Category Archives: Asia

by | 05/11/2014 · 3:21 pm

Just Ducky

Chinese-style duck at Ros Niyom

Chinese-style duck at Ros Niyom

Because it’s so hot, I’ve been even lazier than usual about getting out and about with the street food. It took a handful of text messages and maybe a phone call or two before my friend Chris could gently pry me off of my couch and into the real world, where people move around on sidewalks and take crowded Skytrain rides and, yes, even sweat. Although Chris swears that the temperature in Bangkok has only been hovering around the mid-to-late 30s (and where else can you say “only in the mid-30s”? Very few places), I swear this city is the hottest its ever been, and that it’s foolish to even pretend to go about your daily business, because the world is crumbling down around our very ears (earthquakes? A tornado? Never before in Thailand, in my lifetime).

A good meal will make your forget these things momentarily. So will a good drink, but it’s noon, and things are not (yet) as dire as all that. So when Chris takes me to the far end of Nana (past the entertainment complex, past the various Indian restaurants, and what appears to be a fairly new gigantic Subway), we end up in the kind of relatively quiet, sedate neighborhood that you’d expect to find much further from the pulsing heart of the city’s nightlife center. Right before the street dead ends into a factory sits the Thai-Chinese restaurant Ros Niyom (172-174 Sukhumvit 4 Nana Tai, 02-255-0991), an aharn tham sung (made-to-order) spot that specializes in pet palo, or duck braised in 5-spice sauce. You can tell this is what to order from the ducks hung from their necks in front, where a fairly taciturn lady silently dissects duck meat and skin for practically every table in the restaurant. And it’s not just the duck meat that’s in demand here: also a specialty, the congealed blocks of duck’s blood served swimming in a duck broth, its jelly-like texture contrasting with the sour chili sauce ladled over the top.

Duck blood in a bowl

Duck blood in a bowl

The essence of everything that is ducky, with a generously-sized plate of rice and maybe a stir-fried garlicky bitter gourd shoot or two, and you’ve got a substantial lunch that could see you safely to dinnertime. Throw in a couple of bowls of beef noodles, the highly-recommend hae gun (deep-fried shrimp dumplings) and a couple of beers, and you can just forget about venturing out  from under the safety of that restaurant awning for the next few hours, or, at the very least, until the next torrential downpour comes to take some of the bite out of this heat.

 

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, duck, food, restaurant, Thailand

by | 04/03/2014 · 4:32 pm

What’s Cooking: Nam Prik Hed

The finished product

The finished product

There is a scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” (have you ever heard of it?) where Julia Roberts (do you know who she is?) is having dinner at a fancy restaurant with Richard Gere (my mom’s boyfriend). This woman met Richard Gere the night before while wearing a tie-dyed dinner napkin and Woody Harrelson’s toupee from “True Detective”, and now he is taking her to a French restaurant with waiters and everything. That’s really realistic. And then this douchecanoe goes and orders the escargots, even though his date has no freaking clue how to use her cutlery and one of the dinner companions (the “hothead” grandson who plays polo) has clearly cottoned on to Richard Gere’s game and ordered a dinner salad. Why didn’t Richard Gere order her the salad too? Is he really that attached to the prix fixe menu? Isn’t he rich enough to order a la carte? That is the moment when I figured out this movie was complete horseshit. Let your hooker order her own meal, Richard Gere!

I was thinking about this because, well, there are lots of mealtime etiquette thingies that even I, with all the many many meals that I have eaten, have no clue about. When faced with the mushroom chili dip you see above, I did what I usually do and piled all the crap I could find onto my plate, crowned with a healthy heaping of aforementioned nam prik. My dining companions snorted in my face. “Steady on!” they basically said, in Thai. “That chili dip will still be there in a few minutes’ time”.

“Thais are very fastidious about their manners while eating,” said one person, trying to be nice. “That’s is the only thing Thais do properly”. (Again, horseshit).

Oh, but wait. Let me start at the beginning.

I love nam prik. But I am extremely lazy. So it’s rare that I will make my own, preferring instead to pester harried-but-obliging wet market vendors or darken the doorstep of the occasional Thai restaurant in order to get my chili dip fix. It’s just that there are so few dishes that are as immediate — spicy, tart, funky in that fermented, garbage-y, wrong-side-of-garlic sense that Thai food is known for — as this one. Strange, then, that it’s not such a well-known dish once you find yourself out of Thailand.

It’s also so pretty and deceptively obliging: that little dollop, that big taste. Always surrounded by its various little accomplices, all chosen to offset whatever chili dip you’ve decided to guzzle on that particular day: sweet silky tamarind (macaam), sharp peppery roasted banana pepper (nam prik num), the ubiquitous, funkier-than-George-Clinton shrimp paste (gapi), a pillar of the standard Thai meal. In fact, nam prik was such a go-to dish in Thailand that husbands were once said to choose their wives on the sound their mortars and pestles made when pounding out a particular dip (if this were the case today, I can confidently say I would never get married).

