an unworthy-of-Thailand dinner

Here's the "before" pic:

Bottom row: chili peppers, green onion & sweet basil, chicken tenderloin, peanut-butter sauce
Middle row: generic SE Asian noodles, kongnamul (soy sprouts) & cabbage & green onion
Top row: crushed cashews, shrimp
Not pictured: eggses

And here's the messy "after" pic:

I obviously have a lot to learn about making any sort of Southeast Asian food. I did try to find cilantro at the local SSG Food Mart, but there was none to be found, and the staffer who tried to help me didn't understand what gosu (cilantro) was until I said the fucking word three times. Just another case in which the Korean brain shuts down when perfectly understandable Korean is coming out of the mouth of a foreigner. Instead of cilantro, I went for sweet basil.

The dish ended up tasting like something that wanted to be Thai or SE Asian, but it failed. I could have used a bit more salt, for one thing, and the cilantro was conspicuously absent. I also could have added more peanut sauce to make the dish more peanutty, and the thing that really bothers me is that I didn't add any lime juice to liven the dish up. Well, fook. In terms of prep method, I think I'll stir-fry everything separately next time instead of doing a "cumulative stir-fry" in which you dump in the more durable ingredients first, then start layering the other ingredients on top of them. So this was a failure, but it was also a learning experience. I've got more of all the ingredients except the cilantro (which I will buy next time, by hook or by crook) and the shrimp; I'll give this dish another try later this week.