Food

I have been eating lots of Thai food, some crazy food, street food, a ton of fruit, and bits of phalang food. I turn to the phalang food to get me through a wee stretch of homesickness or because I need to take a break from the Thai food. I’ve been with a falafel, an omelet, a turkey sandwich, a couple bagels, a fried chicken sandwich and one night I went Greek. Aside from that I’ve been engaged in high impact culinary cultural absorption. Highlights include Tom Yam, a spicy seafood soup and Khao Soi, a northern Thailand brown curry dish based on rice soup.

Here are some basic facts about eating in Thailand. The food is spicy. That’s a monumental understatement. That’s like saying oxygen availability is an important factor for mammalian survival. I once ate something so spicy that I chewed on a dried red chili pepper to cool down my mouth. I once ate something so spicy that the moment it touched my tongue I launched into a violent fit of hiccups that persisted for 15 minutes; I’m talking full body convulsions. It is my hope that the spice based perception of heat has the same germ killing affect of actual heat. Because I’ve eaten some nasty stuff here, handled by people who are not aware of the germ theory of disease, but it always comes with chili. Also, there is no Thai breakfast. They eat the same food in the morning that they’d eat for dinner. You wake up and think Wheaties and they’re thinking mushroom and fish head soup with galangal over rice. There’s a lame joke that goes like this: Thai people eat one meal a day; it starts in the morning and continues until bed time. I don’t understand how it works. Maybe they have a super high metabolism. I tried it their way for a couple of weeks and I’m wearing 5 extra kilos as a result. There is pork in everything. If you order shrimp Pad Thai, you will be eating shrimp Pad Thai with pork. And in Thailand every part of the chicken is food. Last week I saw half a chicken head floating in my soup. The skin, the fat, the ligaments, the marrow, all are fair game.

There are three kinds of Thai food here. First, there is the stuff that is visually similar to what you'd find in a Thai restaurant in New York City, think Pad Thai, Pad See Iu, Satay, curries, and whole fried fish on a bed of greens. At first I was a little disappointed to come across this kind of Thai food but then I began to taste the difference and soon I came to appreciate its authenticity here. It’s like seeing a picture of a Buddhist temple versus standing in front of one and looking up at it sparkling in the sunlight. In the states the food is adjusted for the western palate, which is a very different beast from the Asian palate. There are many ways they make that stuff special here. For instance, the most popular Satay here is squid. And here, the whole fried fish is eaten, everything but the bones, those are for the dogs. I like the fins; they are like crunchy fish chips. I once watched a 6 year old girl go around a dining hall collecting the eyeballs from all the fish on all the tables. She would bat her lashes and an adult at the table would dig out the eye with the handle of a spoon and drop it onto her plate of rice. She must have eaten 20 eyeballs that night.

Thai food type number two is the kind that depends on unique local ingredients that I’ve never seen in the states. I have particularly enjoyed this area of culinary exploration. I’m eating new spices and leaves and roots, flowers and fruits, and unexpected taste combinations. Spicy and sweet is the Thai way. I am into the chili fish paste and I love this one type of green leaf that comes with pulpy stalks and little yellow flowers. It gets sautéed in garlic and fish sauce with soft peanuts. Oh yeah, I love the peanuts here. They are way better than boring American ones. They are purple and soft and hard to describe. Mostly they get boiled and there are 3 or 4 in each shell. If the American peanut is cheddar, these are brie. I think. I am eating so many new foods here. I like eating tamarind. It is sweet and a little like a prune and a date. It looks like a bloated green bean except it’s tan. You crack the shell and pull out the chain of brown goo. Then you pop each ball off the root-like fiber that connects them and put it in your face. Enjoy. It goes well with whiskey. Just remember to spit out the hard shiny black seed shaped like a dodecahedron. And they have the smoothest silky kind of yellow tofu here; it’s a joy in soup.

