Few of us have bodyfat percentages in the low single digits, ripped abs, and toned glutes that look even better in spandex than they do naked. So believe me when I say this entry isn’t intended to poke fun at someone who is a bit flabby in the nether regions. It is about something that is wrong, something I saw as I was walking down the street Sunday morning. Wrong in terms of “that’s not how a foreigner should be dressing in Bangkok.”
As I was walking from the Skytrain station towards Sukhumvit Soi 2, a farang (westerner) woman went zipping by me on a microscooter – you know, one of those skateboard-like vehicles with a tall handle. My first thought was, oh, what an interesting way to get around. When I noticed what she was wearing I quickly reached for my camera. It’s a bit hard to see the scooter as she’s blocking it, but I think this picture tells the story pretty fully:
What’s wrong here? As evidenced by the glances the woman is getting from the Thai women, what’s she’s wearing isn’t really… street-appropriate, shall we say. Unless you are a street walker, which I assume she’s not. Much too sheer and revealing for running out and about on a Sunday morning in Bangkok. Even if she was on the way to the gym (she stopped at the Starbucks around the corner, if you must know), some cover-up is called for. This isn’t the type of culture that goes for bare shoulders and revealing, tight-fitting outfits.
There’s a new restaurant in the neighborhood, one about which I’m excited to write just as soon as I can get some pictures of their food. Eating there, I enjoyed a Burmese style stewed pork dish that was resplendent with ginger and it got me thinking about stewed pork. Since we were in the midst of some drizzly weather that seemed stew appropriate, I sought out some recipes and settled on one for braised pork with star anise and ginger.
Star anise is one of my favorite spices, its evocative aroma reminding me of a big bowl of Vietnamese phở even if the actual dish in which I’m smelling it is unrelated, like this stew.
I took chunks of boneless pork butt (which is actually the shoulder – go figure) and after browning them, simmered them for a few hours in a mixture of ginger, garlic, soy sauce, stock, a little bit of vermouth, and honey with a few star anise and a cinnamon stick thrown in. Once the pork was so tender it fell apart with a nudge, I added some bok choy and let that cook for about five minutes before serving it with a nice scoop of organic jasmine rice. What a delicious meal. For those of you who don’t like pork, this recipe would go wonderfully with beef, lamb, or even chicken.
Last week our weather was a little cool. Well, relatively speaking. Several days were overcast and drizzly all day long, more Seattle-looking than our usually rainy season weather which owes more to Midwestern summer thunderstorms than anything else. It seemed an appropriate time to cook some warm, hearty comfort food, so I dug up a recipe for Mexican Black Bean Chili and made it in a Monday night meal along with some buttermilk cornbread muffins and a tasty red cabbage and apple slaw.
Beans are super-healthy, incredibly inexpensive, and easy to use. Make a large batch and freeze up the extras so you can thaw them out and make a fast and easy weeknight dinner like this one. This chili uses chopped onions and peppers (I added some carrots, too, as I had some on hand), and plenty of cumin, lime juice, chopped cilantro, and dried chipotle pepper to add a nice kick. One thing I add that isn’t in the recipe is a few tablespoons of cornmeal. I add then to the aromatics as they are sauteeing in a little bit of oil. This creates a roux that thickens the chili and adds a nice flavor, too.
To garnish, I used a little leftover homemade salsa and avocado cilantro lime cream sauce from fish tacos a few nights earlier.
The slaw is a nice alternative to the usual green cabbage slaw. Not only does this offer more vitamins, it also has more flavor. The recipe is based loosely on the one from Blue Smoke BBQ but I play around with it. For starters, I leave the peel on the apples (more fiber and flavor) and slice them thin instead of chunks, which adds more visual interest to the dish. Additionally, I play around with their dressing recipe, reducing the mayonnaise, using apple cider vinegar for their white balsamic, leaving out the chilies, and adding some nigella seed. Sitting alongside a cornbread muffin, I think it is quite pretty.
The combination makes for a very tasty and very healthful meal. To top it off, chili is one of those dishes that benefits from a night or two in the refrigerator, so it made even nicer leftovers later in the week!
For my friends in America, a brief request for your action:
The big Senate vote on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which will actually be a vote on invoking cloture on the Defense Authorization bill that contains it, will be on Tuesday. Some senators who once supported DADT repeal are starting to flip-flop, making the outcome of the vote uncertain.
Please take the time to contact your senators and let them know that it is time to repeal this discriminatory policy that serves only to undermine our soldiers and diminish troops readiness at a time when we can least afford it. Military and defense leaders agree that DADT serves no rational purpose.
Thanks for making your voice heard and please share the news with your friends and neighbors.
