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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more green things

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Lime green is (disturbingly) a popular color for foodstuffs here, especially sweets. In bangkok with amelia one day, I laid eyes on these shiny green blobs and couldn't resist making the purchase.

nope, it's not gak.
well actually I don't know that - maybe it is


ever-so-cute asian packaging

I'm still unsure what these things were, but they tasted ridiculously sweet and sort of pancakey. Their texture is my favorite part - chewy, soft, slightly sticky and squishy. As it was 8:30 in the morning when we bought them, Millie and I showed a rare ounce of self control and were able to save a few of the shocking green morsels for a snack later (at least 15 minutes) in the day.

holey, chewy green blob innards

We had some sort of strange advertisement day at school last Friday. I'm finally learning not to be surprised when I show up at class and discover that it's been canceled because the kids are all busy with some sort of activity. Friday was one of those days, though I was tipped off by the presence of two huge trucks backed into the school courtyard with no less than 30 crew members unloading equipment in preparation for what turned out to be a rock concert being held in the school's open air auditorium. This was perhaps the strangest even that I've seen take place at school this semester. The courtyard by lunchtime was scattered with vendors' booths advertising such entirely age-inappropriate products as high-end Honda motorcycles, cleaning solutions and monthly cell phone plans. The kids were excused from classes for a full day, i guess so that they could scamper around and poke at the displays at these sponsors' booths and then listen to the deafening concert, which it turns out was being filmed for a local TV station.

the courtyard filling with vendors/sponsors and children

imobile selling expensive cellphones to my 8 year old students

Getting an explanation from anyone about what this all was and, the more intriguing question, why this was going on, was impossible.. so i just wandered around the school grounds, playing with the kiddos, pretending like I was perfectly informed and comfortable with whatever was going on. As usual, there were card tables scattered sporadically around the ground floor. At them, some of the older students were selling mostly unidentifiable foods, so I bought this green wormy-looking dessert:

I think the green worms are made of glutinous rice flour. they're floating in a bath of sweetened coconut milk and crushed ice. a refreshing - if not slightly disconcerting - dessert in the heat.


unclear on exactly what I was eating, I finished the bowl.
(the lovely green and white striped polo i'm rockin is our Friday uniform)


the concert


one of my grade 5 students hamming it up at the concert
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sweet egg custard.. with onions

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Today was a good day. I got up early to start my laundry (a full day affair), and finally clean the house for the first time in too long. A welcome bright, sunny day after a week of clouds, I enjoyed it sitting in my tiny outdoor laundry area, talking to family on the phone and burning my pasty caucasian flesh.

In the afternoon I visited the market and bought way, way too much food. I almost invariably get carried away at the market, intoxicated by the sight and smell of so much food.. and purchase far more than one human could consume in a fortnight, let alone the 2 or 3 days that the food will actually keep. Today I unwittingly bought a treat that I first tried during millie's visit here. I do not enjoy this dessert. It's called kahnom maw gaeng and it's a custard made of eggs, coconut cream, palm sugar (this much is great), and topped with fried, thinly sliced onions (this is off-putting). If it weren't for the onion, I'd like the stuff just fine but with the onion this is just one thing I never want to consume again. The sharp, acidic onion-y flavor and oily texture just seems like a poor match for the sweet, delicate egg custard. there was a line for the stuff every time i walked by the stand, though, so maybe i need to give it another try.

kahnom maw gaeng by the river
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heat and odd cold things

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It feels like it's been getting hotter here lately, or maybe it's more humid. In any case I'm getting just slightly tired of being constantly drenched in sweat. I sweat in places I previously thought didn't have sweat glands. my shins sweat. my knees sweat. the backs of my hands and the tops of my feet sweat.

I wake up in the morning, warm and comfortable and relatively dry with the fan on Hi, 6 inches from the bed, blowing in my face, but by the time I make it downstairs to put the water on for coffee my tshirt is already sticking to my back and my hairline is getting damp. My morning routine continues with ten minutes of killing the resident ants swarming around last night's milk glass, listening to the news, making a butter and vegemite sandwich and by this point I'm drenched. and I stay that way until nighttime when I take a cold shower and plant myself in front of the fan again.

