Blog Book Tour | “Thai Food Made Easy” by June Williamson A newfound joy of Thai cuisine is what prompted me to select this #cookbook!

Posted Tuesday, 28 July, 2015 by jorielov , , , 0 Comments

Cookery Delights | Savoury & Ambrosial | Cookbook reviews by the Bookish Foodie Banner created by Jorie in Canva. Photo Credit: Unsplash Public Domain Photographer Monstruo Estudio.

Acquired Book By: I am a regular tour hostess for blog tours via Cedar Fort whereupon I am thankful to have such a diverse amount of novels and non-fiction titles to choose amongst to host. I received a complimentary copy of “Thai Food Made Easy” direct from the publisher Front Table Books (imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc) in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.

On my newfound joy of Thai Cuisine:

A family friend introduced us to Thai cuisine by taking us to a lovely Thai restaurant late last year, and I haven’t quite forgotten the experience, nor the cosy-comfort of eating Thai cuisine! Even the pot of tea which came with the dinner was quite a unique moment of discovery because lemongrass was combined with other ingredients to give my palate a hearty new taste! Everything about that moment in time was quite special to me because it was the joy of discovering a new cultural heritage whilst partaking in a dish by dish exploration of native foods and styles of cooking that are known as being Thai!

We allowed our family friend to make the meal selections for us, as we knew by our own merits we could have have picked such delicacies nor such favourable entrees if we were left to decipher the menu ourselves! Laughs. I am not a big seafood or fish eater, but the fish that came with our dinner was both light and satisfying. I hadn’t even heard of the name prior to that night, and therefore I cannot offer it now! It was not a fish I had ever crossed paths with previously, yet seeing it on the plate as we ate provided a new perspective for sure!

My favourite part of all were the ‘salads’ as they served as appetizers to the main courses; it ended up being a ‘several’ course meal which added to the delight! Despite what I had previously heard of Thai food being too spicy or too difficult to soak into on a first visit, I must say I found the opposite to be true! Thai food for me is light, delicate, and beyond tasty! I love how you can have a myriad of choices to choose from and depending on what you are selecting you can have an easy five course meal plated in front of you with such stirringly different spices and herbs to create their own cacophony of music which might not believe to go together but truly do!

I was curious before I tried Thai food, and now I find I want to learn more! I want to learn how to make it and I want to learn how to use the herbs and spices in such a new fashion as to have found I barely recognise them in their new varieties of use! And, what a champion moment of blissitude to find a new way to use an herb or spice!?

Blog Book Tour | “Thai Food Made Easy” by June Williamson A newfound joy of Thai cuisine is what prompted me to select this #cookbook!Thai Food Made Easy
by June Williamson
Source: Direct from Publisher

Bring home the delicious flavours of Thai food - without the take-out container.

With this full-service cookbook, you can enjoy your own Thai food at home, easily and affordably. Stop wasting money on restaurants. These recipes make it easy to create your own authentic Thai dishes any time you're craving them.

Try all these tantalizing flavours:

Chicken in Coconut Soup

Pad Thai or Mango Rice

Massaman Curry or Beef Waterfall

Take the mystery out of Thai food. Spice up your menu and bring all those fresh and exotic flavours home for friends and family to enjoy!


Places to find the book:

Borrow from a Public Library

Add to LibraryThing

Published by Front Table Books

on 14th July, 2015

Format: Paperback Edition

Pages: 160

Published ByFront Table Books (@FrontTableBooks),
an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc (@CedarFortBooks)

Available Formats: Paperback, Ebook

Converse on Twitter via: #ThaiFoodMadeEasy + #ThaiFood

About June Williamson

June Williamson

June V. Williamson was born in a little northeastern town of Udorn, Thailand. When she was 7 years old, her mother met, fell in love, and married an American Air Force officer. This was the beginning of her military life of living back and forth from America to Thailand being exposed to the native Thai life for 9 years. However, those years were deliciously profound. Thai food had been infused into her by Thai street vendors and her Thai mother.

She is now back to living in another beautiful little town, but in Utah with her husband and 5 children.

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I had a good smirk of a laugh over why the author (June Williamson) decided to put together a cookbook because it’s the same argument of logic my own Mum has heard from me! Mum is definitely in-step with Ms Williamson on the theory that the best recipes for a family are the ones that are not written down nor remembered soon after they are made!

Mum has had a way of creating wicked good food but without notes and without a way to leave behind a road map for me to follow after! I oft-wondered how this would translate in my own kitchen as how do you proceed to make familial favourites when all the ones you grew up knowing intimately well were made on the fly? Yes, I dearly can relate to Ms Williamson’s children and their zeal to understand how the meals were created!

