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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thempanada and the national anthem

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Learning Thai has proven to be a daunting task, so a few weeks ago i decided to focus my efforts on just memorizing the Thai national anthem that the kids sing in school assembly each morning. I devoted a week to the endeavor and now I'm showing off... i proudly sing at morning assembly, i sing in the evening when the anthem plays on all radios and televisions, i sing in taxis for the taxi drivers, really I sing to anyone who'll listen. did I mention that I'm terribly proud of myself? The kids in class helped me with learning all the pronunciation and they still get a kick out of listening to me butcher their dear country's anthem in class.

morning assembly where we sing the national anthem

i have discovered the thai equivalent of the fabulous latin american hand-held snack, the empanada. I don't know what they're called here, so I've dubbed them thempanadas. these ones I tried in Ayutthaya had two different fillings: one, a sweet crumbly paste made perhaps of some sort of sweetened mashed beans (?), potatoes (?), loads of sugar and some egg yolk, i would guess. the other was filled with ground chicken seasoned with sweet and savory middle eastern/north african spices. The dough is thin, chewy and a bit crunchy around the edges. The whole thing is deep fried - no surprise there - and costs about 15 US cents.

sweet, crunchy, dense Thempanada
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fried quail eggs and the BBC Chronicles of Narnia

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These bite-sized eggs are my favorite streetside snack lately. they're quail eggs fried up in the sort of ableskiver pans they use to cook a number of different foods here. The guy generously oils the little cast iron hemispheres and cracks a quail egg into each one. A couple minutes of cooking and he pops them out with a spoon and drops them onto a bed of shredded cabbage in a styrofoam bowl. When you place an order, he sets a couple of fresh, hot eggs on top and spritzes the whole thing with a spray bottle (like the ones we use at home to punish karl) of soy sauce. The result is a rich, salty, protein-rich snack, all for about 30 US cents.

quail egg vendor
(squid-on-a-stick vendor in the background)

quail eggs by the river

On an un-food related note: I spent Sunday in my neighborhood doing laundry at home, swimming at the school pool with a group of (strangely un-supervised) second graders and buying groceries at the market. In the evening I nestled down in my sweltering bedroom and watched what is, perhaps, my number one favorite childhood movie (well, series of movies) ...

The BBC's 1988 production of The Chronicles of Narnia!

I have to watch it in hideously low resolution 9-minute segments on youtube, but it's entirely worth it.
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it's no Oregon blackberry cobbler...

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...but here's a different birthday treat for my lovely sibling today:

spongy hot dog on a stick, wrapped in a sweet moist waffle!
(i remember how much you loved these)

HAPPY 19th BIRTHDAY SEESTA!

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fried bananas and how on earth do they stay thin?

sdf
An aspect of eating in Thailand that surprised me when i arrived was the profusion of fried (especially deep-fried) foods here. that, and the constant appearance of hot dogs on the culinary stage. At school most of the snacks the kids buy from the cafeteria have, at some point in their preparation, been bathed in a vat of scalding oil and they're usually drenched in some sort of thick, sweet sauce. Walk for five minutes down a street in Bangkok at lunchtime - or breakfast time for that matter - and I would bet you'll see at least that many vendors selling some kind of fried comestibles. and yet, roam the city for a week and you'll be hard pressed to find even a single obese Thai person. There's the occasional chubby adolescent girl, squat older woman or potbellied man but nothing on the order of the massive weight problem we've got back in the states.

From the vendors I passed on my walk home just this afternoon I saw:

deep-fried bananas, deep-fried chicken, deep-fried fish cakes (served with deep-fried basil leaves), deep-fried dough-wrapped quail eggs, spongy deep-fried squid cakes soaked in sweet chili sauce, deep-fried battered slices of white sandwich bread wrapped around banana and strawberry slices (I find this one particularly intriguing), deep-fried chunks of chicken skin,
AND
hot dogs prepared in about 10 different ways [none of which involve a bun, ketchup or mustard]... some wrapped in white bread and deep-fried, others wrapped in a sweet waffle and skewered on a bamboo stick, most of them (in colors ranging from pale pink to vibrant orange) just chopped up and served in a plastic bag, covered in sauce.

you can't help but wonder.. how do they stay so thin? I'll report if i get any leads.


on the morning of Amelia's first day in Bangkok, after enjoying our rice/coconut balls, we ventured down a tiny alleyway bordered on one side by a chocolate milk canal bustling with long tail boats, row boats, canoes. We passed about 5 vendors, all right next to each other, selling som tam (the famous spicy green papaya salad) - the women pounding away with their giant wooden pestles making that distinctive pok pok pok sound as they worked. Farther down the street was a woman whose dinted metal cart was devoted exclusively to deep-fried coconutty battered slabs of banana. We hadn't stopped to look for more than two seconds when she handed us each a slice to try. Burning hot, crisp on the outside, smooth and sweet on the inside and delicious as always, we bought about half a kilo for 10 baht.

