Perusing our cookbook collection, we only found recipes that were extraordinarily complex or overly simplified. So I turend to the Internet, as I so often do, and one day last fall found myself at ethnicgrocer.com.
The site is beautiful, full of colorful pictures of products and dishes. Products can be searched by country (including China, France, Mexico and Greece, among others) or product category (baking ingredients, condiments, pasta, meat, etc.) It's a great site for wandering and wondering things like what is Sanma Kabayaki (it's a fish, which from the description sounds sort of like a sardine and is popular in Japan) or what might you wrap in lotus leaves (sticky rice or meat, as it turns out, but the leaves themselves are inedible.)
I love to look around and have to curb my impulse to buy everything that sounds good, and there are many strange but wonderful-sounding ingredients available from this site. I really want to try things like coconut ginger rice, chanal dal and the numerous bottled curry pastes featured, and some day I'm sure I will order these things, and many others, when I can afford them. Now, it's a good site for dreaming.
The site also has a recipe feature, searchable by cuisine or course. Here you'll find recipes for such ethnic treats as Polish Bigos, or Hunter's Stew, a rich dish with sausage, black mushrooms and, of course, sauerkraut; spicy Spanish Pomegranate Chicken; to Yakshik, a Korean sweet spiced rice desert made with chestnuts, pine nuts and a creamy caramel sauce. I must admit I haven't tried a lot of recipes off this site, but most of them sound delicious.
There are also "cooking school" menus for the countries whose cuisines are covered, allowing you to get a few different recipes under your belt at once, and making a theme night easier. These menus are also periodically e-mailed to subscribers.
While there are 10 recipes in the Thai cooking section, none of them are Pad Thai. But the site does sell Pad Thai noodles with seasoning packet, two different sauces and rice stick noodles for making your own Pad Thai. But the best option for us was the Perfect Pad Thai kit, which included the noodles with sauce, both kinds of sauces and some fresh-from-Thailand noodles, all for $17.99 plus shipping. I got this for my honey for Christmas and lo and behold it also came with a recipe for Pad Thai. Now that we have one that we believe is authentic, we're a little scared to try it, but I'm growing some sprouts now for that very purpose. I can only hope it tastes as good as it sounds!
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