Flashback Friday: A Cuisine Switch Up

Plus a preview of next week's menu...

Next week was originally scheduled to be our Flashback Friday—the once-a-month edition of Restaurant Dropout, where a previous menu is dusted off, polished, re-shared, and cooked all over again. If you’re a newer subscriber, it’s also a way to cook through some of the older menus that you might have missed.

However, while developing the new menu for this week, I ran into a few hiccups (e.g., lack of water, gas, and kitchen equipment), so we’re flipping weeks and sharing “Brightening Things Up, A Menu” next week since it’s my priority to ensure that all menus and recipes are up to standard (rather than half-as*ed).

We’re bringing back my slight obsession with skewered meat, a new type of cutlet, and spring vegetables (including arugula, asparagus, and…chard *surprise!!* [more on that next week]).

On the bright side, this means five consecutive new menus in the month of April.

After digging into the past menus, I felt it was a perfect time to re-introduce a menu I deeply loved, but weirdly had forgotten about: A Cuisine Switch Up.

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Flashback Friday: A Cuisine Switch Up

March 2024

A few weeks ago, I was vicariously living through my parents (a sentence I didn’t think I’d be saying in my 20s) as they traveled through Southeast Asia (SEA) for 6 weeks. As they journeyed through Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos, I received an abundance of pictures *daily* of their food-related adventures (as I had requested).

One of my favorite pictures I received was this grocery store aisle dedicated to fish sauce varieties (below):

On top of it all, they were fortunate enough to take a Thai cooking class, and lucky for me, they sent over the 40-page book included in the cooking class. It consisted of lessons on Thai cuisine, an ingredient overview (i.e., ways to use galangal, lemongrass, Thai ginseng, palm sugar, etc.), and several recipes for curry pastes, noodles, soups, and more. It was far more educational than our one day dedicated to SEA cuisine in cooking school.

That’s to say, I’m inspired and hungry for new flavors, so we’re switching things up this week and diving into a menu inspired by SEA Cuisine.

Everyone say thannnnnnnnnks Mom & Dad! 🗣️