In case you’re wondering, Tawn and I did return from Chiang Mai. It has been a busy start to the week, so I haven’t taken the opportunity yet to update on all the things we did up north. I’ll get to that in the next day or so. Thanks for your patience.
Tawn and I are getting away today to Chiang Mai, Thailand’s “Second City” and the largest city in the northern, mountainous part of the Kingdom.
We’re staying at the Yaang Come Village, a resort that is one of the highest-rated on Trip Advisor. Hopefully, all those people are right. Here are some pictures:
Looks nice, eh? Well, the biggest “escape” in this whole trip is that I’m leaving my laptop behind. I spend way too much time staring at the screen both for work (really!) as well as blogging. That’s it, a weekend of resting my eyes.
Talk to you Monday!
Every so often, Khun Vic invites friends over for a get-together at his apartment. Sometimes it is a poker party, but seeing as how so few of us actually play poker, more often than not it is a simple get-together. Most people contribute by bringing something snacky or a bottle of something alcoholic. No surprise, I contribute something cooked.
Last time we attended a party that I didn’t host, there was too much of the salty, snacky, sweet stuff and nothing substantial. By the end of the evening, Tawn and I were feeling yucky and not because of the drinking. If you invite people over pretty early in the evening, there should be at least something quasi-substantial (cheese and crackers with fruit, for example) to fill your stomach.
Taking matters in my own hand, I bowled over Vic’s objections (“I didn’t want to have to put out utensils or plates…”) and insisted that I would bring some salads. I’m kidding, of course, about the “bowling over” thing. Vic and I talked a couple of times and, ultimately, I wore him down and he agreed that some substantial food would improve his party.
Turning to Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Parties, I found some perfect recipes. Ina believes that parties should be as much fun for a host as for the host’s guests, so she emphasizes recipes that are either easy to prepare or that can be prepared in advance. Since this wasn’t my party and I was a guest, not a host, “prepared in advance” was critical but “easy” wasn’t.
Chinese Chicken Salad
Sure, I know it isn’t politically correct because the Chinese just don’t eat chicken salad like this. But that’s the ubiquitous name of the salad that is dressed with a soy sauce – peanut better – sesame seed oil dressing, which makes it sound more like satay dipping sauce than anything else.
Step 1: Cook the chicken. Ina suggests thighs, which have more fat and, therefore, more flavor. She also suggests roasting the thighs in the oven with the skin on. I like thighs, too, but went with breasts as they were less expensive and I tried poaching just for a change of pace. Below left.
Step 2: Prepare the other ingredients. The body of the salad contains scallions, red bell peppers, and blanched asparagus spears. I blanched the asparagus in the liquid I had used to poach the chicken breasts. Water chestnuts would have been a lovely addition, too, but I didn’t have any. Above right
The sauce was a mixture of the aforementioned soy sauce, peanut butter, and sesame oil, with cider vinegar, honey, garlic, ginger, salt and pepper to taste, and some good-quality vegetable oil to smooth the whole thing out.
Step 3: Combine. Afterwards, I’d recommending refrigerating for a few hours to let the flavors mix and develop.
The second dish was Pasta, Pesto and Peas. For her recipe Ina suggests that you can “cheat” and use store-bought pesto to save time. But with a large bunch of fresh sweet basil selling for only 7 baht – about $.023 – how can I not make fresh pesto? Plus a little extra for the freezer!
Step 1: Prepare all the ingredients. This includes your basil, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and walnuts, and Parmesan cheese for the pesto. Wash the basil leaves and remove them from the stems as the stems will add a rather chunky texture to your pesto.
Step 2: Make the pesto. This is super-easy. The hardest part is washing, drying, and removing the basil leaves from the stems. You start with a small amount of olive oil in the base of the blender and then grind the pine nuts, walnuts and garlic into a paste. From there you start to add the leaves a small amount at a time, adding a little olive oil as necessary to maintain consistency. At the end you can season with some lemon juice (to keep the bright green color) and salt and pepper to taste.
Below, the finished pesto. Lovely, isn’t it?
Step 3: Gather your remaining ingredients. You’ll need lemon juice, mayonnaise, frozen peas and spinach, and of course cooked pasta for the rest of the salad.
You take your pesto and put it back into a blender or food processor (if you made it from scratch, no need to have taken it out in the first place) and add the spinach, making sure to squeeze excess water out of the spinach.
