One Night (or six) In Bangkok

So, here we are in Bangkok! When I say 'we', I mean Mandy and I on a shoot for Five Tastes (please do follow on Facebook!)

Five Tastes is a range of authentic Asian dishes that you can whip up at home - even on a weeknight. The initial dishes are Pad Thai, Red Curry, Green Curry and Laksa. If you don't normally cook these kind of dishes at home, I suggest you start with the meal kits which have the right measures of many of the ingredients already sorted for you. Or you can use the curry cooking sauces - just adding your own meat and veg, or if you're feeling even more adventurous, choose the pastes and go crazy making up your own version of the dishes.

You can watch the video of the story behind Five Tastes here, which explains that it's the balance of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savoury (or umami as the locals call it) that makes Asian cuisine so unique but also tricky to do from scratch at home.

The idea behind our campaign is to taste test the products here in Asia. We've brought over three duos of regular folk to cook up a storm for the locals to demonstrate how easy it is to do and how authentic the result is. You can follow all the action on Facebook and so far, it has been very funny!!!


Our first duo, Ash and Brodie are just gorgeous in every sense of the word. And tonight they will be cooking Five Tastes Pad Thai from a street cart on Soi 38 - one of the city's busiest strips for street stalls - this should be good!

But as we're here, we thought we should check out a few of the other local authentic snacks - like fried grasshoppers. Curiously, there is no 'squish' - they're all 'crunch' and aren't dissimilar to the tarantula legs we chowed down on in Cambodia. We also tried a silk worm - maybe not the worm - maybe it was just the larvae. They look a little creepy but really, taste like some kind of bland bean - and same texture too.

Anyhow, rest assured that Five Tastes in much more delicious than the snacks!!!

Silk Worm Grubs

Grasshoppers - yuuuum