street food in ayutthaya

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I've finally reached my last post about our trip to Ayutthaya...

and, unsurprisingly, it's all about food.

At the riverside night market in Ayutthaya we explored the rows of stalls offering all sorts of wonderfully mysterious foodstuffs before settling on some seafood from this woman's stand..

grilled cuttlefish and squid-on-a-stick

To order, you point to the raw proteins you want (we chose squid, cuttlefish and some meat/veggie shishkabobs), she brushes them down with some sort of marinade, puts them on the hot grill and lets them cook for a few minutes. She tosses the grilled meat into individual bags and ladles some sweet/spicy/tangy sauces over the bags' contents before handing them over.


One of the foods that Ayutthaya is apparently known for is Roti Sai Mai. Street vendors all over the city offer these plastic bags of paper-thin green crepe-like roti. Along with the roti you're given a plastic bag of this green/pink/white sugar floss (similar to cotton candy, but chewier and denser). To eat, you pull off a pinch of the floss and roll it up in a sheet of roti. I think they must use glutinous rice flour in the roti batter because the result is chewy and elastic. and it's almost unbearably sweet.

amelia prepares a roti roll

roti sai mai

As an afternoon snack after our roti, we happened upon one of the millions of rolling deepfrying street vendors on a street corner by our hostel. We bought a styrofoam bowl of hardboiled quail eggs wrapped in won ton wrappers, deepfried to chewy, crispy, fatty perfection and drizzled with sweet chili sauce...

fried, eggy, doughy nuggets
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som tam and son-in-law eggs

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On our second day in Ayutthaya, Amelia and I got up early to go look at the things we hadn't seen on day one. famished after hours of trudging across the town on foot, we abandoned our original plan to eat lunch by the river and ended up sitting down at a pink picnic table outside a streetside cafe. The small eatery was adorned with dozens of tropical potted plants that all, strangely, had hawaiian leis draped over them, making for an odd sort of jungle/PartyCity theme..

While the decor could have done with a makeover, the food was awesome. (though our judgment may have been skewed by our voracious appetites)

We ordered rice (of course - no meal is complete without it), som tam and khai leuk kheuy to share.

khai leuk kheuy, or son-in-law eggs

again, amelia's claw waits impatiently
before pouncing on the plate of eggs i'm photographing

These eggs are hard boiled, then fried so they're soft on the inside and sort of chewy and crisp on the outside. Then they're sliced in half and drenched in a sweet and salty sauce which seems to consist of caramelized onions, sugar, salt and some kind of fat. The dish is topped with chopped fresh cilantro.

sticky, salty, caramely sauce
this might be my favorite Thai egg preparation yet

som tam thai

Unfortunately, as often happens here, they saw our pale faces and made our papaya salad entirely not spicy. aside from that it was just fine - refreshing on a hot day.

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inedible ayutthaya part two

more photos from the spatz sisters' trip to Ayutthaya...

amelia points out a notable feature of this.. thing


a thai baby stumbles across the frame
in the ayutthaya historical park


Wat Lokkaya Sutha,
or big reclining buddha


amelia poses with the feet - golden toenail polish and all

[I don't understand the meaning here, but at temples or sacred places I almost always thai people with tiny sheets of gold leaf, rubbing them onto statues or parts of the temple - hence those toenails]

Buddha's head resting on a pillow of lotus flowers





trucks and motorbikes whiz by, mere feet from the crumbling ruins
and from our table at the restaurant where we ate lunch...

lunch post to follow.
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