October 2008

Wild Ginger
While I'm not personally crazy about Thai food, I wanted to honor a special request to try a place near the downtown Littleton area. Since I'm not one to hang out that far west, I had to put forth a little effort on my part (ie, an internet search). The place that jumped out this time was Thai, though, and other people love it, so I thought I could be less than selfish this one month.
And I'll tell you this, it was pretty good. We had a biggish group, eleven as it turned out, at a round table right in the middle of the restaurant, and I'm sure the rest of the patrons were wondering why we kept taking pictures. For a change, the restaurant was a popular one; the place was crowded, nicely decorated and well established. And it shared a parking lot with some colorful interesting places I might have to visit another time.
One funny thing, I got there a few minutes early (weird, I know) and so sat in the vestibule until the rest of the party arrived. I had handily brought my knitting, so I was working away at a sock when a party of women left. One of them, spying what I was doing, stopped to say "Oh! I should have brought my problem for you to fix!" I guess I look like a real knitter now.
Everyone else arrived just in time for our table. We had to squeeze one extra setting, but that just made things cozier.
The menu is large and most of it is way foreign to me. After quizzing the waiter for a while, I finally just told him to surprise me. When he asked how spicy I wanted my dish, I said medium. My friend Megan, always looking out for me, called out "That's white girl medium." It's funny, because it's true.
Julie and Desiree got the chicken satay as an appetizer, which Julie actually liked!
Keri got chicken and shrimp dumplings which to me looked like pasta wrapped meatballs, but tasted way different.
My entree turned out to be the green curry, "white girl" medium. And it was good. The slightly spicy, creamy, cocanuty sauce was so good, I didn't want to waste any of it. So while my delicate friends were pushing half their entrees into take out boxes, I was looking for more rice to soak it all up. The one weird thing, though, was the vegetables. Celery I know. But there were big chuncks of white eggplant floating in there too. I ate them because they're supposed to be good for a growing body, but not even the excellent sauce could make up for the gummy texture.
The rest of the table was full of colorful food, none of which I tried. Everyone seemed well satisfied. We were very glad to have a couple newbies to the group, and we're looking forward to next month when an old friend is coming to visit us.
On the whole, a good experience. I'd go back again and try just pointing randomly at the menu to see what came up. And run over to the Mexican market across the way.