The ambient heat and moistness doesn't really bother me, but now and then I tire of wearing sodden clothes. So I've discovered the miracle of baby powder - something which everyone carries with them here and with which they liberally dust themselves constantly. It's an ingenious idea despite the way it (combined with blackboard chalk dust) turns my black skirts and pants a lovely mottled grayish color by lunchtime every day.

Aside from baby powder, they combat the heat with cold sweet things to eat...

At temples and other "ancient" places, they often advertise "ancient" foodstuffs like this ANCIENT ICE CREAM, which I find hilarious.

Fresh coconut ice cream on a stick
The brightly colored worms peeking out are pieces of dyed coconut

Pineapple slushy/smoothie
topped, strangely, with chocolate sprinkles and grape jelly balls

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coconut balls and i'm back

sdf
After a brief hiatus during which I enjoyed the company of amelia, my little sister, temporary travel partner and most importantly, eating companion, it's back to life as usual here.

During millie's visit here I took advantage of the opportunity to use her little cannon PowerShot sd750, neglecting my ancient battered Nikon for the entirety of her trip. It was great fun working with a camera that was manufactured more recently than george W's first administration and which reliably turned on (!) whenever I pushed the power button.

The downside to my using millie's camera, however, is that the memory card she had been using was unreadable on my laptop for some reason. So, after an utterly failed attempt at sending the pictures over skype, deciding that attaching 100s of photos to emails was a waste of time, and quickly reaching capacity on millie's flikr account, we decided that our best option would be for her to burn them onto cds and ship them back over.

So I'll postpone the bulk of my posts about millie's visit until I get my hands on those photos. But for now, I do have a couple of photos from our first day of eating in Bangkok...

After a late night fueled by mangoes and sticky rice, singha and noodles, millie and I were up early... dormitory rooms in backpacker hostels aren't popular for the tranquil atmosphere they offer and our Bangkok accommodation was no exception. We rode the BTS - Bangkok's monorail portion of its public transit system - a few stops down, into the heart of the city. Just one long stride from the crowded, filthy stairway leading up to the Siam BTS station, was a woman selling all manner of thai sweets from a tiny, dented metal cart. After a few seconds watching us marvel over her wares, the woman started to rummage in her apron pocket. She pulled out two bamboo skewers, stabbed them - one in each fist - indiscriminately into her piles of sweets and presented the impaled goodies to us as samples. I got a strange, starchy banana slice which had a texture like maybe a boiled plantain, left out on the counter for a couple of days - not bad, really. Millie got what I think was simply a ball of sweet sticky rice with coconut. I noticed that she was selling the squishy coconut balls which I've become so fond of, and which I describe here, so after exclaimations of "arroi! arroi mahk kaa! kahp khun kaa!" we bought ourselves a bag 'o balls and wandered off to a nearby bus station to take photos of our sweets...

coconut balls in white and purple - the two typical glutinous rice colors

outside. bite. inside.

three sweet, chewy, nutty, sticky nuggets each and all before 9am. much more eating to come...
fin

noodle boy speaks and an after school snack

sd
The district-wide speech competition was held today at a nearby rival school, and who was chosen from my classes to compete? none other than noodle boy, himself. The two minute speech about his family was three minutes short (a five minute requirement for this age and ability is ridiculous) and included such inspired sentences as, "My mother he my advertise in New York and tom yam soup clean." and "My dog will have fifteen when I..... um.. breakfast is always good." Even though their public speaking abilities are somewhat *ahem* lacking, and they can't speak English at the best of times, let alone when they're standing in front of over 100 audience members, it was great fun watching our kids compete today. Noodle boy even earned second place in his division and without a single mention of noodles!

Rewarding myself for a hard day's work sitting in a school auditorium, I bought a smoothie, of sorts, from a neighborhood woman on my walk home this afternoon. It seems to be made of blended ice, sweetened condensed milk, coconut water and some sort of simple syrup. Cool, creamy, coconutty and refreshing in the 95+ degree heat.

typical baffling Asian English-language labeling
"Hat Family!"

and when I got home, I even had some left to enjoy a couple of slammers with a package of time tams in my freezer. if you're unfamiliar with the joys of the tim tam slammer, this little girl can show you how it's done.

a delicious union:
cold, sweet coconut drink and a tim tam.
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