Puree it to blend the spinach into the pesto then add some lemon juice and some mayonnaise. Blend until mixed. This is the sauce for your pasta salad.
Step 4: Mix together. Your pasta is mixed with the pesto-mayonnaise mixture and then add the peas, grated Parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper to taste. You can also throw in a few handfuls of toasted pine nuts for garnish and texture.
Those two salads took me about two hours to make, but I wasn’t entirely focused on the cooking and was multi-tasking. The results were lovely and perfect for any party.
What’s especially good is that the pasta dish is entirely vegan so it is good for any crowd. And it tastes great, too. Now, if you wanted to add some grilled chicken to it then you’d really have something going. But then the vegans would be unhappy. So would the vegetarians. And the chicken.
Left, Tawn is ready to go to the party in his “school boy” outfit.
We headed out on Saturday evening and arrived just a few minutes late, what we would describe as “fashionable”. Since Vic lives in the Asoke Place complex where we lived until this past December, the guards still recognized us and gave us a resident parking pass instead of the usual guest parking ticket. No waiting to have our host come down to get us as the clerk working the front desk wai’d us and buzzed us in. So nice to be known!
Vic is from San Francisco and is a man who defies stereotypes. There is nothing more demonstrative of this than his big-ass toolbox that he keeps on his balcony, padlocked so his maid won’t steal a monkey wrench. Would you believe that he had this shipped over from the United States when he moved here? It must have weighed as much as everything else he shipped, combined. Next time I need a tool, I know who I’m invited over for lunch.
Above, the party-goers. Sadly, we’re lacking in diversity when it comes to gender and sexual orientation. I’m trying to work on that, but it is a slow process. Since some of these people may not be familiar to you, I’ll let you know who they are. Back row, standing from left: Russ, Jay, Markus, Vic, Brian, Piyawat and Stuart. Middle section, seated from left: Francois, Chairat, Ken and Mark. Front group from left: Tam, Darrin (visiting from SF), Tawn, Kobfa, and Suchai (standing on right).
First off, I’d like to thank everyone who engaged in the exchange of ideas and friendly debate in my last entry. My blog normally doesn’t head into political topics but on occasion I like to express my idea. I find that when people take a deep breath and exchange their ideas on a civil level, there’s an opportunity to learn much more from each other and to be more open to different ideas.
Let’s all keep that spirit of open-minded dialogue as we head into November. Heck, let’s try to keep that all the time.
Let’s turn away from topical things and get back to the subject that is no less partisan and divisive, food!
I’ve been experimenting with sourdough bread as of late, not so much to recreate the sourdough I know and love from San Francisco (funny story, the first time Tawn visited me in SF and he tried the bread, he looked at me with this odd face and told me he thought the bread had gone bad), but just as a way to leaven and make more flavorful whole wheat bread.
The whole wheat bread I buy here in Thailand is just awful. Even some of the hotel bakeries, which cater to Europeans, still make pretty cardboard-ish whole grain bread.
A great website I found – www.sourdoughhome.com – is literally the home of everything sourdough. Some much information and helpful descriptions and explanations from a former bakery owner and baking instructor!
I created my own sourdough starter, basically a jar of water and flour that is allowed to catch its own yeast spores from the air. Over time it begins to ferment a bit and a sour air become more noticeable, picture on the left.
Every twelve hours I remove half the starter and replace is with a 2:3 mixture of water and flower. Then I let it sit for twelve hours or so, during which time it should double in height (picture on the right). Now that it has matured a bit I’ll send it to the refrigerator to hibernate for a few days at a time but I am sure to bring it out and start feeding it again a day or two before I want to make another loaf.
Below, close up of the starter.
My first few loaves had some problems. One just never rose at all. I think I used the started too far along in the 12-hour cycle after the activity had died down. Another loaf looked pretty good but when I pulled the plastic wrap off the top of the loaf before placing it in the oven, I realized I hadn’t oiled the plastic. The dough caught on it, ripped open, and the loaf deflated into a dense brick.
My most recent loaf turned out quite nicely. It still isn’t as tall as I’d like, but since it had a very nice, light crumb inside I think the issue is that the recipe isn’t large enough for the pan. I’ll try again next week and increase the recipe by about a third.
Below, a nice loaf but still a bit short.
There is nothing like the smell of fresh-baked bread in a house, even when the loaf turns out to be a doorstop. My maternal grandmother used to bake quite often and I recall the smell and taste of fresh-baked bread at her house.