This weekend, Tawn turned 35 years old. Hard to believe that this is the eleventh of his birthdays I’ve celebrated. Because it fell on Friday, we had a couple of days to celebrate this (what he considered to be a milestone) event.
Tawn and I first met in January 2000 while I was en route to Thailand on holiday. We stayed in touch over that year, with him visiting me in San Francisco several times. In September 2000, I returned for another visit, to help him celebrate the quarter-century mark in his life. The evening of his birthday, we gathered with his friends in a riverside restaurant somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
A shot from Tawn’s 25th birthday.
At the time, I remember it being a loud, difficult to follow gathering as his friends were gossiping in Thai and having a good time. While most of them had studied overseas and all of them spoke English, I was for the most part on my own. Having just met most of his friends, I was struggling to keep up with who was who, what they did, where they knew Tawn from, etc.
Now, a decade later, most of these same people are still in Tawn’s life and most of them were able to come over Thursday night for dinner.
Four of the people from the previous shot are in this picture. Can you tell which ones?
The friends and their husbands and children filled the house with laughter and energy. The two children (we were missing two who stayed home), ages 2 1/2 and 3, were exploring a house that is largely “do not touch!” and there are two more children who will be born before year’s end. Nowadays, I know who everyone is, what they do, and how they know Tawn. It is still hard to follow the conversations, though, since the gossip is filled with inside stories, slang, and multiple layers of simultaneous conversation.
When it came time to blow out the candles, Uncle Tawn was helped by two of our friends’ children, 3-year old Nam Ing and 2-1/2 year old JJ. Nam Ing is the spitting image of her mother, who is standing in the group shot above. JJ is tremendously shy, although he goes to an international preschool and has a surprisingly extensive English vocabulary when he works up the nerve to use it.
After the party, Tawn described how much he enjoys having these friends together as they are like family to him. I keep hoping we’ll see more of them and their children, having these images of weekly get-togethers where the children learn English from their Uncle Chris as we play games and draw and learn “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and other songs. We’ll see how that develops in the years to come.
Funny video above of Nam Ing and JJ “helping” blowing out Uncle Tawn’s birthday cake candles.
Friday evening we went with another group of friends to Soul Food Mahanakorn, a new restaurant that opened in our neighborhood just over a week ago. I’m very excited to write about this restaurant but need to go back on an occasion when I can really focus on photographing the food. Another of Tawn’s friends stopped by during the day with some homemade baked goods, including these peppermint frosted cupcakes that spelled out “Happy Birthday Tawn”. The restaurant staff arranged them on some serving boards for us.
Saturday morning we received a call from my parents, who wished Tawn and happy birthday and chatted with him for twenty minutes or so. I think Tawn, who enjoys the attention of others, felt a little overwhelmed about all the attention he received this weekend. Of course, next year should really be the year to celebrate as according to the Chinese culture (Tawn’s father’s side of the family is of Chinese heritage), birthdays that mark the completion of the 12-year zodiac cycles are the real milestones. I guess there’s a few months left to plan that.
This is turning into some sort of an Iron Chef thing where I get inspired by a certain ingredient or combination of ingredients and return to them day after day. In this case, I had pulled the lavender from the back of the cupboard and resolved that I had better start using it before it went bad, combined with a good price on lemons at the Gourmet Market at Emporium. Continuing on the theme, I decided to try a recipe for Lavender and Lemon Buttermilk Scones.
Now, buttermilk biscuits are one of my specialties, one of the few recipes that I can make (and actually follow the recipe!) from memory and that I can turn out consistently, time and time again. Scones and biscuits are relatives and the biscuits I make reminded a former British roommate of mine of scones, so I figure I can move from one to the other pretty easily.
The recipe I used was from the EatLocal blog on WordPress, but like many similar versions of the recipe I found online, this one was credited as being adapted from Leslie Mackie’s “completely fabulous” Macrina Bakery Cookbook, so that’s maybe where credit is really due.
Lemon Lavender Scones
2 cups flour 1/3 cup granulated sugar 1 tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 1 tsp baking soda 1 tbsp grated lemon zest 2 tsp dried lavender, divided use 4 tbsp chilled butter ½ cup nonfat yogurt ½ cup buttermilk ½ cup powdered sugar 1 tbsp fresh squeezed lemon juice
Heat oven to 400°F. In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda, lemon zest, and 1½ tsp of lavender.
Cut butter into pieces and cut into dry ingredients with a pastry cutter, or crumble in with your fingers. Separately, whisk together yogurt and buttermilk. Combine wet and dry ingredients to form a dough that will be wet and sticky.
Turn dough out onto a floured surface and knead a few times, then shape into a square about 1′ thick. Using a kitchen knife, cut the dough into eight triangles. (As you can see, I used a biscuit cutter for a round shape.)