fried bananas

packaged in what looks to be paper recycled from some kid's math homework
kjh

ก๋วยเตี๋ยวน้ำ: kuaytiaw naam

sdf
One of my favorite foods here is the mild Chinese-style noodle soup called kuaytiaw naam. Kuaytiaw refers to those white rice noodles we're all familiar with in the American favorite, phad thai. At the soup stands you have the option of two or three different noodle widths: sen mee - very thin vermicelli size not always available; sen lek - a bit thicker, the classic phad thai size (about 5mm wide); and sen yai - big 'ol slabs of noodle (about 2.5 cm wide) classically used in dishes like pad see ew. I usually opt for sen lek but I branched out today and ordered mee. Naam translates as "water" or "liquid" as far as I can tell, so saying naam just means that you want the noodles in soup form, not dry (like phat thai, for instance).

The portable noodle stands with bright yellow and red signage are ubiquitous here. it's hard to walk for more than 15 minutes in any direction and not run into one.. good news for me.

The dish, as it's served to you, is basically just a bowl of a mild, vaguely sweet, subtly flavored broth (chicken, I assume) with your noodles, green onions and/or fresh cilantro and small chunks of whichever meat(s) you choose. [Instead of meat I did once have some incredibly spongy cubes of fried tofu, which were delicious though I haven't run across them again, since.]

Something about this warm soup is incredibly appealing to me, even when sitting streetside on a concrete bench in the lunchtime sun. I think it's partly the simplicity and "cleanness" (not referring to hygiene) of the dish, partly the mysterious, subtle, savory flavor of the broth and partly the way you get to tailor the dish to your liking with the available condiment options (chili flakes, sugar, vinegar with fresh sliced chilies and fish sauce).




This particular bowl was served topped with ridiculously tender duck meat, chopped cilantro, a couple of crispy deepfried pieces of some sort of dough (?) and, of course, the omnipresent Thai fish balls. An excellent mid-morning snack to fuel my trip to the market for, yes, more food.

Amelia arrives tonight!
sdf

mango salad and a misunderstanding

kjlkj
I set aside Saturday morning to clean my house (yes, i do this sometimes) in preparation for amelia's arrival on Thursday. After about 30 minutes, I'd had enough and left to go for a swim at the school pool.

It was a ridiculously hot day and, dragging my feet down the scalding pavement, I was thinking how lovely it would be if some kind person would take pity and pull over to offer me a ride. Well lo and behold, just moments later a truck slowed, stopped beside me and the driver looked over and tapped his horn. the universal signal for "hop in, I'll give you a ride wherever you'd like to go!" right? this was my interpretation. so I jovially opened up the door and hopped up into the cab, grinning and bowing and thanking my new friend who, I was somewhat surprised to see, seemed a bit alarmed and confused. Ecstatic to be out of the heat and getting an air-conditioned ride, I told man (who was certainly acting strange, for someone who just volunteered to give me a free ride) where I was headed, he gave me another puzzled look and slowly pulled away from the curb.

It was only then that I noticed the bed of his truck. full of fruit and vegetables and hanging scales and price cards.

It quickly became obvious that this man had not, in fact, been offering a ride to the sodden girl on the curb. he was trying to sell me fruit. Unable to say "never mind" or "oops," let alone, "oh sorry, I thought you were offering me a ride because you stopped and honked and I was hot and wishing for a ride at that precise moment, but now I see you weren't so I'll get out right here, thank you," there wasn't much I could do, so I just sat next to this little man in his fruit truck, bumping down the road, smiling hugely at him when ever he glanced over perplexedly, until we got to the school. He let me out, I bowed and grinned some more, and he turned his truck around to continue with his day's work. In hindsight, I should have bought a big bag of fruit from him, but at that point I was so relieved to be getting out of this supremely uncomfortable situation, I all but ran down the street to the pool.

somewhat embarrassing but hey, free ride!


Well, on a foodier note, I've taken to eating a salad of slightly unripe mango, sliced, with shredded cabbage and red chilis and dressed with lime juice, fish sauce, sweet chili sauce. It's crunchy, cool (I normally put it in the freezer for a few minutes before eating), spicy, tart and slightly sweet (depending on the mango). Goes beautifully with a hot rice, curry or soup dish..

salad improvised from what was left in the fridge one day