How to Beat the Winter Doldrums: Pt. 1

So I can't imagine I'm alone here - dreaming wistfully of balmy summer nights with friends, maybe a beach, and some really awesome food, preferably cooked over charcoal. So many times over the last two months have I looked out my back door at my fire pit and grill and thought "maybe it won't be sooo cold..." and quickly huddled back inside without a second thought.
Last week, however, I resigned myself to a night of cooking with one of my best friends, Mike. For Christmas, my brother got for me a copy of David Thompson's Thai Street Food, a book I love for the pictures just as much as the recipes. I've been trying to recreate the food I had in Bangkok pretty much since the day I got back, and I'd always heard this book to be the be all end all of street food.
We shlepped to the Asian market at 11th and Washington (one of my favorite places in the world) and started compiling the 25 or 30 ingredients necessary for what we'd planned to make - beef in coconut milk and green curry, roti and pork skewers. Now, these pork skewers are things of legend. I'm so conditioned to the smell that I perk up like Pavlov would have wanted at nascent whiffs of charcoal. I knew going into this venture it wouldn't be quite the same, because we couldn't grill anything and I'd have to settle for a stovetop grill pan...which is ok. Definitely not the same. However when we were scanning the butcher's case for the perfect cut of pork, I spied it...the EZ-Grill (except the Asian supermarket version)! "HOLY CRAP!!!!" and dove for it - "MIKE LOOK!" He laughed at me, but we bought two. Pork skewers proper! And we could just move away all the excess snow from my back patio! Perfect.
We got back to my place and I went to work on the green chili paste, NOT something I'd recommend for those of you with especially powerful senses of smell, or low tolerance to spice. The recipe had me put TWENTY FIVE bird's eye chillies (holy crap...) into a mortar and pound them into oblivion, along with a long hot green pepper, galangal, cilantro root, kaffir lime zest and a host of various Thai spices. I had quite the head cold at the time, and was relatively unphased, until I realized that my eyes were weeping all over the place. As soon as I realized I was crying did Mike burst into a coughing fit and fled from the room. I transferred the whole mess to a food processor and started blending the mixture into a paste in small bursts, choking and laughing and crying the whole time from the sudden overwhelming blooms of abject heat. Now, I've made curry paste before, and it was really quite hot, but nothing like this. This was insane.
Meanwhile, I had pork butt and fatback marinating in palm sugar, fish sauce, shrimp paste and spices which I transferred to skewers. Mike had fired up the "grill", which involved igniting a piece of wax paper that had been doused in what seemed like kerosine. Not bad for five bucks, right? But the pork skewers! Oh dear. Amazing things happened. For the first time, the sweet salty spicy crust that I'd encountered in Thailand was present, but they were moist and so freakin flavorful with the perfect amount of blackened char. Perfect. The green curry and the roti were amazing as well, the curry being the spiciest, most brutal and complex thing I've ever made, and rest assured I will continue making it until I no longer cry like a little girl in the process. Go out now and concoct something that will make you think of happy, sweltering hot evenings bent over your stove/grill/wok! Winter in Philadelphia may be long, it may be bleak and occasionally abjectly depressing, but it can also be the perfect time to get into the projects you put off when it's beautiful out and you're running around like a nut. If you're up to it, go seek out Thai Street Food, I promise you won't be let down. David Thompson, I salute you.