A grilled cheese sandwich, fried in butter to crispy perfection and sliced diagonally, sits on a wooden plate on the bright oil cloth table. Next to the sandwich, a bowl of Campbell's tomato soup is classic, placid, delicious. Outside the rain falls on the Oregon woods. I am six years old.

My mother made me grilled cheese sandwiches and Campbell's tomato soup, and the meal still seems like the ultimate comfort food. In theory, I love Campbell's tomato soup. But I can't remember the last time I bought a can of Campbell's or any other type of canned soup. I detest the metallic can flavor, most canned soups have questionable ingredients (hello, high fructose corn syrup), and I consider making soups from scratch a form of leisure entertainment.

Enter the flu and my friend Cornelius, who brought me a can of Amy's Thai Coconut Soup, claiming it made him feel better the last time he was sick. Cornelius has pretty good taste in sustenance (his devotion to Chock Full o' Nuts Coffee aside) and the soup is organic and made of whole, recognizable ingredients, so I approached the can with a relatively open mind. (Plus I was really too sick to have any desire to cook anything from scratch.)

I found the coconut broth tasty--light, aromatic, pleasantly spiced, and remarkably free of any "can" flavor. It tasted even better when I added a lime, a teaspoon of chili oil, and a few leaves of cilantro, but that's true about homemade Tom Kha too. The soup contains shitaki mushrooms, sweet potatoes, green beans, shallots, tofu, and even kaffir lime leaves. The mushrooms were good (and I don't even like shitakes), and the tofu was chewy, but the vegetables were predictably mushy--the carrots, in large slices, being the worst offenders. That said, I ate the contents of the can in one sitting. Cornelius was right--I did feel better.

Overall, a good product, and at 280 calories for a whole can (2 servings) a pretty healthy choice.

I have always been prejudiced against cookbooks full of glossy color photographs. I suppose, like many of my culinary opinions, it comes from my dad. Cookbooks in our house were great soup-stained tomes, jackets discarded decades past, crusty pages packed with small print. Glossy photos were for Betty Crocker and her jello-d salads.

Nonetheless,  Mini C's Great Thai Dishes was three dollars cheaper than the other Thai cookbook at Half Price Books, and I wasn't feeling rich. I decided to give it a shot.

The slim volume has been a pleasant surprise. Mini C's instructions are easy to follow and dishes are prefaced with tips, anecdotes, and, occasionally, cheeky commentary, such as 'It would be an appropriate dish to give to your enemy!' (the dish in question, nicknamed 'Weeping Tiger', calls for 10-12 bird's eye chillies).

Her 'Grilled Marinated Sirloin with Seasonings' was succulent, and my usual culinary victims, Ricardo and Cornelius, were suitably impressed with the North-Eastern-Style Chilli Dipping Sauce. In fact, Cornelius actually admitted that it was hot, which I considered a major victory. I also tried the Tom-Kha Gai (good and surprisingly easy to cook), the Sa-Lad Khaek (salad with peanut sauce), the marinated pork, Pad Pauk Med-Ma-Moung-Him-Ma-Phaan (seasonal vegetables with cashew nuts) and Pad Pauk Roam (stir-fried seasonal vegetables). All excellent, though the peanut sauce recipe was probably  the most exciting find; I've been trying to make a good peanut dipping sauce for spring rolls for years, but it's always seemed a bit flat. (The secret ingredient turns out to be red curry paste, which gives the flavor the desired complexity.) I ended up cutting back on the quantity of sugar in almost all of the recipes, but other than that the proportions seemed dead-on.

I spent four months in Thailand and I love Thai food, but this is my first real foray into Thai cooking. Luckily for me (and the culinary victims), the book has decent glossary of ingredients. I must admit that I probably would never have been able to identify Galangal if it hadn't been for the glossy color photograph provided.

Read more of my book reviews at Goodreads.com and People'sGuide.com.

I missed my bus yesterday, so I had some time to kill in the International District. Time to kill in the International District equals food, of course. Normally I'd pop into a unassuming cafe for a bowl of pho or some fresh spring rolls, or hop over to Shanghai Garden for their unforgettable hand-shaved noodles, but I'd just eaten, so I had to content myself with buying a bag of groceries.

Which is more fun than it sounds. Although many Seattle residents equate ID groceries with Uwajimaya, the epic and admittedly entertaining Asian superstore, I've always preferred to poke through the countless mom-and-pop shops that line the Jackson street corridor. The entire area is like a candy store for people who love pickled things and odd cuts of meat: you can find Chinese pickled lettuce, Vietnamese pickled water spinach, and about 50 varieties of pickled chiles, not to mention pigs' feet and live fish swimming woefully in murky tanks. Eleven dollars will buy you a bag bursting with odd roots and colorful cans, and the crowded isles and pungent smells create a vaguely Third World ambiance that always makes me feel at home, even though I'm sure I stick out like a sore thumb. If my  tendency to gangle over the vegetables, peering at roots with a confused expression didn't mark me as a novice, to the trained eye my selection of groceries spell dilettante: lemon grass stalks, a bunch of cilantro, rice sticks, oyster mushrooms (organic! 2.99 a lb!), canned baby corn, two cans of coconut milk, and a can of coconut juice (I am curious, but it turns out to be too sugary). Total cost: the aforementioned eleven dollars. Now on to find some doable recipes in my new Mini C cookbook. (On Sunday, I used her recipes to make marinated pork and rare sirloin steak with chili sauce, and both dishes turned out pretty damn delicious, so I have high hopes for the rest of the book.)