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Eating in Thailand
In the US, the Super Bowl is a national event. In Thailand, they have no sporting event that I am aware of that compares to our Super Bowl. However, eating is the Super Bowl of Super Bowls for Thais. The neat thing is that our Super Bowl happens once a year. The Thai Super Bowl occurs at least three times a day and everyone is allowed to participate. In Thailand, eating is a national event and is an integral part of the Thai culture. Here we eat and run. There they eat and socialize. Eating is a social and cultural event in Thailand. It is said that, as soon as Thais finish breakfast, they start to discuss what they are going to have for lunch. When lunch is over, they start talking about dinner. In Thailand, it is so easy to fall into this practice because there is such a variety of foods and you really want to try them all. I remember that many restaurants did not have a menu per se. The menu was more like a 1-inch book that listed all the dishes you could order. Every shopping mall and shopping plaza has a food court. We were at one in Bangkok and I was amazed at all the stalls selling Thai snack foods and they all looked so wonderful. I made the comment that I would love to come when the mall opened and start eating something from each stall. You could keep eating (grazing) until closing time without ever eating the same thing twice. I ate so many different foods in Thailand and half the time I didn't know what I was eating. The only thing that I would not eat was the red ant egg soup. It is very expensive and considered a real delicacy that is only available when the ants lay the eggs. Thais incorporate everything that is edible into their diet. Lucia told me that there is a common plant (like a weed) that the poor Thais would cook and server with nam pla (fish sauce) when they had nothing else to eat.
An ABF (American Breakfast) was included in the price of the room at most of the hotels we stayed at. Normally, all I have for breakfast is a piece of string cheese but I made an exception while we were in Thailand. Having breakfast every morning is a Thai tradition, so we always had our free breakfast. It was generally an American style buffet but they had some Thai food too. On the American food side, the bacon was delicious. It was meaty and had a smoky flavor and was completely unlike the slabs of lard they sell here in the US. I heard that the eggs were really fresh in Thailand but it was hard to tell because the fried eggs were cooked and then sat in a warming tray. I will never forget the fried eggs that were heart shaped at the Ocean Garden View hotel in Krabi. Lucia loved it when I gave her the heart shaped eggs for breakfast.
Many Thais eat porridge for breakfast. Thai porridge is rice soup that consists of rice in chicken broth with a little light soy sauce or nam pla in it. They put a very small amount of shrimp, pork, or chicken in it. I liked the pork best. You put the porridge in a bowl and then put chopped cilantro, Thai ground pepper, and fried garlic on top. The fried garlic really adds a lot of flavor to the porridge. You can put other condiments on the porridge but these are the main ones. Lucia likes to have a fresh fried egg on her porridge. At first, the porridge did not strike me as being especially appetizing for breakfast. But once I tried it, I was sold on it. A bowl of porridge fills you stomach but it is light so it leaves you feeling very comfortable and satisfied. Chai, our tour guide in Chiang Mai, said that Thais thing of foods being either cool foods or warm foods. It has nothing to do with how hot or cold it is. It has more to do with how your body feels after eating the food. I don’t know whether porridge is considered a warm or cool food, but we Americans would definitely call it a ‘comfort food’. Lucia told me that she always stopped by a shop to have some porridge before she went to schools. Thais eat out a lot and there are food stands all over that sell things like porridge for breakfast or in the wee hours of the morning if you are out drinking. I liked the porridge so much that it was the first Thai dish I cooked after we got back. We were eating porridge every morning for nearly a week.
I had told Lucia that I tried to cook Thai food about 10 years ago. I have 2 Thai cookbooks and another that has recipes from all the Asian countries. I tried it for a while but gave up because I could get much better Thai food in the Thai restaurants. But since I met Lucia, I started to realize there was also a lot of mouthwatering Thai food that is usually not served in the Thai restaurants. Chicken with basil is a good example. It is very easy to make and makes a really wonderful lunch.
After we got back, I checked out the Thai cookbooks listed on Amazon. There was something like 62 cookbooks listed there. Among the 62, there were around 6 or 7 that were devoted to vegetarian Thai food. I read the reviews and ordered three Thai cookbooks. One of them is titled "It Rains Fishes". It is a real cook book even though it doesn't have a lot of recipes. I love reading this book because it talks about the Thai culture as it relates to food. The author talks about importance of rice in Thailand. She pointed out that rice is always the main dish and everything else is an accompaniment to the rice. While we were in Thailand, I noticed that when we ordered food, they served us each with a plate having a big mound of rice on it. The mound filled most of the plate. Rarely did the restaurants give up rice in a big rice container like they do in Chinese restaurants. After the rice is served, they start bringing out the dishes. You then serve a small portion of the dish on the rice and eat it. Then you move on to the next dish. If in a large group, they keep bringing out dishes and you end up nibbling on a huge variety of food until you are full. The cookbook emphasizes the importance of tasting the food (and especially the curries you make) to get the balance of flavors right. I even learned that I didn't mix the green curry paste with the coconut milk correctly when I made the fish balls with green curry. She said that you fry the curry along with the thick part of the coconut milk to bring out the flavor of the curry and then you add the thin part of the coconut milk. There is a lot of culture and ritual in cooking and eating Thai food. For example, throwing rice away is a real no-no. In the rural areas of Thailand, they wai the empty place after they finish eating to thank the Rice Goddess. So while the cookbook is shy on recipes it is a real cookbook because it tells you the proper way to cook Thai food from recipes from any of the other cookbooks. Lucia has been reading it and I think she is learning things about Thai cooking too even if she is Thai.
