Cook is serving (From Tewkesbury Admag)

Cook is serving

2:21pm Thursday 2nd November 2006 in News

Tick Brinn loves cooking and she particularly enjoys making the dishes she remembers from her native Thailand.

Now she is sharing her pleasure with others. Every Thursday night, she takes over the kitchens at Slatters Bistro in Church Street, Tewkesbury and produces a range of creamy curries, spicy sweet and sour and other traditional Thai dishes.

On a Sunday and Monday, she does the same at the Rose and Crown in Redmarley.

At both she is gathering a growing following of regular customers.

Although she has many years experience of catering, she says that the dishes she produces are the ones she learned from her mother and are typical of Thai home cooking.

They are satisfying without being heavy and spicy without the intense heat of an Indian curry. The main flavourings she uses are lemon grass and chilli.

She buys all her spices and other special ingredients from an oriental supermarket in Cheltenham, which has them flown in twice a week.

The meat and vegetables are all bought fresh from local suppliers.

As well as running her own bar and restaurant in Thailand, she spent seven years in Cape Town, South Africa, also running her own restaurant.

She met her husband, Warren, who comes from Tewkesbury, when he was on holiday in Thailand and staying at the hotel where she was working.

They married there and have a five-year-old son, Jack They returned to England three years ago and it was when Jack started school earlier this year that she decided to get back to the cooking she loves.

"I was bored, but I did not want the responsibility of running my own restaurant, or doing it every day, so this just suits me," she said.

One thing that she does not like is the way the English eat their food.

"You just put everything on one plate, so that you do not really know what anything tastes like. In Thailand we put it all on one big plate in the middle and everyone sits around it and takes one thing at a time - that way we really taste what we are eating."

Jack so enjoys her cooking that he often asks for his favourite omelette and rice instead of sandwiches in his lunch box.