Retro-Blogging: Summer, Part 2

Told you I'd be back sooner than later! Unfortunately, the reason that I can afford to blog today is because school was canceled as many others are due to the fire disaster around San Diego County. I hope everyone and their families are safe and evacuated if necessary. Where I am located, visibility is fine but the air quality is bad. As soon as I step outside, I can smell the burning. This reminds me of the fire storm in 2003 when I was still at UCSD--I remembered that it was snowing ashes and burning debris, and school was canceled for 4 days. I am thankful that my friends and their families, despite the threats to their homes, are safely evacuated. Mr. Tall's office is also closed so we are both home intently glued to the news on TV. Please stay safe out there!

Continuing on from the last post of my summer in the Motherland: at the beginning of my trip, a girl friend of mine from UCSD had the opportunity to stay with me in Bangkok for a few days, so we took a boat tour through Chao-Praya River and visited the Koh Kret (Kret Island) community. Koh Kret is known for their traditional, handmade pottery and delectable sweets. One of my favorite things that you cannot find anywhere else but Thailand is Ka-Nom Buong. It's sort of like a crispy, mini-pancake filled with coconut cream and Foy-Tong (golden and very sweet dessert made of egg yolks and sugar). The first four pictures show how they make these delicious morsels.

At last, the Ka-Nom Buong are gently folded into a taco-shaped, bite-size dessert.

As we rode around the Choa-Praya, we made various stops around the Koh Kret community. We also saw that the floating community and lives subsisting on the river are still vital in this day and age in Bangkok. We made a stop at small shop with various homemade handicrafts as well as fish cakes--Tod Mun Pla. The fish cakes are uniquely Thai because they are spiced with curry paste and served with the sweet chili sauce vinaigrette and cucumber.

The fish cake lady frying up the hand-formed fish cakes in the ginormous wok.

These fish cakes are served hot in a banana leaf bowl and topped with fried sweet basil.

One of the truly traditional Thai delicacies is Kao-Cher, or rice in iced Jasmine water. I know that sounds really weird, but it's really quite refreshing and delicious. The restaurant along the river that we visited was renowned for its Kao-Cher and traditional Thai desserts. It was actually my first time eating Kao-Cher and I really enjoyed it. The cooked rice are served with iced water that has been fragranced with Jasmine flowers. The rice is served with a variety of sweet and savory sides such as Mee-Krob (sweet crispy noodles), fried Kra-Pi (fermented shrimp paste), and pickled vegetables.

The desserts, including the one that is inside the Ka-Nom Buong, are made with egg yolks, flour and sugar and cooked in a large copper wok filled with syrup. The desserts are all hand-made. Unfortunately, when we got there, they had already finished the batch for the day (we went on a week day so it wasn't too bustling) so we could only see the finished products. They also make a variety of other desserts that you can take and enjoy at home. Because such desserts are so popular, there are other shops that hand-make their desserts in massive quantities.

The Tong-Yip is one of the egg yolk-sugar desserts. The dessert names have "tong" which means "gold" in Thai because of the golden yellow color of the sweets.

The neatly folded bunch of golden goodness are the Foy-Tong, resting before they are packaged. Here are some of the other beautiful desserts there:

Tong-Aek: bite-size sweets made of ground yellow mung beans and topped with gold leaves.

Sum-Pun-Nee: similar ingredients as Tong-Aek but colorful and usually molded with flower imprints.

The next stop we made was at a dessert house that produced a massive amount of Foy-Tong and Tong-Yod. One of the really cool things there were these old-fashioned candy that my mom was really excited to see. From old-fashioned gum to candy bars, my mom grabbed a few things for herself and my grandma to enjoy. The mass production of the desserts was really amazing. They are all still handmade but with the help of some interesting small machinery to help drop the Foy-Tong and the Tong-Yod into the boiling syrup. They sell kilos upon kilos of these desserts to retailers in Bangkok and all around central Thailand. We bought a kilo of the Foy-Tong to share with the family. The desserts are delicious but are quite sweet so one person could only eat so much before you are overdosed with sugar.

The Tong-Yod machine dropping bite-size rounds into the boiling syrup and then transferred into a resting pot.

The Foy-Tong man handling a load of the golden strands desserts.

Man, this entry is getting quite lengthy. I shall end with a handful more pictures from the rest of the trip to Koh Kret. I just realized that I took so many pictures from this trip that you'll all have to read about it for the next entry or so!

Handmade pottery before being fired up at Koh Kret.

Deep-fried flowers at a vendor.

One of my favorite non-foodie pictures: a pagoda at a Koh Kret temple.

I shall leave you with floating vendors serving noodles on the riverside. More good eats in Thailand to come!

