A flavorful cooking adventure

The Spice Merchant's Daughter: Recipes and Simple Spice Blends for the American Kitchen
By Christina Arokiasamy
Clarkson Potter, 240 pp, $29.95

The Mediterranean approach to cooking, in which you get the best ingredients and prepare them simply, is very different from the Southeast Asia style, where many raw ingredients -- tamarind pods, lemongrass stalks, toxic candlenuts, Kaffir lime leaves -- are several steps away from even being edible. There's peeling, chopping, pounding, and more, so you might as well make a day of it.

For years I've lingered at the doorstep, trying out Thai and Vietnamese recipes without venturing into the explosive, intricate flavors of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Thanks to "The Spice Merchant's Daughter: Recipes and Simple Spice Blends for the American Kitchen," by Christina Arokiasamy, I'm crossing that complex and utterly delicious threshold. Arokiasamy, raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, runs the Spice Merchant's Cooking School in Seattle, and it's to her credit that these recipes are approachable at all. But with so many steps in each dish, small hitches are inevitable.

Lemon-pepper wings demand ginger-garlic paste, garam masala, and lemon-pepper rub, first toasting spices and lemon peel. My lemon peel cooked in one-third the recommended time, but with no detriment to the wings. They have a crisp, flecked crust and reassuringly tart flavor.

Other puzzles followed: Red curry with bamboo shoots, tofu, and zucchini called for 12 ounces of fried tofu. I used two 4.2-ounce packages. Fried tofu is so light and bulky; that much threatened to overwhelm my big skillet. But the cilantro-garlic paste in the red curry is a marvelous flavor-boosting secret I'm glad I know. The 12 minutes you're supposed to stir-fry thin slices of marinated sirloin with black pepper and coriander are surely a typo, since Arokiasamy cautions that the cooking time should be short. If you interpret it as "1-2 minutes," as I did, the beef comes out tender and perfectly browned.

In stir-fried bean sprouts with white pepper, 2 tablespoons of oil are more than the beans can handle, though a bright shower of cilantro and scallions almost cuts through it. I wasn't sure how to "separate the bok choy leaves from the stems" for a dish of the greens with shiitakes -- cut off the green part or separate them into single leaves? Given the brief cooking time I'm pretty sure the author meant baby bok choy, not full-size.

A recipe for rich chocolate cardamom cakes has a happier problem. It generously fills seven ramekins, not five. My family easily absorbed the excess.

When Arokiasamy gets it right, though, she's incredibly good. Chicken satay with perfect peanut sauce is the best I'e ever tasted, and well worth the half-day it takes to address various combinations of fresh turmeric, fresh galangal, candlenuts, lemongrass, palm sugar syrup, raw peanuts, and red chilies. It took me an hour to make the paste for green beans with roasted chili paste. But when I tasted it, I just stood there in my kitchen saying "wow," till I recovered enough to proceed. Slicing green beans "on the diagonal" was another poser. I ended up nearly French-cutting them so they'd cook in the recommended four minutes.

I could eat basil fried rice every day. Though fried rice is one of my staples, I never guessed at the seasoning power of Thai basil, cilantro, fish sauce, and scallions. Garlic prawns rely on sweet soy, oyster sauce, and Thai basil to successfully hint at more complex flavors, and like any shrimp dish, they're blazing fast.

With all the work frontloaded into the marinade, coconut spare ribs are easy, too. Sweet soy and a clove-heavy garam masala give them aroma, while coconut milk keeps them moist.

The book's subtitle, "Simple Spice Blends for the American Kitchen," is a canny bit of marketing. It's not how I would describe a blend created from a dozen whole spices (half of which hide out in undiscovered aisles of an Asian market), peeled, chopped, toasted, pulverized, etc. You're not going to walk into your pantry and throw these recipes together. One other caution: these recipes are written hot. I'm a rabid chilihead, but I often had to halve the recommended quantity to make these dishes universally palatable.

Despite its "some assembly required" approach, "The Spice Merchant's Daughter" is one of the best culinary adventures I've had all year. Like the best adventures, it left me breathless and exhausted -- and ready to do it all over again tomorrow.