After an exhausting primary season – perhaps more exhausting for the general public than the candidates – the race to be the Democratic Presidential candidate has come to a close.
The race has been a hard one and has opened a tremendous number of wounds within the Democratic party, wounds that must be healed if there is any chance for the Democrats to retake the White House this November. This is the battle that must be won for the good of the country.
One of the biggest concerns I have is how the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton will react to this conclusion to the primary season. Some polls have reported that many of her supporters claim that they will stay home on election day or will vote for Senator John McCain instead. Neither of these would be in their rational best interest, of course, but people have a tremendous capacity to cut off their own noses to spite their face.
I’m sure that as the wounds heal and the general campaign gets under way, most of Senator Clinton’s supporters will rally behind Senator Barack Obama. In the meantime, though, I suspect the Blame Game will begin.
“Who was at fault? Who caused Senator Clinton’s loss?” they will ask. Someone must be blamed.
As Ron Elving, National Public Radio’s “Watching Washington” columnist, writes rather astutely, there are many reasons for the Senator’s loss but the ultimate fault lies with her campaign. They made a fundamental and strategic miscalculation at the beginning of the campaign: that the nomination was already theirs and that the real fight was for the general election.
You can read Mr. Elving’s full comments here, but I think he is spot-on in recognizing that even though Senator Clinton’s campaign made a strong comeback after Super Tuesday, that initial arrogance cost her the nomination.
As we turn our attention to the question of Vice Presidential candidates, many people are talking about the potential of a “dream ticket” with Senator Clinton taking the Veep role. Part of me thinks that this is a wonderful idea. Part of me has three specific concerns:
I’m interested in hearing your ideas and comments. The most important thing to me is ensuring that Senator Obama beats Senator McCain this November. America deserves that.
This morning I received the following email. It is so sinophobic as to remind me of the “yellow peril” scare of the laste 1800s and early 1900s. It left me fuming and so I spent two hours composing a response, which is printed following it. Please note that I added the images to this post; they were not part of the original email message.
MESSAGE TO CHINA
Do you want to send a message to China? Are we Americans as dumb as we appear or is it that we just do not think? While the Chinese, knowingly and intentionally, export inferior products and dangerous toys and goods to be sold in American markets, the media wrings its hands and criticizes the Bush Administration for perceived errors. Yet 70% of Americans believe that the trading privileges afforded to the Chinese should be suspended. Well, duh..why do you need the government to suspend trading privileges?
DO IT YOURSELF!!
Simply look on the bottom of every product you buy, and if it says ‘Made in China’ or ‘PRC’ (and that now includes Hong Kong), simply choose another product or none at all. You will be amazed at how dependent you are on Chinese products, however you will be equally amazed at what you can do without. Who needs plastic eggs to celebrate Easter?
If you must have eggs, use real ones and benefit some American farmer. Easter is just an example, the point is.. do not wait for the government to act. Just go ahead and assume control on your own.
If 200 million Americans refuse to buy just $20 each of Chinese goods, that’s a billion dollar trade imbalance resolved in our favor…fast!! The downside? Some American businesses will feel a temporary pinch from having foreign stockpiles of inventory. ** Downside??
The solution ? Let’s give them fair warning and send our own message. We will not implement this UNTIL June 4, and we will only continue it until July 4. That is only one month of trading losses, but it will hit the Chinese for 1/12th of the total, or 8%, of their American exports. Then they will at least have to ask themselves if the benefits of their arrogance and lawlessness were worth it.
Remember, June 4 to July 4.
Here’s is my response:
I was forwarded an email (I’m sure it has been forwarded many times before I received it) that suggested that we should engage in a month-long boycott of $20 each of Chinese-made products in order to “send a message” about their “arrogance and illegality”. Here is my response:As an American living overseas, am I personally to be blamed for George Bush’s blundered war in Iraq just because I’m American? Does every computer running Microsoft Windows around the world represent “America” monopolistically flooding foreign markets just because it is an American-based company? Does the spread of McDonald’s around the globe and the ensuing obesity epidemic that seems to follow in its footsteps represent America “knowingly and intentionally exporting inferior products” and unhealthy goods? Of course the answer is no, because individual people and individual companies should not be conflated with a country as a whole.