The Thai deserts are also wonderful and, again, there is an incredible variety. The most memorable desert was something that I had at a restaurant in a mall in Bangkok. It was something made of wheat gluten in sweetened coconut milk. The gluten was shaped into fat, phosphorescent green, pink, yellow, and white ‘worms’. They looked so colorful and it tasted so yummy. I have been looking for something like it here in the US so Kimberly can try it. I know she will really enjoy eating such a colorful desert. The other thing that I remember eating was sweet custard that was served on a dish of sticky rice. It was so yummy. I ate it while floating on a boat in the floating market south of Bangkok. That was a wonderful experience because you rented a boat and a driver who paddled you along the canals. The canals were full of other boats with people (women mostly) selling wares and food. Along the sides of the canal there were vendors selling wares (mostly souvenirs) to the farangs. If you looked interested in something, the boat driver would paddle you over to the vendor where you could get a closer look and negotiate a price if you liked the item. While you were shopping, you could buy food and drinks from the food vendors paddling up and down the canals. I drank coconut milk from a fresh coconut and had the sticky rice with the custard on it. The sticky rice was wonderful. The wares are basically souvenirs for us flatland touristers, but I did get Kimberly a string puppet of a dancer in an authentic Thai costume, mask, and one of those pointy gold hats. She really liked it. Despite the tourist-trap aspects of the floating market, it is an experience that should not be missed if you are ever in Bangkok.
The fruits were wonderful in Thailand. When we got to Chiang Mai, they were having a strawberry festival and there were many things that were made with strawberries. They make a lot of drinks by putting the fruit in a blender with (maybe) a little sugar and serving it in a parfait glass with lots of crushed ice. I had one made with strawberries and it was magnificent. I also loved the pineapple that they have in Thailand. The Thai pineapples are smaller than the ones you get in the US and are much sweeter. Also, the fibrous core that runs down the middle of the pineapple is smaller or non-existent in the Thai pineapples. Eating fresh Thai pineapple or having it in a drink was so delicious and refreshing. Thai pineapples make Dole pineapples taste like Sunkist lemons. We also had some other interesting and very good fruits. We went to Lamphon (which is south of Chiang Mai) to see some property that Lucia owns. On the way back we stopped by a roadside stand and purchased two bunches of some brownish fruits about the size of kumquats that were on the ends of some brownish twigs. It sort of looked like a bouquet of dried flowers. You peel off the brownish skin and there is a translucent white fruit that takes like lychees but is sweeter. When we went to ???? National Park, Chai, our tour guide bought a bag of small green fruits that were halfway between the size of a large grape and a small plum. You pop them into your mouth, skin and all, and they were delicious.
I expected that the food I ate in Thailand would be much hotter than what I ate. Part of this was because Lucia kept telling them to make the food for the ‘farang’ (me) which meant to tone down the spiciness. In actuality, she did it more for herself because she cannot tolerate really hot and spicy food. Also, I think that the food in northern Thailand is not as hot as the stuff served in the south because the northern Thailand food has a Burmese influence. I did not get to experience really hot food until we got to Bangkok and we ate with Lucia’s family and school mates from Chiang Mai University. After we got to Bangkok, people asked if I found the food to be too hot. I had to be honest and tell them that I actually had much hotter Thai food (along with Indian food) in LA. The hottest food I ever experience was a long time ago when I ordered some ribs with hot sauce in a black rib joint. I had their ribs with the mild sauce but I guess when I ordered the ribs with the hot sauce they decided to teach this honky a real lesson. When we had dinner with her school mates, they had a wonderful fish dish that was ultra-hot. I only got enough for about 4 bites and by the time I got done, it was all gone. Fortunately, they ordered another serving and again I was able to get a few more bites. It seemed to set the tone for eating with a large group of people. They kept bringing out new dishes so you had a bit of this and a bit of that until you were full. A few of the dishes were extremely hot but the rest were not. Eating the less spicy dishes helped douse the fire caused by the ultra-hot ones. Besides, it is a standard practice to put a small dish of nam pla plik (fish sauce with sliced chili peppers) on the table plus other sauces so you could jazz things up if the food was too tame. Some of the other sauces were meant for specific dishes and I had to rely on someone to tell me what sauce went with what dish.
The only sad part after eating so much wonderful Thai food is coming back realizing you can’t find about ¾ of the foods that we ate back here in the US. Besides, most of the time I had no clue what I was eating – it just tasted so good. But it all provides a lot of motivation to go back.