Thai Food

(Very long, but mostly pictures.)

Thai people eat almost everything. For a most part that's a really good thing. Food here is delicious, and unlike anything I've ever eaten before. Thai people use tons of spices in their cooking, and the combinations of flavors are bizarre and extremely good.

FRUIT

The fruit here is incredible. There are literally dozens of fruits that I'd never seen or heard of before coming here, and they are almost all wonderful. Thailand is very tropical, and they grow almost everything here. Bananas and pineapple, in particular, are so good here. I don't even like those fruits back in America-- the flavor and texture is very different here. And here in Somboi, we are absolutely drowning in bananas, coconuts, and millions of mangos. All of those are growing in trees in my backyard right now!

They also have these apple-like fruits that I love.

Mmmmmmmm..coconuts:

I don't have pictures of the other fruits, especially the mangos. We eat yellow, ripe mangos (YUM - my new favorite fruit) and green mangos. The greens ones are pretty sour, and we eat them with a mix of sugar, salt, and chili. Sometimes we add fish sauce to the mix. I won't lie - I'm not crazy about this strange dip, but I eat it. It's growing on me.

MAIN COURSES

3 kinds of pork with a sweet and sour sauce, with soup:

They think this is like Chinese food. It's not, but it is good. Noodles with a sauce. If I was even a little bit of a cook, I could probably describe the taste a little bit, but I'm at a total loss. Come and taste it!

This is either chicken or pig blood. The particular animal that the blood comes from isn't too important though. They boil the blood until it becomes a solid. It's like jello. Blood jello. (Yes, I did eat it!)

Squid (yes, I ate this too; it's very chewy):

Somdom is a staple food here. It's made from papaya (not similar at all to the fruit we have in the States), fish sauce, chili, tomato, peanuts, lemon, and sugar. You eat it with sticky rice, and it's really delicious! Very spicy.

I cooked this meal with P'Pawn older sister. The pumpkin dish is one of my favorites. Americans don't make very good use of pumpkin...

On a raft on the river with my uncle, aunt, and cousins. You buy food on the shore, they bring it to you in intervals, and you can just sit and relax for as long as you want. Lots of people swim in the river too. It's so much fun!

Eating a slightly Thai version of Chinese food, where you put raw meat and vegetables into boiling broth and it cooks. That's Palm and her dad!

KANOM (Thai for deserts, treats, snacks, etc. Basically anything that's not a meal.)

The banana-leaf wrapped things are great, but the pink milk is NOT. Thai people love to drink this stuff that they call "Red Water" but it's actually this thick sugary syrup that they add to water. It's bright red, and tastes exactly like cheap cough syrup. Mixing it with warm yogurt-milk doesn't help.

Very thin rice cakes, but the picture is mostly here to show the preferred cooking method here in the villages.

That's a cup! They put tea or coffee or whatever you want in it, and you get to keep it. But if you're thinking the twine might come out and the clay cup might shatter all over the ground, you are right. If you are white, it draws even more attention, and the story is told for the rest of the day.

(No explanation needed.)

That's ice cream, with corn on it! It was weird at first, but that's because it was my first encounter with veggie-deserts. They put corn and beans in ice cream, yogurt, cakes, etc.

That's a fried doughy thing with sugar and condensed milk inside. Horribly unhealthy but so good...

MY FAVORITE FOOD!!!!!!!! Mango with sticky rice and coconut milk. Doesn't sound like much, but it's oh-so-good.

OTHER ODDITIES

I went out to eat with my first host family (in Bangkok). They told me it was a typical American me. On that table, we had:

 - pizza

 - breadsticks

 - onion rings

 - french fries

 - spaghetti

 - mozzarella cheese sticks

 - garlic bread

 - ham and cheese bake

No wonder they think Americans are all fat!

This picture isn't much, except the scene of a story I want to tell. This was on my vacation with my boss a few weeks ago. We were eating dinner with about 10 people, and there was this dip for the sticky rice. Most people eat sticky rice with their hands, so that's was I was doing. I got some dip, and took a bit. Not bad. A little spicy, but nothing I can't handle. Then I looked at the clump of rice in my hand and there was a giant red ant on it! I panicked because I had almost eaten it, but my next thought was how to get rid of it without calling attention to the fact that there was a bug in their dish. So I played it cool and just set the whole thing down on my plate. I got some more rice, and went for more dip and then I saw. The whole dip was red ants. There was some chili paste mixed in, and a few vegetables, but it was a huge mass of giant dead red ants.

I emphasize the word dead there because this is what I was served a few days later:

I'm sorry to report that I just couldn't put the giant moving bugs in my mouth and crunch down. I did eat large ant larvae though! They pop, like grapes.

So that's a pretty good summary, I think! The food is really different, but most of it isn't too weird. I just don't take a lot of pictures of the normal stuff.

I'm going to Bangkok tomorrow to renew my visa, so I won't be online or near a computer until next week Wednesday or so. I'm trying to take more videos though, since people seemed to like that.

Love,

Alex