The global employment chain
Third, consider the impact of where you buy. Tens of millions of Americans do their shopping at stores like Wal-Mart, that pay low wages and provide minimal benefits. Sure, they provide low prices but they do so on the backs of their employees, not just because they are selling a lot of inexpensive foreign-made goods. In addition to buying less and buying things of higher quality, spend your money with stores that pay their employees a living wage and provide them with reasonable healthcare benefits. Remember, these “employees” are our fellow citizens, our friends, neighbors, and even family members.We received the sad news that my sister and brother in law’s yellow labrador, Zoe, who had been diagnosed with liver cancer just two weeks ago, was put to rest on Saturday morning.
In the course of those two weeks, her health declined precipitously and within just the final few days she went from somewhat normal levels of energy, activity and appetite to being unable to eat or drink anything, let alone get up from the floor or move on her own.
Zoe was Jenn and Kevin’s first “child”, giving them a trio of years of experience caring for another living being before my oldest niece was born.
Emily wasn’t as close to Zoe as my younger niece, Ava, has been. But for both of them, the loss of a permanent part of their life will bring about all sorts of questions and worries and sadness.
Emily, who is old enough to remember her great-grandmother (my father’s mother), stated that now Zoe would be in heaven and would take walks with Grandma Schultz. While Grandma was always a bit overwhelmed by Zoe (she was very demonstrative of her affections when she was younger, jumping all over you and sharing her very fur with you), I’m sure that image will provide the whole family with comfort.
Above: Ava and Zoe, best of friends, watch an endless summer afternoon pass by.
If the nature of things is that life is given and taken away on a whim, it seems that our clinging onto memories in an earnest, if futile, attempt to resist that capriciousness.
For starters, I want you to know that this isn’t my usual weekend breakfast. But sometimes I just want a taste of home and so I whip up a batch of buttermilk biscuits (yes, from scratch) and some sausage gravy. As they say, “Them’s good eatin’.”
We’ve had a steady stream of visitors in town and I just found out that two more will arrive the second week of June. I wish we had a large house with guest quarters so I could extend my hospitality to all these guests. In fact, shortly after moving here I drew up plans for the house I’d like to build some day. It has a large semi-detached guest suite and a climate-controlled piano room so my parents can come for extended visits and my mother can play.
Don’t expect to read any entries about this dream house anytime soon, though.
Big Michael has been visiting from Hong Kong this week, returning Saturday morning. A former colleague of mine while I worked in Hong Kong, he’s now a yoga instructor and decided he needed a few days away from the twist and stretch of work.
We had a nice time visiting and had several meals together, introducing different friends and making some new connections. I really enjoy when I can introduce different people and help weave a tighter web among people.
In my mind, I’m kind of like the Lily Tomlin character of Ernestine the telephone operator (right), smacking my gum and helping people connect.
“Hello? Have a reached the party to whom I’m speaking?”
We had dinner Wednesday night at Basillico restaurant on Sukhuvmit Soi 33, below. Always good, it seems that it has become even better as of late with exceptional quality and attentive service. In this day and age that is a good sign, especially considering that at Ta Ling Pling for another dinner Friday night, we were met with spotty, inattentive service, portions that are smaller than before, and more spotty, inattentive service. How many times must a man get up to fill his own water glass?
Above from left: Chris, Tawn, Big Michael, Marc, and Wit. Would you believe that Michael specifically wanted to eat pizza here because he can’t find any good pizza in Hong Kong?
This weekend we have several errands to run. For starters, we need to get a jump-start for the car because somebody left the interior light on after we returned home Wednesday night and the battery is dead. No names, no accusations… we’re in this together, right?
As has been pointed out to me by several people who came to my blog by way of airliners.net (including this parody by Stipica), I have been remiss in writing and posting reports chronicling my airborne adventures over the past year and more.
Starting to catch up, I have finally posted the full trip report from the elaborate March 2007 trip Tawn and I took that included long layovers in Nartia, Toronto and Hong Kong as well as official stops in San Francisco and Kansas City. The first part of the trip report is here and the second part of the trip report is here.
More airplane geeky than travelogue, although with additional detail about the stop in Narita town in Japan.
After some political interruptions, let’s return to the second part of my trip to the land of honey – the literal translation of Bangnamphung, the location of the nearby weekend floating market.
The floating market isn’t really a “floating” market. Instead, it is a weekend market built alongside the khlong (canal) that may have at one point years ago had some vendors in boats but which eventually was developed by well-meaning local officials into a destination for local tourists.
It is still a fun place to visit, but isn’t the quaint local market that you might envision. Still, there aren’t too many foreigners there. I did see one other but I pushed him into the water so there wouldn’t be any competition.
