Category: Food

Would you like that order with or without endocrine disruptors?

The saddest cooking news I’ve heard in a long time: Black plastic products including spatulas are likely being made from recycled electronic waste like computers and televisions, many of which are treated with flame retardants and other chemicals. Flame retardants can dislodge from polymers easily and make their way into the surrounding environment. They are endocrine disruptors, which interfere with the body’s hormonal system and may be associated with thyroid disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Full link to the Atlantic story: Throw Out Your Black Plastic Spatula

These are my mainstay utensils for certain things I cook and I surely have a dozen in my kitchen including spoons, ladles, slotted and unslotted spatulas, etc., because sometimes silicon is too flexible and wood/steel are too hard. I do have blue plastic spatulas, but they are on the large side… Then even if I buy all the right size blue plastic ones to replace the black ones, we’ll find out that they’re made of recycled nuclear Smurf poop or something…

Scenes from a Hoi Tod Shop

Hoi Tod is a Thai dish made by frying mussels (or sometimes, other shellfish, squid, or shrimp) in an eggy batter and wrapping up beansprouts and garlic chives with it. Those in the know usually prefer this dish to Pad Thai. It’s often served as street food, especially at night markets, but there are also small shops that specialize in it.

This particular joint was crowded when we visited at lunchtime on a weekday in a busy Bangkok district, but I thought it was pretty average — I thought it was too stuffed with undercooked sprouts, but that might just be due to my preferences. I’m used to a greasier dish with a more generously seasoned finishing umami punch in the gut. I thought this hi-so version was a bit bland. Also, eating this in a restaurant instead of at a fold-up table on the street means it costs double… However, in the third pic, you can see that they served a whole extra plate of crispy bits on the side, so that almost made up for it.

Sushiro End Stack

I remember using QR codes for product tracking (with Keyence printers and scanners) as a salaryman around Y2K at an electronics factory on monster island. The only other place I’d ever seen them used was at kaiten (conveyor) sushi, on the bottom rim of the plastic plates. The codes would be scanned as they went by on the conveyor so old plates of sushi could be pulled – this was more than 20 years ago! Things certainly come full circle (although the new system seems to be RFID-based):

There was a boom in QR code usage here in Thailand from around ten years ago specifically for adding friends in the LINE app, and then again a few years ago for cashless payments tied into the evolving PromptPay system.

Makizushi Class

For the past year, Nam and I have been arranging sushi roll-making events for university students and schoolchildren. This video is a typical first attempt of trying to stuff too much into a roll. I would say 75% of people end up making this mistake the first time. But hey, if you don’t make mistakes, you never learn, right? It’s been a lot of fun just trying to do our jobs well.

Gogi Seki

Max’s auntie took us to a Korean BBQ buffet near her office in Sukhumvit and it’s basically the best yakiniku I’ve had in Thailand. For 500 baht ($15 US), you get the higher tier plan with beef and seafood, and the waitress comes to grill everything for you. This is the second time we’ve been there, and we’ll probably try to make it there whenever we’re on an extended Bangkok trip.

Raw Liver at ลาบ ลับ ลับ ปรีดี 43

Either Taro or my cousin knew about an awesome Japanese street restaurant in Bangkok that serves raw beef liver – a dish once very popular in Japan that is now very hard to get (where it is available, single portions are apparently given out to customers in a sealed plastic container with origin/tracking information). Everything was excellent, but the liver, served traditionally with rock salt and sesame oil, was outstanding. Taro and I ate too much.

The sashimi was also pretty good:

It was very hot that night, but we had a blast: