LCBO Food & Drink Early Summer 2019

“ Like a lot of Thai food, this salad is refreshing, sour, sweet and salty, crunchy and soft, all in one bite ! ”

papaya salad (som tam) recipe on page 122

Nuit Regular Kiin, 326 Adelaide Street West, Toronto, kiintoronto.com

but when I went back to Thailand I found she had written down all her recipes for me in a book. It’s my treasure. Now I’m writing a cookbook for my own kids, to pass on our recipes and our culture. It will be published in the fall of 2020.     “This recipe is slightly different from my mother’s because in Thailand we would use fresh tamarind, which is hard to find here. We have it on the menu at Kiin in springtime and early summer but at home I eat it year-round. If I’m hungry in the middle of the night, I’ll go to my fridge and make papaya salad. It’s so easy to do!”

“This is for Mother’s Day,” explains Nuit Regular. “Every little girl growing up in Thailand loves papaya salad. It was the first thing my mother taught me to cook, when she showed me how to use a mortar and pestle. And it was the first recipe I taught my own daughter. My mom passed away five years ago,

86  FOOD & DRI NK EARLY SUMMER 2019