Eat, Eat, Eat

My version of Eat, Pray, Love, would be called, Eat, Eat, Eat, since that is all I seem to be doing on my travels. But there is no place better to eat than in Thailand.

In Bangkok, food is everywhere. Walking down the street, especially around lunchtime, the streets are filled with the smells of a variety of food and vendors prepare all kinds of dishes to sell.

This morning after blogging, I went back to the little market I discovered. I had seen a "food court" and thought I would go there for lunch. It seemed clean and it was air-conditioned. I went out around 11:45, just in time to hit the lunchtime crowd.

I walked past the food court and it looked crowded. I hesitated and was going to walk to another place I saw deeper inside the market, but as I walked down the little soi with the market, it was packed and I knew that any place I went would be crowded, so I swallowed my traveler's pride and decided to be adventurous. This was new for me. In the past, I would have walked around afraid to go into a place that was so crowded. But this was Thailand and I'd already been putting myself in awkward situations and surviving. So in I went.

There was a woman sitting at a little podium and a sign in Thai mentioned two prices - 50 and 100 baht. I knew from being here before that there are places where you buy coupons and then take the coupons to the vendors. Usually I buy 100 baht and then return what I don't use - because the food is so cheap, that is often half of what I originally bought, but better safe than sorry.

So I gave the woman 100 baht and she gave me a little card, like a credit card. This was new, but I saw this credit card type thing in the bakery in Lisbon.

I went inside and it was a buzz of activity. A flood of office workers had filled the place, which was not that big. There were about 5 or 6 vendors. I had my eye on one place that looked like they sold chicken fried with chili, but there was a long line. Instead, I settled on a soup place because there was no line, there were easy pictures to point to, and it looked like the soup I had seen minutes earlier being sold on the street outside my hotel. I have not worked my way up to sitting on the street and eating, but that is the next frontier.

So I pointed to the picture and the woman asked me in English what kind of noodles I wanted. Gee, this was easier than I thought it would be. I ordered wide noodles, got my soup, put some condiments in it (different kinds of chili sauces mostly) and then hunted for a table.

Most tables were taken and those that didn't have people had umbrellas or other things reserving them. I finally found an empty spot next to two women and sat down.

The soup was good. I've had it before. It was a rich, pork flavored broth with pieces of pork, fish cakes and fish balls. It might have had a few prawns, I don't remember. I was the only foreigner there. I felt like I had forced my way into a private club, but no one seemed to care.

After lunch I went to the Blue Elephant Cooking School which is one skytrain station from where I am staying. I could have walked, but walking is not a pleasant experience in Bangkok due to the heat and traffic. Even the short walk to the station is grueling, walking along a soi with no sidewalk and lots of traffic.

I was served an herbal tea made from lemongrass with a beautiful orchid in it while I waited for class to begin. At 1:30, we were led to the classroom.

Our teacher was a young Thai woman. I think she said her name was Ni. I don't remember. Her English was good but sometimes a little difficult to understand. But once you got used to certain pronunciation difficulties she had, it got easier. Green for example was geen.

She showed us how to make a dish and then we went into the kitchen to prepare it. We did this with every dish we made. She also demonstrated a dipping sauce that we did not make.

We made four dishes and a desert - the first one was yellow curry with chicken, potatoes and pineapple. She showed us how to make the curry paste, but we made our curry with red curry paste (already prepared) and yellow curry powder and turmeric. Next we made desert - jasmine cake, made with mung bean flour, coconut milk and palm sugar. It was like a custard that was then baked. After that we made sweet, sour spicy prawns, fish baked with herbs in a banana leaf and grilled beef salad (yam nua).

Yam nua is one of my favorite Thai dishes. The first time I had it, two cute young gay guys from Northeastern Thailand watched as I ate it and the sweat poured off of me. They thought it was comical. They then explained to me that it was a northeastern dish. I think the name translates as "waterfall" or something like that. It has become my test of how good a Thai restaurant is. If they can make passable yam nua, then I think it is a good restaurant.

Well, the yam nua we made today was okay, but it didn't seem authentic to me. It was missing something and it definitely was not as spicy as the one I had years ago. I guess I can experiment and try different recipes, but what I found was that it is not hard to make at all. It seems like a good way to use leftover steak (not that I often have leftover steak, since I don't eat steak that much).

I opted to eat my meal in the restaurant but the other students in the class got theirs to go. I thought about getting mine to go too, because I have a refrigerator and a microwave in my room (as well as a little stove), but thought it would be nice to eat there in that lovely setting.

When I went down to the restaurant, the table was set with my four dishes. I started with the fish which was fabulous. A nice piece of sea bass baked with dill, basil, lemon grass and a paste of garlic, coriander root and galangal. It was perfectly spiced and really yummy. From there I sampled the other dishes and decided to eat the prawns. I knew I could not finish everything, I was already full, so I got the beef salad, the curry and my jasmine cake to go.

I don't know if I will ever become a masterful Thai chef, but I am learning some good little techniques to make Thai cooking a little easier. I mean, when you think about it, in households all over Thailand, people, mostly women, are preparing these dishes with nothing more than a mortar and pestle and a little fire. If they can do it, so can I.