Bangkok Glutton

Tom yum soup at Siriporn Pochana

People have asked me why I bother to have a blog if I can’t be bothered to update it on a regular basis. My answer is that there are few other places where I can rant to my heart’s content without being interrupted by someone who has their own things to rant about. I don’t care about what is bothering them. I only want to focus on me.

My first rant today has to do with how people commonly mischaracterize George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series — *look, you can scroll to the bottom and figure out where to get the soup in the photo above, serious nerd stuff is going on right now zzzzzz* — as “nihilistic” and “dark”, a “real world” version of  a high fantasy world, replete with the grit and grime of our own terrible reality. These people are idiots.

These people are idiots because, um, maybe you haven’t heard, but the story isn’t finished yet. This would be akin to getting bummed out by “Cinderella” because her sisters ripped up her mother’s dress and now she’s crying and oh how sad is Cinderella, she never catches a break. How bleak this story is! How unnecessarily violent! I am disturbed by the unrelenting darkness! Also, I am outraged at the objectification of Cinderella in a tattered dress. Where is her sense of agency?

There’s a whole other half to this story that George R.R. Martin has yet to tell (some day). A whole bunch of other people are going to die, and secondary/tertiary characters have to come and go, the butterfly effects from their actions somehow resulting in some crazy and important repercussions that will end up getting edited out of the television series or ascribed to Bronn because he’s just so entertaining you guys. Can I go off on a sub-rant from the main rant? I am shocked at how many people don’t bother to read the books, and think that the television series is what really happens. “Oh, every one you care about dies unnecessarily and for shock value,” people invariably say. That really drives me up a wall. It’s a cascade of dumb opinions that are stoopid because they aren’t mine.

These pat responses to complicated things, these conclusions reached wholesale by committee, this is what is killing us. I get it: we are barraged with information every day, and we have to curate what stays in our brain. Vikings is on at 8? OK, stay. Pick up toilet paper because we have none left? Oops, you’re out. Examining things ourselves — even when we can’t even figure out what to have for dinner tonight, much less what to believe — is never easy. But by reflection and analysis, by thinking things through, we would be less likely to come up with stupid stuff. Like creamy tom yum soup.

Someone did it first, probably by doctoring their indifferent spicy lemongrass broth by adding condensed milk to the pot and calling it a day. The result was not only creamy and sweet, it also hid any problems with the soup itself. Score! Soon people were using regular milk, or splashes of coconut milk, or cream, or anything else that would ease the natural bite of the chili and lime and completely blanket over the flavor of the natural herbs. This is a soup that a lot of people like, but it is not tom yum soup. It’s something else, with a completely different flavor profile.

Tom yum soup is, to me, one of the most genuinely Thai dishes in the entire repertoire. You use a Thai cooking method — boiling — and infuse your water with herbs which not only smell great, but are supposed to have medicinal properties too. Later, when your “broth” is made, you throw in your protein and wait for it to cook. It sounds easy to do, but it’s not easy to pull off, because the result can be a bland, unappealing mess (trust me). It’s really hard to make a good tom yum. It’s even harder to make a great one.

Siriporn Pochana (152 Soi Mahannop, 02-224-1287) is known for its barbecued and crispy pork, but that’s only part of the reason why people stand in line for a table at lunchtime. Their tom yum soup (with nam sai, or clear broth) draws enough fans that it’s a matter of course that, when we sit down at our table, our server automatically assumes we will order a bowl. When it comes — obviously doctored with some roasted chili paste (nam prik pao) and based on a fish broth — it’s thick with chunks of sea bass and fish eggs, smelling of lemongrass and makrut lime leaves and seafood, steaming and welcome with a heaping plate of rice. Yeah, there are probably other things to think about after lunch. But it makes everything better at that moment, and that is what food is supposed to do.

Beef khao soy at Lamduan Faham

It is commonly believed that men think about sex every 7 seconds — which amounts to about 8,000 times a day. This is actually not true. According to an Ohio State University study published in the Journal of Sex Research (?), men “only” think about sex about 19 times a day … just a little more than food (18) and sleep (11). Women, meanwhile, think about sex half as often as men, but apparently also think about food and sleep less as well, which begs the question: what are all these women thinking about? Actual work?!

Food takes up a lot of my own brainpower (sleep comes in second). It took me a long time to realize that people aren’t thinking of their next meal as they are eating their current one. I don’t think the preoccupation with food is out of some misplaced sense of duty. Food keeps me from focusing on all the other stuff, like whether I’m a bad mother, or why does the world seem like it’s imploding, or what am I doing with my life. It’s the filter through which I’d prefer to interact with the world. Eating my feelings is my happy place.

Friday

Chiang Mai is one of my favorite places in the world to eat my feelings. So when I arrive late on a Friday, the first thing I do is head into town for something delicious, easy, not too filling, and, most importantly, quick. This usually means khao tom, or rice porridge. One of the more popular fish porridge places in Chiang Mai is S. Sriracha (186/2-3 Kampangdin, 053-449-149), just a few doors down from perennial favorite Midnight Fried Chicken (or Sticky Rice, or Fried Pork) on a road once known as Chiang Mai’s red light district. As is the case with most Thai-style fish porridge, the fermented brown bean dipping sauce is the most important component, and here it doesn’t disappoint: bags of salty flavor, but with a  chili kick.

