Here are a few:

Thai Food by David Thompson
Thai Street Food by David Thompson
Modern Thai Food by Martin Boetz

Now I want Thai instead of the lamb stew simmering away!

Here is a link that might be useful: Thai Food

Check ou the blog She Simmers for Thai cooking.

I am not affiliated with the blog....

Here is a link that might be useful: She Shimmers Thai Blog

My favorite is Keo's Thai Cuisine, which is fairly small - only 192 pages, and almost half the pages are full page color photos, which are very inspiring. I skip all the recipes that have coconut milk because I do not like sweetish main courses either. Some of them I have made and simply omitted the coconut milk, and they were excellent. My favorite recipe is the spicy shrimp and crab soup, which I can easily make, now that I have a Kaffir lime tree and lemongrass in my back yard. I've had this book since 1985, which is when it first came out, and I've made this soup many times. If you want, I can post that recipe. I got this book originally for the soup recipe but also for the curry recipes. I wanted to make my own curry paste back then because I wanted to make it without cinnamon, but these days I can find curry paste that does not have cinnamon.

Thai and Vietnamese are my favorite Asian cuisines, and Indian is third. For Chinese food, I prefer Sichuan or Hunan - I find a lot of the other Chinese food to be even sweeter than Thai food. I do not have a good Chinese cookbook, and so maybe you can recommend one of those.

Lars

Thanks all! I will go to Powell's and check those out. Lars, I will look at my cookbooks tonight and tell you which ones I like.

I'm not home, and can't remember the name of my Thai cookbooks, but my favorite is one with lots of photos as Lars describes.

The Key to Chinese Cooking by Irene Kuo is a terrific volume, with lots of spicy dishes. I've been cooking from it for about 30 years and the recipes never fail. There are no photos, however.

seagrass

Lars, the Chinese cookbook I use most often is "Classic Chinese Cuisine" by Nina Simonds. It is straight up traditional Cantonese restaurant dishes, including all the hoary old standards (hot and sour soup, etc). Well, there is a reason why they got to be standards. The recipes are done correctly, not simplified and not healthy.

I also have a dim sum cookbook, but I loaned it to someone so I can't give you the title. There are various good ones.

People give me Chinese cookbooks so I have 10 or 12 of them here. Most aren't very good. The older ones are for American cooks who wouldn't have had access to Chinese ingredients so the ingredients are wrong. Others are too simplified, to make them "quick" and "healthy". Some are generic "stir fry" books and the worst of those result in bland boiled gray stuff. Then there are the ones that are all spiritual, going on about the immortal flavors of the zodiac and such nonsense.

Thanks, John. I ordered a copy of that book and then also decided to order the Sichuan book by Fuchsia Dunlop. The Chinese cookbook I already have is The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook , which I found a bit disappointing and uninspiring. I have another book that I got for cheap at a B&N sales bin that says it is an Asian cookbook, but it reality, it is an East Asian cookbook and has no Indian, Persian, Afghan, or Armenian recipes, which I would have liked. I bought it because it has some good Vietnamese recipes and good instructions for spring and summer rolls and has nice color illustrations that are very inspiring. I don't have any Indian cookbooks, and that might be next on my list.

I have not particularly liked most of the Cantonese food I have had in restaurants, except for a few in Monterey Park, and I think that may be the fault of the restaurants trying to please a market that has different tastes from mine. It's amazing how many bad Chinese restaurants there are in San Francisco, and tourists will still go to them, especially if they are in Chinatown. I've not always been successful at convincing tourists to go to Chinese restaurants outside of Chinatown.

Lars

Tell me how you like the Sichuan book, after you cook from it.

Bad, touristy, Americanized Cantonese food is often gloopy from too much cornstarch and oil. Cornstarch and oil are important but not so much.

The dish that bugs me the most is "orange chicken". The awful version of this dish is so popular among tourists and non-Chinese. I actually like orange chicken but when made right.

I have two Thai books because Thai is my second favorite food. Italian being the first.

Most used book is "The Best of Vietnamese & Thai Cooking (Favorite recipes from Lemon Grass Restaurant and Cafes)" by Mai Pham. Excellent! Not too spicy, but great depth of taste.

The second Thai book is "Simply Thai Cooking" by Wandee Young and Byron Ayanoglu. Have to adjust every recipe in this book because it's too spicy. Acid reflux doesn't like spice even though I do. Have to live with it though.

I use both books extensively. I'm always looking for ways to use a lot of veggies and Thai food works for us.

I like this thai cookbook a lot..

Real Vegetarian Thai. I particularly like the fact that her directions are very detailed and she has great recipe for the basics from scratch - red curry paste, panang curry, various stocks etc. I realize that if I understand the logic of the cooking style, I can cook better. So the curry pastes are basically like a thick pesto that can be diluted as needed for various dishes. Like pesto, they also freeze well in icecube trays. So I can make various curry pastes in one sitting (most of the ingredients are similar except chilli color) and "assemble" the dish in a short time for dinner with just some chunks of tofu, veggies etc. The other thing I realized is using the right ingredient makes a huge difference. I live in the hub of asians in SF bay area and have several chinese grocery stores near me but some ingredients from a thai grocery store gave it that special flavor. Thai soy sauce (much thicker.. almost like a reduction of balsamic vinegar), thai palm sugar, thai red rice, thai sticky rice, also kefir lime leaves, thai chillies, galangal (ginger is not quite the same), lemon grass, tamarind (not paste). Most of these freeze well as well.