Here is the last piece of puzzle for our ultimate Thai dinner party and it is a tangy salmon salad. So you want to start off with your salmon and the best way to get the crispiest kind of salmon, you want to pat the skin dry with paper towel first. Sprinkle with salt and then heat up your frying pan. Add some oil. Put those salmon fillets in skin side down. Then place some baking paper on top and you want to weigh everything down to get really good contact with that skin and the oil and the salt so things get really crispy. So I just put a pan on top or a pot will do. 2-3 minutes here and then remove everything. Flip that salmon over and it should be so crispy right now. Oh my goodness. Another 2 minutes on the second side and then let that salmon rest and once you cut it open, it should still be really lovely and juicy inside. For the dressing, you want to place your chili and garlic in a pinch of salt into a mortar. Use your pestle to pound it to a roughish kind of paste. Pop that into a bowl. Add your palm sugar, fish sauce, lime juice and stir and that's your dressing. Set aside until you're ready to serve. Now right when you're going to serve, you want to add in your fresh ingredients to the salmon. So add in your shallots, spring onion, mint leaves, Thai basil, a whole bunch of chili flakes. That's kind of optional, up to you and then your dressing. Mix it all very gently. You don't want to break up the salmon too much and serve. Now this is the kind of thing that you want to make just before everyone sits down to eat. So it's your last-minute piece that you need to do before you eat. Okay, check out what we did here. Oh my goodness, we made so many amazing things. So now you know. Look at your amazing Thai banquet. You know when to make things, how to make them and your friends are going to be so very impressed. So go forth, spread the good Thai eating vibes.