Author Archives: Bangkok Glutton

Memory is a tricky thing. I can tell you the names of all of Taylor Swift’s boyfriends, but I don’t remember if I wrote this post before; I could have sworn I did. If I have, sorry, but I’ve turned into one of those old women who repeats themselves over and over again, with you nodding your head and saying, yes, you told me that already. If not, then, well, that’s a first, at least in a while.

I had an Aunt Ton who is buried in the same cemetery as my Jiao Yai, whom I’ve mentioned before. Even though we are on different branches of the family tree, she would host me every time I was in Chiang Mai, and serve this delicious clear soup made tangy with pickled garlic juice. I think she enjoyed the fact that I could be so easily pleased. Me, being me, never got the recipe from her, or her cook. And then she passed away, and the recipe was lost forever.

So what was left for me to do, besides try to replicate it? (After all, I had a Northern Thai food chapter to fill out for our upcoming cookbook.) It was a clear soup, but too flavorful for gang jued. It didn’t smell like tom yum. And it didn’t have coconut milk like tom kha. It was either a tom kloang or a tom som, and because it had chicken wings in it, I opted for tom som, and substituted pickled garlic juice for the vinegar, adding tamarind and local tomatoes for extra acidity, just like they do in the North.

How did it go? It was absolutely delicious, if I say so myself. Of course, knowing Aunt Ton, she might have thought differently. But, as I said before, memory is a tricky thing, and my memory, for once, was ok with just playing along.

Jiao Ton’s Clear Chicken Wing Soup with Pickled Garlic

Serves 4

Prep time: 5 minutes                                      Cooking time: 30 minutes

• 1 lb (450 g) chicken wings
• Enough chicken stock (or hot water with a chicken bouillon cube) to cover the wings, about 2-4 cups (500-700 mL)
• 2 lemongrass bulbs, crushed
• 2 slices of galangal, crushed
• 4-8 makrut lime leaves
• 3-15 fresh chilies (goat or prik chee fah if your tolerance is low; jinda or bird’s eye if your tolerance is higher. If your spice level is very high, crush these chilies before using)
• 3-5 dried chilies (if your spice level is very high, chop these chilies before using)
• 8 cherry tomatoes
• 6-8 shallots, peeled
• 3 Tablespoons tamarind paste (macaam piek)
• 2-3 Tablespoons fish sauce
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 Tablespoons pickled garlic juice
• 3 Tablespoons pickled garlic (optional)
• 1 bunch fresh cilantro and scallions, chopped (for garnish)

First, dry-roast your aromatics in a pan: lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves, fresh and dried chilies, and shallots. Once the chilies and shallots get a little char, and the aromas get pronounced, you can take it off the heat (around 5 minutes) and set aside.

In a stock pot large enough to carry the chicken wings, add chicken stock (or water with bouillon cube, if using) over medium heat. Allow to reach a shimmering surface-level simmer before adding the roasted aromatics for a classic Thai-style infusion. Turn the heat up to medium-high and leave alone for a bit (5 minutes) to allow the flavors to commingle. Add the tops of the scallions too if you have them, because why not? Once the broth reaches a rolling boil, add tamarind, fish sauce, and salt. Taste for seasoning. It should be salty, herbal and tart.

With a spider or tongs, scoop out (or pick out) the aromatics, leaving maybe a chili or two and all of the shallots. Add chicken wings and cherry tomatoes and leave the soup alone for a bit so that the meat can cook (about another 10 minutes). The chicken wings are cooked once the meat starts pulling back from the top of the joint (shoulder). Add pickled garlic juice and, if using, pickled garlic. Taste for seasoning and adjust with more fish sauce and/or tamarind paste if necessary.

Since this was a dish served at a “royal” table, we’re going to remove the bones from the wings. Pick out the chicken and allow to cool in a bowl for a bit. Once you can handle the wings, take the meat off the bones; you’ve done your job right if the meat just falls away (it’s OK if it doesn’t). Put the meat back into the soup and stir. Taste for seasoning again. It should be tart, salty and a little sweet from the pickled garlic and shallots. Leave to simmer for a few minutes (around 5).

Turn off the heat and add the fresh cilantro and scallion garnish. We like a luxurious blanket of herbs, but you can just do a polite little sprinkle. Serve as part of a delicious Northern Thai meal, just like Jiao Ton did.

