Liar, liar, pants on fire!

Okay, so in the last post when I said that it was my last one in a while (mainly due to the fact that I've heard that internet can sometimes be iffy in Cambodia), I lied. But really, the only reason for that is that I forgot a few things that I wanted to talk about. Okay, one ever-important thing: my culinary adventures in Thailand.

I know that I tend to care about food more than most of you (I did write a whole thesis about it I suppose), but I thought I'd share on the off chance that it interested the rest of you.

Here in Thailand I've tried two new snacks that I quite enjoy. The first was snot on bread. Okay, so I exaggerate a little bit, but the sauce looks and feels remarkably like snot. As I'm not selling this well, let me backtrack. I was walking down the street in a random part of Bangkok not usually frequented by farang as far as I could tell and stumbled upon a street vendor with little pieces of bread on display in her cart. I thought to myself, 'huh, I wonder what that's for,' so with lots of pointing (which, BTW, I think is culturally inappropriate which I realized later) I was able to communicate that I wanted "the bread thing." She put the bread in a steamer pot (which surprised me, I might add, although I didn't know what to expect) and spooned some green goo into a plastic bag and added condensed milk. After a short time she took a metal funnel and funneled the bread chunks into another plastic bag for take away. I took my bags to a bench next to the main river that runs through Bangkok and tasted away. The snot I used as a dipping sauce for the steamed bread pieces. It was sweet and quite delicious. I later found out that the reason for the green color is a leaf that is commonly used in Thai cusine that acts much like vanilla. It's called pandanus (pronounce as you see fit). In any case, the whole dish gets 1.5 thubs up, as it was almost too sweet. I did like the lightly steamed bread idea though.

The other sweet snack that I enjoyed was corn. Sweet you say? Yes say I. At the same place the next day, after missing our bus stop and having to continue on to the next one, we happened upon a corn vendor. He took kerneled corn, added butter, cream, sugar, and a dash of salt, mixed it together and put it in a cup. For decoration it was whipped cream and blueberry syrup. Overall, an enjoyable combination. Who knew that blueberries and corn went together?! I have to admit that one of the reasons that I like Asia is that its desserts (or at least sweet things) tend to surprise me. Before, in China and Japan, it was the sweet beans that impressed me. In Thailand, the sweet corn.

As far as more traditional Thai dishes go, I'm quite enjoying the tom yam soup. It's a spicy soup traditionally made with prawns, lemon grass, and ginger. I think I'm renaming it yum yum soup, but maybe that's culturally insensitive or something :o).

Now go eat!