Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
WARNING: If you are vegan, watching these videos will melt your eyeballs.
There couldn’t possibly be a western equivalent to this horrifying act of culinary cruelty, right?
Wrong:
Attributing this reaction to ionic exchange somehow doesn’t make it less difficult to watch (again and again).
This meal was so good, it cannot be described properly with words… Suffice to say, it knocked us all out with a quantity/quality double combo.
@ one of the numerous Korean BBQ joints near Sukhumvit Soi 12
The only thing worse than the Thai interpretation of American food is the American interpretation of Thai food — THAT SHIT IS NOT PAD THAI, YO! (but it is so fucking metal!)
In other news, Satan’s kitchen helper needs a goddamn spell checker, like chaotic badly.
April, May, and June are mango season here. Everybody who grows them at home brings them into the office or to their friends before the fruit gets too ripe. The coolest thing is that there are over a hundred different species grown and sold here in Thailand. I’ve probably tried about a third of them. To date, the best kind I’ve had are small ones that people grow in their backyards and sell at weekend fresh markets, known generically as mamuang noi (small mango). They have the perfect blend of sweet, tart, and wild flavors, and are at once slightly chewy yet soft.
And I thought Max’s coining of the term, “unko hot dog” was genius… This takes it to a whole new level.
I’m eating a plate of crab fried rice that looked unremarkable, but actually tastes quite amazing. This is a touristy dish that I pass on in Thailand because it’s usually got bits of shell in it, but it’s what they made for me today, and I’m glad they did – there’s huge chunks of crab meat hidden in the middle, and the egg was crispy with a runny yolk. Yum.
Meanwhile, there’s a guy who looks like jesuscristo floating in the huge hotel pool. If he turns it into wine, I’m calling off the afternoon lecture..
I am very busy just now, as you might tell from my lack of activity here. I will free up again in a week or so. In the meantime, I present you with taro:
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.
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Max just told his mother to leave him alone and go be with daddy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
😉
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.