Transfer to an oiled baking sheet (I just used parchment paper instead of oiling and brushed the tops of the scones with cream) and bake 20 minutes, or until scones are golden brown.
Remove from oven and cool on baking sheet. Meanwhile, dissolve powdered sugar in lemon juice and mix in ½ tsp lavender, then drizzle over scones.
I wasn’t terribly patient – we were hungry and had a condominium juristic meeting to attend – so I put the sugar-lemon glaze on while the scones were warm, so instead of glazing it just absorbed. Still, they tasted really good. The tops also cracked, which leads me to believe I should have turned the oven down a little. My oven is a convection and I think you’re generally supposed to cook at a slightly lower temperature but I don’t always heed this advice.
Anyhow, hope you enjoy these scones as you begin your weekend!
Nearly two weeks ago I made a greek yogurt panna cotta for a brunch dessert. Since then, I have done some cooking with lavender and lemons. Looking in my refrigerator, I saw that there was some yogurt left as well as some more lemons on the counter and plenty of lavender, so I decided to revisit the panna cotta but this time with lavender and lemon as the flavoring.
I added lavender to the cream and sugar mixture, brought it to a near-boil, and then let the lavender steep for two hours off the heat. Afterwards, I strained the flowers and reheated the cream. Taking it off the heat again, I dissolved some hydrated gelatine into it, then whisked the yogurt in.
For fun, in addition to putting it in ramekins that could be unmolded onto a plate, I poured some of the mixture into shot glasses. These were put in the refrigerator overnight to set.
The next day, I made another mixture with lemon juice, sugar, and gelatine. This was poured on top of the panna cotta and allowed to set for a few hours. Upon eating it, you had a sweet-tart lemony jelly on top of the lavender panna cotta. Quite nice and it makes for interesting presentation. A garnish of mint would have been nice, too, but I didn’t have any.
It is rainy season here in Thailand and true to norm, September is proving to be the wettest month. Almost every evening we have heavy rains here in Bangkok and we’re even having several days with on and off showers. The air is cooler than normal, which is nice, but the humidity hasn’t been below 65% in two months. Still, I prefer rainy season to the hot season.
Here’s an audio clip I recorded last night about midnight after the rain had stopped. Various creatures are croaking and chirping in the background as the occassional drop falls from one palm frond to the next.
I know pride is one of the seven mortal sins, so I’m going to try to write this entry in the least prideful way possible. Going through my photos of food I’ve cooked this year, I thought there were several pretty pictures so I posted them all as a Facebook album. When I was looking at the main page of the album, I was pretty satisfied with the way it looked.
Looks pretty professional, right? Of course, looks can be deceiving! But since they are all about food, I’m not sure if the sin I’m committing is more one of pride or one of gluttony.
Limes are a popular fruit in Thai cooking, are plentiful, and are generally inexpensive. Lemons, on the other hand, are none of these. In fact, there is no word in Thai for “lemon” – they just use the same word as lime and, when necessary, say “yellow lime” to distinguish. That’s one reason you are likely to order an iced lemon tea only to remark at how much it tastes like lime. But I recently found a reasonably good price on lemons, about half their regular cost, so bought a dozen in order to try preserving lemons.
Preserved lemons are a staple of Moroccan and other Middle Eastern cuisines and provide a certain unique flavor that fresh lemons cannot provide. One food writer said that if you couldn’t find preserved lemons, it was better to substitute capers rather than fresh lemons, so different are the tastes. Curious, I decided to try preserving my own lemons, something that several recipes promised is easy to do.
The ingredient are simple: lemons, salt (I used sea salt from Samut Songkhram province), and spices – coriander seed, cloves, bay leaf, pepper corns, and cinnamon were recommended and I decided to add some cardamom pods, too.
After purchasing a Fido pickling jar at Muji and washing and sterilizing it, I cut about 1/4 inch off from each end of the lemon, making them flat. Then I cut them into quarters, slicing down almost the entire way but leaving the quarters connected at the bottom. I then liberally salted the insides of the slices.
After lining the bottom of the jar with a few tablespoons of salt, I mushed lemons in, alternating each layer of lemons with a generous sprinkling of salt and spices. I kept layering until the jar was tightly packed and then added the juice of two additional lemons to fill up the remaining space. Close the lid, shake a few times to help the salt dissolve, and that’s it.
Now all I have to do is wait. I’m supposed to leave the jar on the counter at room temperature for a week or so, and then can transfer the jar to the refrigerator for at least another three weeks before using. I’ll keep an eye on these and once they are complete, will write a follow-up entry.
After finishing this process, Tawn told me that we can buy Chinese preserved lemons (used in some Cambodian dishes among other things, I understand) at local markets here. But where would be the fun in just buying them?
christao408 
