Thai Food
 

I'm going to a Thai Resturant tomorrow with a friend of mine. I was wondering if anyone had any healthy menu suggestions. I use to get chicken pad thai but I realize that is a very unhealthy choice.

oohhhh...i don't know...but i'll keep an eye on the post since i LOVE thai food also. Great question!

I usually get something my local restaurant calls "Buddha's Feast". It's a big platter of mixed vegetables, sauteed with a broth-like spicy sauce with lots of garlic and ginger, and is really nice with a little bit of rice. You have to like veggies, though, LOL!! I love 'em, so it makes a nice meal for me.

Satay isn't too bad if you stick to chicken, and ask them to put the sauce on the side (the sauce is loaded with fat and calories - not all of them bad, but restaurants tend to douse the satay with the sauce, and you can save yourself a lot of calories if you dip or drizzle yourself).

try checking the web for nutrtion values. glen

Try grilled beef salad (yam neua), fried rice with pineapple (Kho Pad Sapparot) if you can get them to make it with brown rice, Hot and Sour Shrimp soup (Tom Yum Goong), or Thai Seafood Salad (Yum Talay).

When I go out to my local thai place, I get thai pepper stir fry with steamed tofu - tofu chunks, bell peppers, snow peas, and some other veggies stir-fried and served in a broth sauce. A little bit of rice and it is HEAVEN.

One restaurant we go to serves a delicious seafood soup that is broth based. It has a lot of fresh mushrooms in it. I love it! I don't know the nutritional values but since there is no coconut milk, only broth, I can't imagine that it is too unhealthy.

Watchout for coconut milk. That stuff really sabbotages your efforts.

I'm a soup lover and could eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner so I normally get one of the thai noodle soups with chicken. I just make sure the broth is chicken and that the chicken in the soups is not breaded/fried. This way the worst thing about is the noodles (which I generally can't finish) and there's probably too much sodium but all in all it's a giant bowl of soup and it makes me very happy! :D

Let us know what you had!

I love green curry although I don't know if I'd call it healthy but you can always portion control if nothing else.

Thanks for all of the suggestions. I love soup but am allergic to seafood so that wasn't an option.

I'm curious about the tofu stirfry. I don't know if I have ever had tofu. Does it just pick up the seasoning of the rest of the dish.

I ended up ordering Cashew Chicken. It was similar to what I get when I go for chinese, excpet the sauce was a lot thinner and spicer. I wanted to get a curry dish but they all had coconut milk :( They have a to-go menu so I grabbed one on my way out of the door so that I could look at without making my friend wait while I attemt to determine nutrition information. This way I can be better prepared.

Actually, the nutritionists have yet again changed their opinion--coconut oil is now a "good" fat. All the studies done back in the '80's that said coconut oil clogged your arteries and did other horrible things to your body were based on hydrogenated coconut oil, i.e. trans-fat. Although coconut oil is a saturated fat, it is composed of medium-chain fatty acids rather than long-chain fatty acids as most other saturated fats are. Therefore, it is metabolized differently.

Check the shelves at your health food store. It now carries coconut oil.

Oh, coconut oil may be relatively healthy, but the CALORIES are ridiculous. So if you're a calorie counter, you really have to watch it, regardless of whether it is healthy or not...sort of like cashews. Healthy fats? sure! But you can still eat 200 cals without even realizing, so you have to watch it.

Boy! You said it!

I know, but again, I have to come back to calories. Also, aren't the carbs high in that stuff?

Good luck with that. I have tried that with some places and found it frustrating because I didn't know quantities. I guess I'll have to be more patient with myself.