Thai food type number three is food that we would consider nasty. This begins with fish balls. Thai people love fish balls and they are everywhere. Picture replacing all the pretzel carts in New York with fish ball carts. They remind me a lot of gefilte fish. They are often fried, which leads me to want to try fried gefilte fish. Other nasty food includes sour fermented pork blood sausage, grasshoppers, spiders, larvae, sautéed cow skin attached to an inch of fat, congealed blood, and all kinds of dried seafood. I have tried neither the sausage nor the grasshopper. I prefer the dried seafood that is salty, not sweet, and I try to avoid the bits with the dead bugs in them.

The Thai barbecue I attended was a spectacle. Oddly enough the beef was raw: muscle, stomach, intestine, and liver. Only when we ran out of 6 inch shrimp did people start to put the beef on the grill. There was also 1 foot squid, kick-ass chicken soaked in Thai BBQ sauce, clams, freshwater crabs, fish and pork pork pork.

My favorite street food is Pad Thai, noodle soup, spicy green papaya or mango salad, crepes, fried bananas, sweet French fries fried in coconut oil, and the fruit. Walk down the street and you can get corn or strawberries in a cup, with or without, salt, sugar, butter or coconut milk. For $0.30 you can pick up a bag of pineapple, watermelon (red or yellow) or papaya and a pointy bamboo stick to use as a utensil.

I have done a great deal of fruit exploration here and I’m hoping to track down an illustrated guide book to Thai fruits when I get back to the states. I love jackfruit, longan, phalang, passion fruit and a bunch more I can’t name. When I first saw jackfruit growing I couldn’t believe it. I looked up into the tree and hanging off the branches were giant bumpy oval light green cocoons the size of watermelons. Phalang is a crisp white guava. When I buy them the vendor always jokes about the phalang buying phalang. Passion fruit is what the villagers in the hills always give me when they are eating pork for lunch. I like Thai bananas and oranges. The ‘naners are smaller and sweeter and the oranges are green on the outside with a thin easy to peel skin. When I’m in the hills people often dig something from the ground or pick something from a tree and give it to me. And I dutifully put it in my mouth and try to eat it. There are the blueberries with the seed and the things I call teeth. Each one looks like a giant tooth, 3 inches long, and off white. You pinch the tooth root and it splits. Inside there are 3 air sacks filled with seeds. The seeds are black and covered in a white moist fibrous pouch. The pouch is sweet and the seed is kinda smoky sour. They are great. I also like the sour grapes with a pit that come from what I call the fern tree.

The desserts here are interesting, in a good way. I’m a big taro fan. It is so versatile and my mouth loves that bouncy pasty texture. They have lots of little jelly things that jiggle and come wrapped in banana leaf. Oh, and sticky rice. Take a glob, put a nut and a slice of fruit in it, dip it in coconut milk, grill it, and call me; I’ll come right on over. I’m over the sweet egg things and their cookies and cakes make me laugh. They are too bland for phalang and too sweet for Thais.

In the hills we eat the same 6 dishes. Rice, fish head soup, canned mackerel in tomato sauce with MSG, fried egg, dried and then roasted fish, and sautéed greens. A good day is when pumpkin makes an appearance. A treat at lunch is roast cabbage. That’s about it. If you don’t count litre after litre of rice whiskey that they start into around 9am and don’t stop until bedtime at 10:30pm. The first trip I made to the hill I was curious about the food. On my second trip I was scared by it. Then I learned how it was cooked. Soon it became old hat for me. Now I sometimes find myself hungry for it. I like how it is served on one big plate the size of a table. The matriarch of the hut flops 6 or 7 piles of rice around the edges and the dishes are put in the center in bowls. Everyone gets a spoon and no one has to wait for anyone else to start. It builds a sense of family and community without any courtesy or formality.

Can you believe I’ve had no GI issues? Really, I’ve been as regular as the sun (knock on wood). And wanna hear what I’ve been doing for drinking water? I’ve been boiling the tap water in my room in my electric kettle and pouring the water in my Nalgenes. Thrifty Gabe. Sometimes I have a moment right as I go to put something in my mouth. I think, I’m about to eat Hepatitis A, this could be a bad idea. But I do it anyway. I figure mind over matter, hunger and curiosity over infectious diseases.