A Thai-inspired Friday dinner with friends

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Som Tam Salad

Friday night was dinner at home with my Filipino friends, and I decided to put together a meal with a Southeast Asian flavour. Not everything on the table was strictly Thai, but that is rather typical of the way I cook. 

I chose Thai food quite deliberately. There is something faintly terrifying about cooking food from your guests' own homeland. They know exactly how it is supposed to taste, how their mother or grandmother makes it, and every shortcut or questionable substitution is immediately exposed. 

The first dish was som tam green papaya salad. It is one of those dishes that is crunchy, salty, sour, sweet and hot at the same time. Raw green papaya is mixed with blanched french beans, chilli, fish sauce, juice of a lime, grated garlic, fresh coriander, and toasted peanuts. If you do not happen to find green papaya, you can use hispi cabbage.

For the main course I made gai yang, Thai grilled chicken, served with jasmine rice. The chicken is marinated with garlic, lemongrass, fish sauce and other aromatics before being grilled. The result is deeply savoury, fragrant and slightly charred.

I based mine on this excellent recipe from RecipeTin Eats: Gai Yang – Thai Grilled Chicken. I did not have dark soy, so the result was not that dark. After grilling the meat, I placed it in the oven at 120°C for 10 minutes to rest. 

Gai Yang – Thai BBQ chicken.

I served the chicken and jasmine rice with a sharp, spicy dipping sauce made from white wine vinegar, fresh lemon juice, brown sugar, garlic, chillies, shallots and freshly ground black pepper. 

Grilled meat and rice was served with an improvised sauce.

And then the menu took a small detour because I had bought some good-looking plantains from an Asian food shop and could not resist. So I made pan-fried plantains with Italian pancetta, a dish taught to me by my friend Gemma, who divides her time between Rome and Kigali. Sweet, caramelised plantain and salty pancetta may not be an obvious flavour combination, but they work remarkably well together.

So, one dinner table travelled from Thailand to Finland, with a small excursion through Italy along the way. The Italian connection felt particularly fitting, as my friend Imelda's sister lives in Italy.

That, for me, is one of the pleasures of cooking for, and with, friends. Recipes travel with people. They are borrowed, adapted and remembered, and eventually become part of your own kitchen repertoire. Last night's dinner was less about following one particular cuisine faithfully and more about putting together food I love for people whose company I enjoy around the table.

Pan-fried plantains with pancetta.