Some areas of the market sell crafts and products, others sell fresh fruits and vegetables, but most of the market space is dedicated to prepared foods. This is because, as any Thai will tell you, there is absolutely nothing more fun to do than eat! Eat in a group and you’re in an even higher plane of heaven.
Below, Khun Tawn borrows my straw hat as he prepares to chow down.
Here’s a guide to our culinary explorations. First, we enjoyed that tasty snack that thrills your tongue, pak pbed. Literally translated, “duck mouth” or grilled duck beak. Let’s get a closeup of that beauty:
Here’s one of several vendors grilling the delicacy, proof that you can eat pretty much every last part of a duck except the quack.
And did Paul try one? Despite the pose, I wouldn’t count on it! Aori, however, thinks they are the best thing in the world, or pretty darn close to it. They taste smoky and the beak is edible albeit crunchy. The tongue (still intact) is supposed to be the best part. As my paternal grandmother used to say, to each his own.
Moving on to other delights, we have hoy tod or fried mussels. Normally fried in a batch with scrambled eggs, this vendor did a little play on tradition by frying an individual mussel in a half-moon shaped khanom khrug pan with a little egg to make versions of the original dish. Tawn didn’t feel like it was an improvement.
We also had some khao klug gapii, friend rice with shrimp paste served with a variety of condiments including lime, cucumbers, shallots, green beans, chili, scrambled eggs, green mango, dried shirmp, and sweet and sour pork sauce.
Turning to some more traditional Thai foods, here is som tam, the ubiquitous green papaya salad that is crunchy, sweet, vinegary, salty and spicy all at once. A fixture of northeastern Thailand, it has been adopted by Bangkokians as a de facto official dish in part because so many people who live in the Big Mango are from the northeast of Thailand.
Something you can find in nearly every culture, fried chicken wings. I don’t know what they use to season them, but these were incredible.
Our little culinary tour included some flavors of Muslim Thai food, predominately from the south of the Kingdom but brought into the local culinary lexicon by the many small pockets of Muslims who live in and around Khrungthep. Here is gai satay, chicken skewers served with a peanut sauce. The onions and cucumbers, pickled in rice wine vinegar, provide a clean contrast to the sweet richness of the dipping sauce.
Below, the satay vendor prepares an endless supply of satay served with toasted white bread. Note the way the fans are rigged to blow the smoke and smell away from the tables but towards potential customers.
The tables were tightly nested together and this young man behind us almost had to climb over us to get out to buy some ice cream.
This homemade ice cream is made from fresh young coconuts that are locally grown with the scoops served in pieces of the shell that still have shreds of the coconut flesh attached.
Chatting with his family, they encouraged him to try speaking whatever English he has learned in school, but I couldn’t get so much as a “hello” out of him.
Below: Yes, there is actually something floating at the floating market. Here a vendor grills khao niyaw ping, literally “grilled sticky rice” wrapped in a banana leaf and filled either with baked taro root or baked banana.
Actually, the guy doing the grilling is the husband of one of the ladies sitting at the stall onshore and conducting transactions. How he got stuck in the boat, I don’t know, but at least he was in the shade and there was a little breeze along the water.
One final food item was kai nokgrata nam siiyuu, grilled quail eggs (they are boiled first otherwise they would take forever to cook on the grill) served with soy sauce.
After eating our fill and far beyond it, we wandered around the market to see what else was interesting. We saw these seed pods called teen bet naam, which look like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Here I am standing on one of the concrete pathways built above the marshy ground.
The market also included a park area with public karaoke. Anyone was invited to sing and, judging from Tawn’s reaction below, greater discretion should be used before people go on stage and inflict their voices on others.
Despite the lush local atmosphere, the latest security systems are installed to help the police keep an eye on all corners of the market.
Walking back along the khlong to the main road where we would catch motorbikes back to the pier, we saw a group of local children playing in the water and diving from the bridge and the water pipe. Once I started taking pictures and they saw they had an audience, all sorts of derringdo ensued.
On the ferry ride back across the Chao Phraya River, I took these shots of two youngsters:
Lovely helmet, huh? I can’t imagine what good it would do him on the back of a motorcycle but it is the thought that counts, right? Whoops! That was very “naive farang” of me. I should let Thailand be Thai.
That concludes our trip to the land of honey. And, I’ll have you know, I did return home with two bottles of unpasteurized local honey to add to my morning oatmeal.
christao408 