Foodyssey 2017: Thailand

After living in a student dorm in Bogor, Indonesia for a month I’d lost weight from each meal being an unvaried routine of rice or fried noodles with chicken or beef and a few leaves of lettuce, or the occasional bowl of noodles from the Japanese ramen shop to change it up. I ate even less when Ramadan started and only the convenience stores sold food before sundown in packaged snacks. Fresh fruit was expensive in the markets in Bogor near my place (maybe just because my clearly foreign classmates and I were quoted a higher price?) and sometimes had worms, as we found out. In fact, where we lived it was surprisingly difficult for us to find fresh vegetables and fruit considering it was a tropical country on fertile volcanic soil, the land use policies of which I still haven’t had a chance to fully research. Maybe we just never figured out where to buy the good stuff, even with about a third of the class being vegetarian or vegan.

But anyway I was hungry for the fresh produce and readily available meat food of Thailand, my next destination.

Short and sweet (and savoury), here is part of an odyssey, an amateur food porn listicle - a foodyssey of the 33 most memorable flavours that summer.

1. Mango sticky rice (Silom, Bangkok, Thailand)

Took a Thai cooking class and learned how to make this lightly sweet dessert. All the dishes were made from ingredients bought before class at the local market, and combined with the teacher's experience I hadn't tasted any better Thai dishes anywhere else. I tried to re-make this in Trois-Rivieres with brown nonsticky rice, cane sugar and no pandan leaf but it wasn't the same.

Grating coconut with Silom Cooking School to flavour the mango sticky rice

Mango sticky rice

2. Tom Yum soup (Silom, Bangkok, Thailand)

Everything in the Thai cooking class with Silom Thai Cooking School was easy to prepare once all the ingredients had been chopped and marinated.

Tom Yum soup

3. Pad Thai (Silom, Bangkok, Thailand)

As made in my dorm later in Quebec- with beets to make it pink

4. Coconut WORM (Kao San, Bangkok, Thailand)

Coconut worm on a stick

The coconut worm had a good fried taste and it was hard to cut the tough skin in half with my teeth. The inside was a different story; mostly air and it tasted like chicken. There's a Vancouver company that sells protein bars with bits of cricket in them and their samples tasted great. Insects really aren't that bad. Unless they're mosquitos.

5. Pork sausage (Bangkok, Thailand)

I'd been in Indonesia for so long that when I visited Thailand and saw all the pork casually displayed in stores and sold in markets, I was floored. Not a lot of pork can be found in Bogor, a conservative Islamic city. Upon visiting my travel buddy’s aunt's house her aunt treated us to these pork sausages that might have been cured in various seasonings. They were a bit sweet, like my joy at eating pork for the first time in what felt like months.

6. Kaffir Lime Leaves (Bangkok, Thailand)

Once upon a time nearly 10 years ago, my sister, brother and I went to the Los Angeles Arboretum with my great-aunt and I learned about the kaffir lime tree, a discovery that awed me as the highlight of the trip. The tree was perfectly pruned in an appetizing conical top, like a lollipop, and thick with waxy emerald leaves. What made it awesome was its smell. A citrusy perfume with a hint of spice. I categorized the smell in my mind and never smelled it again until this cooking class, when lo and behold it was a regular ingredient in many of the Thai dishes. What a throwback! The surge of memories from desert and fragrant shade! I brought some home and used them to make pad Thai and tom yum soup.

7. Underwater Coke (Koh Tao, Thailand)

At 60m depth, the coke stays in the can due to the high pressure. It can be drunk when you create a pressure vacuum sucking through a straw. It was neat to try, but not as awesome as kaffir lime leaves.

8. Coconut Ice cream in a Coconut (Bangkok, Thailand)

They didn't have as many of these in Indonesia (durian ice cream was more popular, I recall), but Thailand sure knows how to do them.