Category: Food

..random

Mina shook her head in serious disagreement 17 times in a row yesterday – I was asking about people she loves; apparently she just hates everyone, because by the time I got to the end I had run out of people she knows by name and had started naming animals.

—

Max just told his mother to leave him alone and go be with daddy.

—

I got an e-mail from a distant relative in Kyushu who runs a beauty salon that T, Adam, Inaba and I visited 12 (?) years ago when we went to visit my cousins Kana and Aya in Saga Prefecture (Saga was where my grandfather on my dad’s side grew up, and is the Northeast Thailand of Japan – the locals move out to work shitty jobs in the big city, and the only people moving in are either going back to work on their family’s farm, or to get away from people in general.) Anyway, when we visited the salon, they just happened to be shooting a commercial to be aired on a local TV station, so we got to be in it while getting haircuts and shouting the name of the store – “HEADS!” – at the camera.

So the owner of that shop is either a distant cousin or uncle (which makes him close enough to kill for under Sackett law), and he emailed me out of the blue yesterday. He’s recently into sansevieria plants (AKA mother in law’s tongue), which are not so popular in Japan, so he’s coming this June to check out some of the farms and collectors here in Thailand. Maybe we will hook up.

—

Max had to take an entrance exam for a nearby preschool yesterday (his current school, which he loves going to now, is closing at the end of March). They test out the little kids by giving them various little tasks and challenges like drawing, puzzles, logic games, motor skills testing, simple questions, etc. Max would not enter the room without mommy, but aced all of the tests. He apparently did some of them twice, by choice, because they gave him too much time to complete them. Sounds scarily familiar.

—

Nam thought up a brilliant substitute for tenkasu today: Rice Krispies!

This was sufficiently genius for me to acknowledge that I am truly lucky to have married her… For the ten thousandth time or so.

😉

A Different Way (to Fry Burgers)

This is the smashing method, which I first read about online somewhere. Supposedly, it’s the Shake Shack’s method of cooking beef patties, but I don’t know because I’ve only been blessed by In-N-Out (in fact, all of the people I’ve ever talked to who have had both say that In-N-Out is better). All I know is, any place that’ll make you a 100 patty cheeseburger AND sounds like half of a porn movie title kicks serious ass.

Anyhow, this method ensures you get crispy crunchy goodness throughout the burger as long as you smash it so the initial crust is distributed evenly across the top of the patty.

Please see the mostly unannotated and hopefully self-explanatory photo series/instructions below. As a sidenote, I am using a ground pork/beef mix along with diced carrots, onions, and shiitake mushrooms (super baby burgers) in the photos, so coloration may be different for you.

Shape into balls.
Fry until crispy and flip.
Smash and shape with sturdy spatula.
Fry some more.
Finish with a slice of cheese and onion/chicken stock.

Back in the ‘Kham

We are back in town, and all of the comforts and familiarity of home are just made so much better with one of the best bowls of noodles in town… So I bought take-out kway chap for the babies in between the last classes of the year, and this insolent cat drinking the water offering on the spirit house in front of the shop caught my eye.

Tomorrow, we have kin from the states coming, so it looks to be a special new years!

image

Shoyu chili garlic fish sauce wings

It’s made like how it sounds (plus braised in Japanese sake to finish). It tastes how it looks. I suppose you could call them water buffalo wings.

Did you know that shoyu (soy sauce) is the root word of “soy” in English?

And that perhaps the best of example of a loan word from the Thai language in English is “bong?”

Cooking and linguistics are both a delicious jumble of influences and flavors.

Friday finality

I think I’ve finally got this blog up and running the way it should be, so I feel great.

—

Woke up this morning, went to buy a traditional Isan breakfast of sticky rice and skewered BBQ pork, as well as some fried doughballs and a bag of rice porridge. Brought it all back home, got Max ready, and took him to school. Found a roadside vendor selling fresh durian and had him break down a small (~.75 kgs whole) one for Nam – she loves them (I merely tolerate them). Came home again to Mina babbling and scooting around madly on her baby walker. It’s been a perfect start for the day.

Snail curry

I just came back from lunch with a bag of (aquatic) snail curry that I accidentally ordered at a new restaurant located just behind our campus. It looked like an appetizing fish or chicken curry under the glass when, but when it was served I saw it was full of snails or similar freshwater shellfish.
Me hates parasites.
So I munched on the other things i’d ordered and brought back the snail curry in a bag. I gave it to a group of girls I’d taught before who were hanging out outside the teacher’s lounge. They seemed happy with it.
I forgot to take a photo, though. Oh, well – one snail curry looks like the next, I suppose.