Not her first, but pretty good. Much better than anything I ever did in Paint.
Mina’s MS Paint Creation
Category: Photos
What’s for lunch: Green Curry with Wings and Portobellos
Although I have made green curry with all kinds of meat, chicken is the best because of its wonderful grease. And among the cuts of chicken, we all prefer middle wings with an occasional wing drum thrown in for variety.
Today I sliced in a couple small portobello mushrooms, and along with the filtered fish sauce and chicken grease, they made the curry into an aromatic, coconut-infused umami bomb. With local round eggplant and julienned kachai (lesser ginger).
As far as eating goes, I actually prefer pulling chicken off the bones and mounding it on top of the rice and curry, but the kids just devour it off the bone.
Only in Issan
Kubota convertible with sunshade driving around town every day with no plates and hazards flashing.
As a side note, I know this gent and he’s more of a classic than all of the twenty-odd cars in his collection… He collects all of the cars that he wanted in his youth, but couldn’t afford. Never knew he wanted a rice tractor, tho.
Fixing my trusty ASUS laptop
…and installing an SSD at the same time. This particular laptop has served me for seven years already and I would normally not bother, but SSDs are cheap and it will make a good Minecraft rig for the kids. I already installed Linux and Windows 10. God bless KMS Pico.
The problem, as it turned out, was a small piece of ABS from a case peg that had broken off and settled inside the cooling fan. Made the whole rig sound like it was going to explode.
Top this.
It’s very rare to find someone who’s the master of so many things.
Cökelek salad
At our friend Turgay’s house having this wonderful Turkish salad with tomato, onion, parsley, mint and Cökelek cheese from Hatai, Turkey. This regional cheese is smoked, fermented, and has an otherworldly funk about it. Absolutely delicious.
Yoshida Kitchen Creation: Issan Sushi
Sticky rice topped with crispy pork rind and corn somtam. Unbelievably delicious dipped in somtam juice.
Sunday dinner
Whole smoked chicken.
Mina’s Picnic
Out of the blue, Mina told us that she and her best friend, on the last day of school (yesterday), had promised to have a picnic together today.
It was quite amusing to watch her put together a bag of snacks and water, and she even washed a plastic bowl and dried it carefully with a paper towel. But when it came to asking what time they were supposed to meet, she gave me a blank stare…
“She’ll just know, daddy, we’re best friends!”
Knowing which way this was heading, I asked if we all could go together. Mina agreed and we were soon hitting the McD’s drive thru and heading off to the park near her school for the picnic. Mina was of course devastated that her friend was not there and kept expecting her to show up throughout lunch. Afterward, she asked me why her friend hadn’t come.
I thought for a while and told her that you have to set a time when you want to meet somebody. Then she asked me if that’s why I’m always angry about people being late.
Alien eyestalks
I found these crazy-looking plants in a local wet market at the base of Phu Rua National park in Loei province yesterday afternoon. An old lady was selling plants from the roadside and forest (Loei people are apparently known to be formidable foragers) across from a stall displaying animal traps, snares, and freshly skinned rats.
Nobody who has seen these photos (+/- a few hundred Thais in person and my wife’s Facebook) has ever tried these plants before. But the old lady told me how to prepare them, so we steamed them and ate with a green chili dip (the alternative was to make a soup).
As it turns out, the bigger of the two types of plant (the alien eye stalk one) was better than the smaller iceplant-looking one. If you ate the “eyes” one at a time, they were sweet, but the more you put in your mouth, the more bitter they got. Strange. The iceplant-looking one tasted like… well, like how I imagine iceplant to taste (Thank you, thank you).
Although I associate bitter vegetables with poison for some reason (college flashbacks maybe?), we suffered no ill effects from eating these unknown plants, maybe (Nam had a funny stomach feeling possibly due to the cold she was getting over). Overall experience: Exciting in good and bad ways, anticlimactic.