I had fully planned to pick out a few of the recipes within this cookbook to cook, however, there were a few things that went against me shortly after the book arrived by post! You see, I remembered that we still had several Asian food markets locally, only to realise with quite a bit of dismay they have all left for greener pastures elsewhere! Even the lovely family-run restaurant with an attached foodie haven of a market has disappeared; they were originally from the Pacific Rim, however, the originating country eludes me. I do remember having a nice conversation with them when I met them, but to find they are no longer in business was quite sad.

It is hard to get exotic ingredients without the benefit of an Asian grocer or market; they are quite popular in larger metro areas yet quite rare in smaller cities. I felt blessed we had the variety only to have learnt through reading this cookbook, we are no longer as blessed as we once were before! Secondly, July has been a vexation of a month for me, but truly, it began in June! You see, we’ve been getting such an arduous amount of lightning storms it is hard to predict how much cooking time you’ll have day to day because our lightning is quick to ground and fast to monkey with our electricity!

A good case in point would be to mention that the night I celebrated my birthday last month was the very night where just as I was about to put my birthday cake in oven to bake *ALL!* the lights flashed out and we entered a major blackout! The cake did rise hours later once the power was restored, but it felt like it could have risen more if it hadn’t had to spend time in the fridge! Throughout July, we’re above average for lightning storms, hence why my presence in the twitterverse and on my blog has been intermittent! It’s hard to find a way to blog and tweet if mother nature is barreling down on you!

I decided instead to put aside the recipes I wanted to cook for the blog tour, and give them a go when the weather settles down, allowing me the ability to fetch the ingredients I’ll need to experiment with them!

Recipes make me giddy for cookery experimenting!

{ the only difference is I won’t be adding MSG }

The SPRING ROLLS on page 11 & 14 (whose photographs follow the recipe) is a happy discovery because this is one of my favourite parts of eating out at Chinese and Pacific Rim restaurants; finding the variety contained within a spring roll! Each chef approaches it a bit differently and includes a few different key ingredients as well! I like the spring rolls that are light, crispy, and slightly flaky – the ones where the ingredients themselves do not feel overly cooked but retain their lightness? The main difference between the two is the first recipe is fried and the second remains unfried. I love having options to choose amongst and these two surely held my eye!

The CURRY chart on pages 28 + 29 is quite the find! I love seeing the breakdown on heat levels (from mild to hot) as well as a bridge of understanding – which ingredients to make which style of curry (there are five listed!), the country of origin per curry, and the dishes in which each curry will find a happy compliment! This was something that’s been on my mind for quite a long while — understanding the differences in curry and finding out ways in which to use them! I have been quite a bit jealous hearing of all the ‘curry takeaway’ across the Pond when I find it’s quite difficult to get over here! I can tell already the VEGETABLE CURRY is going to be amongst my favourites!

The most wonderful dish in the world to consume is PAD THAI although curiously, I’ve consumed this at different places outside of a Thai restaurant, I did have the benefit of tasting authentic versions of it! I love it because at it’s heart it’s a pasta meal whilst it has the spirit of something more! Quite the crowd pleaser this one is because you cannot surely consume all of it (portion wise!) yourself! I’d like to make this with tofu and/or tempeh to switch-up the fact I’ve only had it with chicken in the past!

The idea of PINEAPPLE FRIED RICE sounded quite appealing to me, as it’s a bit of a clever exchange for the traditional fried rice I’ve grown accustomed too! I like keeping things fresh and getting the chance to try something uniquely new is always a high priority!

The hardest part I had was choosing what to make first and how to take my Thai curiosity to the next level! All the recipes appeal to me on different levels, and this is one reason I wish you could ‘sample’ Thai at a buffet because it’s hard to eclipse your curiosity when *everything!* sounds as scrumptious to eat as the last recipe! I can see where I’ll simply have to compile the different dishes I think might work together well and offer up my own little ‘buffet of a Thai sampler’! I look forward to doing that as what is incredible is how Williamson gave us the benefit of the basics where we can go further with the recipes if we wanted too or we can hold back. She truly embraced each cook’s ability to choose what is right for them and for that I am full of gratitude!

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 The author’s YT channel provides some introductory videos!

Thai Ingredients via June Williamson

I love when you can become introduced to new ingredients and a new style of cooking by the writer of a cookbook! Here you can see a few of the bases of Thai cooking by getting a good feel for what the ingredients look like and how they are used in Thai cooking.

