Category: Oh, baby!

Catch!

When we play catch or practice hitting balls around the vacant lots and parks around here, people stop to watch. Hmm… I’ve never seen anyone else playing baseball in Thailand, either! I’m not a big baseball fan or anything, but it’s great for kids’ hand-eye coordination.

I found the equipment for sale at a secondhand Japanese goods store in town. This was a very popular business until very recently – you could buy containers of household stuff from Japan at various Thai shipping ports for around 70,000 baht and up. A lot of people started used Japanese good shops with stuff from a single container. You couldn’t see what was in the container before you bought it, so there would be some new stores opening with tons of old clothes, others loaded with baby strollers and rice cookers (the wrong voltage for TH), and many with just worthless crap. The best containers were probably the ones loaded with wooden furniture and bicycles. Many of the products were packed in similar moving company boxes, which led to speculation as to where this stuff was coming from.

Now that I’ve Googled a bit, UPDATE: We export used clothing from Japan to Thailand

Day of Grub

It all started out with French toast and banana milkshakes for breakfast, and continued into lunch at our friend’s nearby restaurant where the kids had noodles and fried rice, and we had various curries and braised meats.

We made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with walnuts in the late afternoon, then I went to my Turkish pal’s house to get continued instruction on various salads, sauces, and kebab. I took a big bag of food home and the kids chowed down. Tomorrow is school for them, so the sad silence before bed has begun.

 

Bonus Kebab Assembly Vids:

Max and Mina’s Fish and Chips

Uncle Andreas got us a bottle of malt vinegar, so we decided to make beer batter and fry up some fish. Unfortunately, the local Makro didn’t have much of a fish selection, so we settled on (ahem!) Issan cod.

Max and Mina did most of the prep, and I was on fry duty.

Today’s cooking vocabulary included: Deboning, scaling, pin bones, fins, gills, gutting, ounces, even spoonful, heaping spoonful, all purpose flour, sodium bicarbonate, sifting, dredging, frying oil, and fire extinguisher.


#englishforcooking

#cookingwithglenmo

#culinarylinguistics

Our Big Boy

There’s this girl from school that likes Max. He’s chatting online with her right now in the other room; I can hear their little voices as they talk about whatever kids talk about. They’re only 10 years old. It feels… strange. Very cute but kinda funny?

All I can think of is:

Dripping Umami Bomb

Mina brought a hamburger bun stuffed with a fried duck egg over to my desk and said, “try some.” I was just waking up, so I told her I needed a minute. In that minute, the sandwich disappeared and I jokingly asked Mina why she didn’t save me any.

“Cuz it was sooo gooood.”

I fried up one of the duck eggs Nam’s sister gave us from her egg factory (she makes salted duck eggs out on her resort in the country) and threw it in a toasted burger bun with a slice of processed cheddar… UMAMI. BOMB.

It was the best, messiest, umamiest egg sandwich, ever.