Saturday

The next day, I am desperate to have some bona fide Northern Thai food, so we trek to Huen Jai Yong (64 Moo 4, San Kamphaeng Road, 086-671-8710), which I’ve eaten at and written about many times before, but why experiment when you know what you want? I get almost giddy when the food comes to the table: deep-fried bits of pork belly accompanied by grilled green chili dip, homemade fermented sour pork sausage, a pickled mustard greens stew flavored with tamarind juice, sort of like the Northern Thai version of collard greens (pak gad jaw), a minced, pounded salad of fresh Northern vegetables (saa pak), succulent stuffed Northern Thai sausages (sai oua) thick with turmeric, and of course mounds of sticky rice.

There was also a special of the day, a chili dip of freshwater fish, cooked and then shredded:

Sunday

We finished off the trip the day after with the requisite stop for khao soy — probably Chiang Mai’s most famous dish, and the dish with the most muddied history. Some people will say it is adapted from a Burmese dish, while others say it’s a Chinese-Muslim specialty, and still others (mostly Malaysians and Singaporeans, I suspect) who believe it is derived from laksa. If you ask the people at Lamduan Faham (the original, at 352/22 Charoen Rat Road, 053-243-519), they will say their ancestor (the restaurant’s namesake) invented it by simply tipping fresh coconut milk into a bowl of noodles before serving it to her coconut-loving customers from Bangkok. Whatever its origin, the dish at Lamduan is still my very favorite, thanks to its flavorful, rich broth, stewed for hours from pork bones.

Grilled river prawns Ruanthai Goong Pao

For whatever reason, I’ve been going through all my old things, combing through high school and college mementoes for no reason other than to delay doing real work. Aside from the occasional wince-inducing photo with Ill-Chosen Boyfriends 1-5, I stumbled on a treasure trove of music — or, at least it would be a treasure trove if I still had a cassette player, because I don’t have one, and haven’t seen one since about 1999.

Tapes. Lots and lots of tapes, in a blue zip-up Case Logic container, remember those? Mix tapes, too, because that was how people showed their love back then. It was the music I listened to from roughly 13-17 — the best music of our lives, at a time when it mattered most to us, before we got really busy or our tastes corrupted by boyfriends who preferred classic rock. I would argue that the music of 13-17 is the music we love most. Even if it is New Kids on the Block, or Spice Girls, or whatever else you are too cool to admit to now. You will always secretly love this music most.

Finding those tapes was a blessing and a curse, because it inevitably led to … where the hell are the rest of my tapes?! Where is my Kate Bush “Hounds of Love,” or my XTC “Skylarking”, or even my China Crisis — stuff I listened to nonstop along with the Replacements and my “Pretty in Pink” soundtrack. What happened to REM’s “Murmurs”? Who took my Bauhaus? And how the f#$k did I get four copies of Pearl Jam’s “Ten”?!

River prawns are the mix tapes of Thai cuisine. Bear with me here. They are like foie gras to French food, caviar to the Russians, hamburgers to the USA. They are, inevitably, the favorite food of Thais, secretly or not: big, juicy, flavorful, adaptable to nearly every Thai treatment and ubiquitous if you aren’t too picky.

That’s the bad thing about them, too. Because, while you can get them anywhere, even Chiang Rai, even down the road from your house at the corner next to the gas station, it’s not the best. No, the best you can get is in Ayutthaya. Really. Every Thai knows this. The best grilled river prawns in the country are in Ayutthaya, the old capital of Siam before Bangkok, and still the unofficial capital of all that is prawn-related. And, in Ayutthaya, the best grilled prawn restaurant is arguably Ruan Thai Goong Pao (1/2 Moo 4, Wat Cherng Lane, Tambon Ratchakram, 035-367-730). So when my friends Nat and Cha invite me for a lunch a mere 18 songs’ ride away, of course I will say yes.

Stir-fried morning glory with garlic and chilies

It’s easy to say that anything tastes good as long as the dipping sauce is decent, and that saves a lot of Thai seafood restaurants all over the country. But when the prawns (and I use the word “prawns” because “shrimp” doesn’t really convey the size of these things) don’t really need the dipping sauce, that is something special. They come to the table hot, halved, and barely opaque, meant to be pried — with difficulty — from their shells in a way that makes it impossible for you not to splatter your neighbor. The orange goo in the head, meanwhile, is supposed to be mixed, painstakingly, with each grain of rice on your plate, so that everything is coated in shrimp head. Nat and Cha look askance at my attempts to dab the top of my rice with the goop like butter on a cobbler, but I can’t help it: shrimp goo is just not my thing. But if you are Thai, or truly know Thai food, that is the way you are supposed to eat all your river prawns.

It’s not just about river prawns: there is the obvious tom yum, or spicy lemongrass soup with seafood, and shrimp baked, Chinese-style, in a pot with glass noodles

along with thick, juicy lotus stems stir-fried with surprisingly plump prawn legs.

But if you go without having a single grilled river prawn, just go ahead and buy the ticket out of Thailand right now. Because that is ridiculous, the equivalent of owning four copies of Pearl Jam’s “Ten”.