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 This is definitely a cookbook whose variety of lovelies to cook & bake
will become the wicked awesome reference book for me to use!
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This book review is courtesy of Cedar Fort, Inc.:

Cedar Fort Publishing & Media
One thing I have wanted to seek out is a way to talk about what befits a book blogger’s soul – part of what makes our soul happy is the food we consume, which is why time to time I will be showcasing a healthy-minded cookbook or baking book to augment this side of my life into my book blog. For this reason, I am still quite grateful Front Table Books and Cedar Fort gave me my initial chance to feature a cookbook — as it marked a transition moment for me, as I started reviewing for their Front Table releases in 2014 whilst continuing now in 2015, I will be regularly featuring non-fiction titles as much as dipping into the Foodie Fiction section of literature which compels my heart to discover.

Follow future installments by: #TheBookishFoodie

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Virtual Road Map of “Thai Food Made Easy” Blog Tour can be found here:

Thai Food Made Easy Blog Tour via Cedar Fort Publishing & MediaFun Stuff for Your Blog via pureimaginationblog.com

Find out which Front Table Books I’m hosting in 2015!

Visit my archive of Front Table Books reviews!

Visit with me again soon!
Reader Interactive Question:
What attracted you to try Thai food originally? Was it a particular dish OR spice?

Comment Box Banner made by Jorie in Canva.

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In conjunction with my ‘The Bookish Foodie’ Feature on Jorie Loves A Story:

The Bookish Foodie a blog feature of Jorie Loves A Story

This post marks my fourth tie-in on my bookish blog where I am going to be highlighting both fiction and non-fiction Foodie delights! I have always appreciated “Foodie Fiction”, but I am also an amateur sous chef who likes to experiment in the kitchen with her Mum! I grew up with a keen interest in savory and sweet decadence from a Mum whose culinary wanderings spanned the world. We were always a family who were considered to eat ‘bland’ food due to the fact we limited our salt intact, and we never used black pepper! Ironically, it was through the herbs and spices my Mum always fused into our cooking adventures that first sparked my own interest in getting a bit more involved than merely developing a ‘taste’ for what I appreciated. I developed my own yearnings for Indian spices (i.e. Curry Powder, Garam Marsala, Turmeric, etc) and foods, as much as I always had a hankering for extra garlic cloves due to a high concentration of Italian foods I consumed growing up. I wanted to merge my bookish joy of reading ‘Foodie Fiction’ with my quest to uncover a healthier and more vibrant way to eat, live, and thrive. Therefore, I decided to begin featuring what I consider fit under this new Feature of Jorie Loves A Story: The Bookish Foodie! As I am *exactly!* what the title eludes — I’m a bookish girl who has a Foodie soul! Drop back and spend time with me to see where this Feature takes me!

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{SOURCES: Author photograph, Author Biography, Book Synopsis and Book Cover of “Thai Food Made Easy”, Blog Tour Badge and Cedar Fort badge were provided by Cedar Fort Publishing & Media and used with permission. Post dividers badge by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets were embedded due to codes provided by Twitter. Cookery Delights | Savoury & Ambrosial | Cookbook reviews by the Bookish Foodie Banner created by Jorie in Canva. Photo Credit: Unsplash Public Domain Photographer Monstruo Estudio. The Bookish Foodie badge created by Jorie in Canva. Comment box badge created by Jorie in Canva. The ingredient video had either URL share links or coding which made it possible to embed this media portal to this post, and I thank them for the opportunity to share more about this novel and the author who penned it.}

Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2015.

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About jorielov

I am self-educated through local libraries and alternative education opportunities. I am a writer by trade and I cured a ten-year writer’s block by the discovery of Nanowrimo in November 2008. The event changed my life by re-establishing my muse and solidifying my path. Five years later whilst exploring the bookish blogosphere I decided to become a book blogger. I am a champion of wordsmiths who evoke a visceral experience in narrative. I write comprehensive book showcases electing to get into the heart of my reading observations. I dance through genres seeking literary enlightenment and enchantment. Starting in Autumn 2013 I became a blog book tour hostess featuring books and authors. I joined The Classics Club in January 2014 to seek out appreciators of the timeless works of literature whose breadth of scope and voice resonate with us all.

"I write my heart out and own my writing after it has spilt out of the pen." - self quote (Jorie of Jorie Loves A Story)

read more >> | Visit my Story Vault of Book Reviews | Policies & Review Requests | Contact Jorie

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Posted Tuesday, 28 July, 2015 by jorielov in Bits & Bobbles of Jorie, Blog Tour Host, Cedar Fort Publishing & Media, Cookbook, Cookery, Indie Author, Non-Fiction, The Bookish Foodie




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