Category: Thai Society/Culture

Quick ‘n Dirty Beef Panang

Beef Panang is considered a dry curry (for Thailand at least) because it contains less roux (liquid base), and specifically, less coconut milk than other Thai curries. It is also one of the best uses for lean/tough beef, which is great since that’s pretty much all we have around here. Panang is an easy dish to make and my way is even easier than most. I’ve tried it the normally advocated way, by heating curry paste in coconut milk first, but I’ve found this is a waste of time when using ready-made curry paste. So without further ado:
INGREDIENTS

  • Beef – Any cut. Any quantity approximating that in the photos below (about 1.5 pounds).
  • Thai red curry paste – Suitable quantity depends on brand; see photos below for reference
  • Coconut milk – About one cup
  • Fresh kaffir lime leaves – Slice these into strips. I used 2-3 big leaves in the photos below.
  • Nampla (filtered fish sauce) – Suitable quantity depends on brand; I only used a couple dashes since I was using a fairly pungent brand. Remember, the only 2 reasons to use nampla are to make things SALTIER and FUNKIER – it doesn’t make a dish magically Thai, but it sure can funktify (esp. if you throw it in a hot frying pan).
  • OPTIONAL: Raw cane sugar – A tablespoon or so. I forego the use of sugar because I can’t stand sweet curries, and this dish already contains coconut milk.

DIRECTIONS
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Cut the beef into strips. Traditionally, it should be cut into thinner strips than this, but I like bite-sized chunks. Cut the kaffir lime leaves up as well. The baggie in the background contains the red curry paste (we only used about half).
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Heat a bit of vegetable oil in the pan and add the red curry paste. Fry it for a couple minutes on medium high heat to activate it, stirring rapidly to prevent sticking and burning. Then add the meat and stir often.
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Did I forget to mention that Nam was cooking while I took photos? Anyway, the baby started waking up at this point so the coconut milk was added earlier than usual – we usually wait until the meat is slightly browned but it turned out not to make a difference. Also, the Quick ‘n Dirty series of recipes is designed for those that need to display adaptability on occasion, so they are meant to be stretched and improvised upon.
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After the coconut milk is added, add a couple splashes of nampra (be careful, it’s really salty! You can always add more later, as well as sugar if you want) and also the lime leaves. Then turn the heat down to low-medium and let it simmer until either the meat becomes unbelievable soft and succulent, or tempted by the heavenly smell, you start scooping ladlefuls of panang onto hot mounds of rice and let the little piggy in you take over.
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Alternatively, you can serve with boiled egg halves and veggies of some kind.
Note that you can eat the lime leaves, but they are a bit tough. I usually put them to the side.
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This is C. Buddha signing off with today’s Quick ‘n Dirty recipe – funky and delicious, yet simple and semi-authentic-ish Beef Panang.

No more hi-octane ethanol-free gas in Mahasarakham

This photo was taken back in March.
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This was the last gas station in Maha Sarakham to sell 95 octane gasoline with no ethanol added. It greatly surprised me to find them selling it because all of the other stations had gradually phased it out by the end of the previous year – PTT and Petronas were the first to go, then Esso, then finally, what I thought was the last holdout, Caltex. But I stopped at this station (I even forget what company it was!) on the way back from the road to Borabu, a neighboring town, and got a full tank of the good stuff – unadulterated 95 oc (and it may very well have been the last tank my car will get, ever – it’s VQ30 is running fine on 95 gasohol, tho).
The problem is, this station is too far away and off the beaten path. When I went to the labor office (located on the road to Borabu) to renew my work permit a few days ago, I looked at the pumps when passing by and saw that they had finally switched to the ethanol crap like everywhere else.
Sad.
Note: The VQ30 in my A33 Cefiro is running on 95 gasohol. The RB20 in the S60 Crown is running on regular (non-eth) 91. They are both running fine, but I’d still prefer to run them on non-eth 95 because it runs smoother, gets better mileage, and isn’t robbing food from people’s mouths.

Pimp Ghost Riding (Sky on Fire)

The other day we went to nanny’s village to see the flooded rice fields. The Chi River has overflowed into the fields, and huge invading catfish are happy to feast on drowned field mice and other flood detritus. Unwilling to take Mr. Max out on a flimsy boat, we watched the villagers go spearfishing for dinner.
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It sure is a good thing we took the trusty old Crown out on the muddy roads instead of our pretty car.