I recently read that a telltale sign of something written by AI is the inclusion of em dashes and colons — essentially, the way that I write. I am pretty sure that people (person) who have been here a while would never accuse me of resorting to ChatGPT, but I still want to explain to you why I write the way I write.

I’m no musician (obviously), but words to me are the melody. Punctuation marks are the percussion. One of my favorite percussionists is Stewart Copeland of the Police, and I like him because he is always surprising you with something that he does, even if it’s on a fairly simple song like “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” — a song I am fairly sure has been ruined by a romcom scene somewhere involving Nicole Kidman walking across the street or something.

But that is neither here nor there. I like my punctuation marks; I think they add texture. I hate commas that appear in the middle of a sentence that should be two sentences, that is just so irritating to me. I want to surprise … even if it’s not exactly right. If that’s how ChatGPT also wants to express itself, that’s out of my control. In fact, someone quite gleefully informed me a few months ago that ChatGPT can already write exactly like me, and that my services are no longer really needed. So there’s that.

But can ChatGPT do this transition? Meaning: there are the original and ChatGPT versions of food, too. In this case, I’m talking about noodles. Tom yum egg noodles, in fact.

I’ve written about Rungrueang before. There was once one noodle shop, which eventually morphed into two competing (but related) rivals. For whatever reason, both my family and my husband’s family simply favored the right-hand side shop, for no reason other than force of habit. The assumption was that they were both working off of the same original recipe. This remained the assumption until I revisited a couple of weeks ago.

The left hand shop has expanded to across the street, soon after it was awarded a Michelin Bib Gourmand. For that reason, it is considered the “superior” noodle shop, though both are packed at lunchtime. All of the hallmarks of the Michelin Bib Gourmand stop are there: diners lugging suitcases on their way to/from the airport, tense queues full of gimlet-eyed customers, harried waitstaff. To make things easier, there are the dreaded laminated menus (something I used to dread, but which are now at all the street food shops I used to champion). They make ordering easier, it’s true. My husband and I both ordered the tom yum noodles ruammitr (with everything) in broth, and the pork meatballs in broth on the side.

There is a tendency in Thai food to “specialize” one’s own dish with one’s own particular seasonings. My father was a big tinkerer who loved to make his own sauces with whatever he found on the table. You’ll also see it in big Thai group tours to a Western country, where “nam prik”, chili powder and Maggi sauce are employed with impunity. As a result, I have a few (posh) friends who refuse to season their own Western dishes, since this type of flavor customization is such a Thai trait. I believe that noodle shops are the reason why Thais are so free with seasoning things to suit their own palates.

But the “right shop” noodles come already seasoned. I added some pickled chilies because I am stubborn and need to do something, but it wasn’t really needed. The noodles are already salty and a bit sweet. The reason for this, I imagine, is because so many non-Thais are eating there, and they do not have that ingrained desire to mess around with everything. These noodles are meant for them.

To be fair, my husband and I ordered the exact same thing at the right-hand shop: bamee tom yum nam and luk chin moo. There were already differences on the (also laminated) menu, with a couple more side dishes than at the other shop. When the broth arrived, it had the addition of lettuce leaves to make it sweeter, a sort of (now) old-fashioned flourish. And the noodles were definitely made with the Thai predilection for tinkering in mind. I added fish sauce, lime juice, pickled peppers, and a little sugar. I found it more delicious, if only because I felt like I had a part in making it myself. Isn’t that why all Thais do this to noodles?

So which one is the ChatGPT and which one is the original? I leave that up to you. Time changes all of us, and progress renders us all obsolete in one way or another. Happily for the Thai noodle vendor, the making of good guay thiew has yet to become fully automated. Until then, we should celebrate every bowl that finds its way to us, already seasoned or not.

Thai tours are not like other tours. First of all, one must make sure that there is rice available somewhere everyday, or people will complain about not feeling full. A tangent to the first one: you have to book every Chinese restaurant in the area, at least once a day. And a tangent to that one: you have to stop at least once at the local Thai restaurant favored by your embassy, because that is what the “Global Thai” and “Kitchen of the World” assistance programs are all about. And then a tangent to even that one: this Thai restaurant must have karaoke.

