Vegetarian Thai Cooking

After making a decent Thai green curry sauce over the weekend for my housewarming party, I realized that some of the ingredients in the sauce are not necessarily "kosher" for vegetarians. I got to thinking, how can I make vegetarian Thai or Vietnamese food. In general, much of Thai/Vietnamese food employs the use of fish sauce (nam pla), oyster sauce, or shrimp paste. So our goal is to try and find suitable substitutes.

A recommended substitute for fish sauce (nam pla, nuoc mam chay) is light soy sauce or just soy sauce. Soy sauce is not always good enough on its own. So, one recommendation that I read is to mix a small amount of it with fermented tofu and salted yellow beans. You should be able to find fermented tofu at your local Asian grocery store. Apparently, though, you should also be able to find products labelled as "Vegetarian Fish Sauce." I've personally never found it, but maybe I've never looked hard enough.

Shrimp paste (kapi) can be substituted with soy bean paste (yellow bean paste) or fermented tofu.

Dried shrimp (Goong Haeng) is a little tricky. According to what I've read, this is nearly impossible to substitute. The thaigrocer.com suggests that bean products or roasted nut products can be used. However, many more suggest that it should be omitted entirely.

Oyster sauce can be easily substituted with Vegetarian Oyster Sauce. This is readily purchased in most Asian grocery stores in the United States.