Thai immigration in Mukdahan

Our university sent us foreign teachers to Mukdahan yesterday for our annual visa renewals. Until now, we had been using th immigration office in Nong Khai, but the last time we visited for 90-day notice, they told us that the Mukdahan office was becoming the top office for the Isan region and that we should go there from now on. So the seven or eight of us rode out on a bus accompanied by 26 Chinese exchange students who are studying Thai in China at various universities and are on a program here for a year. 30+ visa applicants are enough to crowd any immigration office, and it was shocking to see how understaffed the Muk office was. Everything took a long, long time. It’s unreasonable to blame the people (the underlings at least) working there because they’re as trapped by the system as we are… It was hard watching other applicants* come and wonder where to queue up because the waiting room side of the counter looked like the escape scene from The Killing Fields.
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What saved the day was my colleague finding a well-run expat cafe (expat customer, not proprietor) a couple doors down from immigration -the name of the place was Good Mook. Good coffee, pate on crispy French bread, and bottles of Beer Lao… It was a great place to relax and wait for all the students to get processed, until the tiny little immigration office closed at 4:30.
We got back to our university at around 9:00 PM. By the time I had a bowl of noodles with another colleague and went home, both wife and baby were sound asleep.
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* Some of the other applicants included one of Nam’s Japanese teachers, and my next door neighbor (who also works at Nam’s school, MSU – Mahasarakham University.)

Maxie Update

We are settled into a private room at the private hospital on the street behind Serm Thai shopping center in downtown Mahasarakham. The facilities are better than the VIP room at the provincial hospital where we stayed after Max was born.
Max has an IV in his arm and he’s doing fine. He’s been fine the whole time, actually. This whole week he’s been coughing and getting stuffed up, but never stopped playing or smiling. It was heartbreaking watching him being held down by nurses and getting stuck in the arm with a needle. He cried LOUDLY and shook his head back and forth in pain and frustration. He actually pried his free arm loose of the sheet it was held under and he let loose with a massive backhand that didn’t connect with anything. He looked at me, crying, with a look of shock and incomprehension. It was… hard to watch.
But now we are settled into the room for the night and it’s all playtime and smiles again. Nam had me bring SO MUCH stuff from the house to support the little emperor’s activities here… The security guard at the front door helped me schlep some crap from my car to the room upstairs; it still took three trips, and I’m pretty much a world-class bagboy.
Anyhow. The best thing about this place is that there’s dedicated wireless on each room.
Google chat is ON, biotches.
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They are actually saying that he has pneumonia now. So this is kind of serious.
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Meanwhile, this next week is finals week and I’m writing tests in between being a boyservant and figuring out how to play Japanese children’s music from my iriver to a pair of USB-powered PC speakers. Simple willpower isn’t cutting it, so I imagine I’ll take apart the inversion pump on the wall for parts and perhaps pump out the jams via venturi effect.
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Oh something really weird happened right after my last post, at home. My desktop PC, the one I put together from parts after my White Night died a few weeks ago, well it just up and died, too. I only had a couple minutes to fiddle with it, but it seems totally fuxx0r3d. I wonder what’s up with that. My desktop PC karma is just really crap lately. Anyway, because I was scanning max’s chest x-ray right before the PC died I forgot to take it off the scanner and bring it here for the doctor to see. So after we got here and I unloaded everything from the car, I went back home to get the x-ray. Dude, the house was so empty without my wife and the Max. Damn. No way I want to stay there alone tonight! Plus, I have the boyservant role to fill.
I am being told to go buy dinner. The night market where everyone tried fried cricket and grasshoppers after our wedding 2.6 years ago is just down the street, so I’ll see what non-insect yummies are available there I guess.

pedicheese

Beware, queasy ones.
A couple days ago Nam went to a beauty salon to get her hair done and I tagged along to get a pedicure since my toenails tend to get painful if not cut correctly, and also because pedicures are the absolute best kind of addiction in a place like Thailand – inexpensive and actually good for you.
Nam’s usual shop was closed for some reason, but since we were already out on the only sizable chunk of free time for the week, we went to another place that we’d actually been to before but didn’t like so much because the older women running it do everything very slowly. On this day, however, it was still early and their shop was empty, so we decided to give it another shot.
I sat down and got a manicure first since I had to wait for Nam anyways, and soaked my feet in a bucket of water. What happened after the manicure was simply amazing.
The old lady unwrapped a long razor blade from the piece of wax paper it came packaged in, and began shaving away the callouses on my feet – I have LOTS of callouses on my feet. In fact, the balls of my feet as well as the heels are basically huge callouses. This stems from a bad case of athlete’s foot in Japan ten years ago that opened huge cracks in the bottom of my feet over which thick layers of skin eventually accumulated. I never thought this could even be removed, actually. However, the long soak had a great effect on this chitinous mass and huge swaths of dead skin flaked off with every pass of the razor. It piled up on the wet towel draped underneath my foot like a massive pile of grated cheese. To be more specific, it was like a massive pile of fetid, extra-sharp cheddar. In hindsight, maybe I should have saved it to put on an enemy’s piece of toast.
Anyway, after she was done shaving off the pedicheese, she smoothed everything down with an oblong plastic emery board. My feet felt fantastic! It must have showed on my face, because Nam had her feet worked on too.
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* This is the first time I’ve ever seen this service performed anywhere, at any price, even though I’d heard that it existed before.