I was nervous about going on this trip, because it wasn’t just me, or even just me and my family. It was me, my parents, my in-laws, and 20 of their closest friends from Chulalongkorn University 10 million years ago. Several people walked with canes, and more than a handful had titanium hip or knee replacements (which, incidentally, did not keep them from getting strip-searched by airport security). Some had dietary restrictions (meaning they didn’t like unfamiliar food) and, like true Thais, had brought their own packets of Mama, chili dips and bottles of Maggi. They had many needs, and rightly so. But our intrepid Thai tour guide, Mod X (yes that was his name), and Georgia (the country, not the state) were more than up to this challenge.

But first, the obvious: how to sell Georgian cuisine to older Thai people? Mod X appeared intent on trying to make Georgian food as similar as possible to Thai food, which meant lots of fish at every meal, rice, and of course soup to go with that rice. He passed out bowls of his own chili dips (this would change every day, from nam prik narok, or flaked “hellfire” dry chili dip) to nam prik mangda, chili dip flavored with mangda bug extract) and his own bottles of Maggi, with the red top (made from beef extract) instead of the yellow one (made from soybeans). Knowing that breakfast is usually comfort food, he would wake up early every morning to make khao tom (rice porridge) with all the fixings brought from home, also schooling the local cooks on how to make Thai omelets. He even went so far as to bring in his own green papaya, making his own som tum in the courtyard of one restaurant in a plastic basin.

There was also the requisite trip to the Thai restaurant (not once, but twice), in this case, aptly named Thai Curry.

But that cut down on a LOT of Georgian food. Eventually, after learning about our predilection for bread (and lots of wine), we were able to try what some people would term the “greatest hits” of Georgia. That meant khinklish, face-sized Georgian soup dumplings meant to be held by the stem (edible, but usually not cooked, and bad luck to eat) and bitten into, sipping the broth inside before enjoying the filling.

There was a mashed bean-filled pancake reminiscent of a quesadilla stuffed with refried beans, fresh out of the oven:

There were also pickles with every meal, which made me absolutely thrilled — I love sour pickles (sweet pickles are an abomination). One particular special pickle, apparently only available in the spring, was called jonjoli, similar to a caper berry and really delicious:

But the most popular dish ended up being none other than khachapuri, in this case Adjarian-style, in which the hot bread serves as a (delicious) boat-shaped receptacle by which you can scramble your own eggs and cheese together (or if they don’t trust you to do this properly, baking the egg completely through).

There are many types of khachapuri, incidentally: Gurian is crescent-shaped and stuffed with cheese and hard-boiled eggs; Imeretian is round and filled with cheese; Megruli is round and has even more cheese; and Meskhetian is layered and flaky. I haven’t even touched on the bread-y things that are offshoots of khachapuri. Needless to say, I gained 3 kg.

But there were things that weren’t so popular. There was satsivi, a stew made with walnuts and usually chicken, but which in this case was replaced by an extremely bony grilled fish:

But what I loved even more than the food (is that possible?) is Tblisi itself — yes, even the people, who have a ways to go to reach Thai-style “smooth as silk” service (the service was so brusque that my mother came to the conclusion that they were anti-Asian). I did not get the same feeling, but think “Chinese servers in a Kowloon tea parlor who are sick of dealing with tourists”. An acquired taste, perhaps.

The cobblestoned streets in the Old Town wind in ways you wouldn’t expect past places full of people celebrating and laughing, or simply playing music. Down one street I could distinctly hear someone playing complicated-sounding classical music — a professional hired by the cafe, I assumed, but in reality just a patron who quickly retreated to his table when he finished (who puts a piano out on the street in front of their cafe for no reason?)

Further along we hit a park, where a circle of guitar players — not busking, not looking for attention — started singing songs and strumming. It’s very Los Lobos-meets-Eastern Europe, and my husband’s aunts, suitably inspired, began to dance in the street.

“How old are you, grandma?” One of the guitar players asked from behind the gate.

“I am 86,” said Aunt Tui, the most vocal of us all. “And she is 89,” she added, pointing to her sister.

“God bless you all,” he said before he started playing again and they continued dancing for a while, eliciting smiles from passersby and their dogs (a city is either a cat city or a dog city, and Tblisi is definitely for the dogs). We would have a lot of challenging stuff in store for us later on, but at least Georgia on that day blessed us, and we blessed it back.