So when my friend Chin took me to Nakhon Pathom with the promise of a good meal and a cooking class, you could color me curious. I rarely take cooking classes, because a.) they remind me of the time I was in culinary school, where I was bad and not good and to which I was generally unsuited, and b.) I don’t like to listen for long enough to follow directions (which may explain a. Really, though, why cook and then not eat? Who cares about these so-called “customers”? Let’s not discuss cooking school ever again.) But at Oo Khao Oo Pla (a take on the Thai saying “Nai nam mee pla, nai na mee khao” or “There is fish in the water, there is rice in the fields” aka Thailand is a lucky land of bounty), the friendly chef is happy enough to chat with me as she gives her hand-picked mushrooms a quick stir-fry with sugar and garlic in the wok, and garnishes her thom kloang pla salid (sour soup with smoked dried fish) with freshly plucked tamarind leaves from the tree out back. Better yet, she lets me pound the nam prik hed (mushroom chili dip) into a paste on the dinner table, peppering her commentary on my poor working style with the occasional “pok pok pok” (the sound a mortar and pestle should ideally make).

Sacrificing my shirt to the cooking gods

Sacrificing my shirt to the cooking gods

 

So with her blessing, I’m giving you this recipe. A tip or two: when you are pounding the shit out of that chili mixture, make sure you do so with intent and malice. Pretend you are Mike Tyson in the ring. Thais may seem all smiley and happy-g0-lucky, but that is because they are getting all their aggressions out on their food.

My chili paste

My chili paste

Nam Prik Hed (makes 4 servings)

– 2 hed fang (large straw mushrooms), cut up

– 4 red bird’s eye chilies and 4 green bird’s eye chilies

– 1 green, 1 orange, and 2 red prik chee fah (chili peppers)

– 5 garlic cloves

– 4-5 shallots

In 1 tsp oil, fry garlic, shallots and sliced chilies in hot wok with mushroom pieces until “dry”, about 5 minutes.

It should look like this.

It should look like this.

 

Next, mix the dressing:

– 3-5 tsp fish sauce

– 2-3 tsp sugar

– juice from 2-3 limes

Or, if you are going the vegetarian route, substitute the fish sauce for light soy sauce and salt.

Mix to taste.

Pound your wok mixture with your mortar and pestle. Add “dressing” to taste.

Done!

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, chili dip, food, restaurant, Thailand

by | 02/24/2014 · 2:47 pm

Isaan foodie haven

Fish grilled in a salt crust at Jay Dang

Fish grilled in a salt crust at Jay Dang

It’s official: I’m in worry for my second book, which threatens to be stillborn in Singapore. It’s hard for me to point fingers, since it is supposedly all my fault. Remember that time when I thought signing a book contract and handing over control meant I could sit back and let other people do the work? Remember that? That was foolish, me. At least there is my non-existent writing career to fall back on. Silver linings!

Let’s look at more silver linings. Such as: a movie like Pompeii 3D exists. My lack of social life means I can finally grow a beard, just like I always dreamed of. And that there are still little pockets of unique, special foodie-dom in Bangkok, existing in spite of jams and disturbances and disorders. Hanging in there until the commotion dies down. In some cases, thriving.

Example: the Isaan neighborhood on Petchburi Road, next to Ratchathewi intersection and across the street from the mosque on Soi 7. Dwight Turner of bkkfatty.com told me about this place first; later, the very talented Isaan artist Maitree Siriboon took me here when I asked him where he ate when he got homesick. By day, it’s a grimy, slightly down-at-heel working class neighborhood where you’d expect to see a lot of hubcaps sold. At night, though, the strip suddenly lights up and the people come out like Isaan food-loving vampires, basking in the dusk and the neon lighting of the restaurant signs as they are switched on: Jay Orn, Jay Goy, Jay Dang. There may be a Loong (or “Uncle”) sandwiched in there somewhere.

But the aunties are the big ones, the favorites of the diners here — either transplanted Isaaners like Khun Maitree, or chili-seeking junkies like me. In that respect, this place doesn’t disappoint: hot, hot grated papaya salads peppered with pickled crab and sprinkled with fermented Thai anchovy juice; steaming vats of soup sporting an abundance of chicken feet, bright orange in its toxicity and nicknamed thom super (“super soup”). There are strips of pork liver and minced pork or chicken meat dressed in a spicy-tart dressing and a shower of mint leaves. And, if spice isn’t really your thing, there are old favorites like grilled chicken, sliced pork collar, and snakehead fish cooked over an open flame, stuffed with lemongrass stalks and kaffir lime leaves and coated in a salt crust so that when the skin is split open, the flesh stays wonderfully fragrant and tender. There is nothing like this dish when it is done right.

A shame about the dancing shrimp: live baby shrimp that are drizzled in a tart-spicy Isaan-style dressing and served to you, as is. It is baab (a sin) to eat them, as you are causing the suffering of untold little animals, but the experience — while horrifying — is unparalleled by anything else in Thai food. When I asked about this dish last week, and the tanks that used to be at every cooking station, they all said the protests had made bringing fresh live shrimp to Petchburi impossible. Good or bad? As with everything else, my feelings are mixed.

 

 

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Filed under Asia, Bangkok, Isaan