Enjoy,
Little Miss Contrary

Retro-Blogging: Summer, Part 1

This post is long overdue ... I have been meaning to post about yet another fantastic trip to Thailand this past summer, but law school has been life-consuming that I can't seem to find time to do much else. But here is a photographic summary of what I ate and enjoyed in the Motherland:

One of my first dinners at home: kao lad nah gai--simple and hearty chicken, mushroom and coagulated chicken blood (it's good--don't let the sound of it scare you!) gravy over rice

Moo satay--pork satay (you can hardly find chicken satay--pork is the meat of choice), served with peanut sauce and cucumber vinaigrette

Grass jelly dessert with lotus root, sweet plum, and ginkgo nuts--really cool and refreshing on a hot, humid day, which is practically everyday in Bangkok

There is a family-operated noodle house (which is literally in their house) nearby our house, where they hand-make Chinese noodles and use fresh crab meat in their absolutely simple and delicious dish.

One of my childhood favorite dishes: kao mun gai--"greasy" rice (rice cooked in chicken broth) with fried chicken, served with a side of sweet chili sauce and chicken soup

Yum Som-O: pomelo salad with shrimp and dry roasted Thai chilis (a Blue Elephant recipe)

Ka-nom Jeen (rice noodles) and red curry with chicken, coagulated chicken blood, and winter melon

Fresh mung-kut--mangosteen

Miang-kum: a traditional Thai snack of leaf wrap with peanuts, lime, red onion, ginger, chili, dried shrimp, toasted coconut, and topped with a sweet yet savory sauce

Noodles with stewed duck meat and Thai iced tea--a perfect lunch

Noodles soup with stewed duck

Kanom-Krok--coconut milk custard

Various cocktail desserts at a wedding

Foodie break: pwong ma-lai--traditional flowers for any Thai auspicious occasions

Meals on wheels--almost!

The traveling pan, frying up some glorious chives cake and dumpling

Coconut ice cream topped with taro, sweet sticky rice, and toddy palm seed

I've got many more pictures to share but I'll just end this first anthology of pictures with my I'm-a-selfish-sweets-addict-I-can't-just-choose-one-flavor birthday cake. I'll be back soon with more, I promise!

Enjoy,
Little Miss Contrary

The Land of Thai, Part 2

It's been too long since my last post, but I must blog about the rest of my culinary adventures in the motherland. One of the things I miss for breakfast in Thailand is kao tom or rice porridge. The thing I most enjoy about it is that you have a variety of side dishes, or kub kao, to eat with the porridge. My personal favorite must be my grandma's steamed minced pork with broth, or moo nuung. Eating it was so nostalgic; I was reminiscing about my childhood in Bangkok when my grandma used to have to run around and feed me, or distract me to eat while I pretend to do the dishes. Anyway, this time around I willingly sat down to have porridge breakfast with moo nuung, and a variety of small sides--salted egg, soy fermented tofu (tasty stuff!), preserved Chinese cabbage, and pork sung.

Side note: I have a random story about pork sung. On my flight back from Bangkok, one the meals that was served on the plane was breakfast and I had chosen the Chinese-style option, which was with porridge. One of the things that came with the meal was a packet of pork sung; however, on the packaging, it said that it was "pork floss"! I wouldn't necessarily associate pork and floss together, but it's just funny when some Chinese items are translated into English.

Anyway, back to Thailand. My mom, as usual, drove me around every where. Ironically, I don't particularly enjoy the offerings of McDonald's stateside, but one of the things that I always have to eat when I'm back in Thailand is the Pineapple Pie! The pie "crust" is ultra crispy and always piping hot; the filling has small chunks of sweet pineapple. On another excursion, my mom and I went to a bustling shopping spot of Soi Lalaisup, which literally means the street to dissolve your wealth. Also know as Khang Bank (because it is physically next to the Bangkok Bank), it is always busy with various food, clothing and miscellaneous vendors.

By the food court area, there is a lady whose vendor has a large selection of various Thai desserts. From coconut kanom, or sweets, like tah koh (right corner of the picture), and sweet sticky rice with banana and black beans wrapped in banana leaves, to the large pot full of diamond-shaped sweet bean dessert. But my all time favorite has to be kanom quey, or literally green sweets (they're in the tray closest to the vendor's hands). A couple of vendors away was the banana lady who had all sorts of, what else, bananas! She had peeled, grilled banana, barbecued banana, and, of course, banana with coconut milk. The Thai bananas are slightly smaller and more stubby than the ones we see in American supermarkets, but they are equally if not more tasty.

Since I had such a limited time in Thailand, my mom (always the tour guide) arranged for she, my dad and I to travel to Trung for a few days. After a one-hour flight from Bangkok, we arrived to the southern province. A local tour guide picked us up from the Trung Airport and was kind enough to make a short detour downtown for us to pick up the province's famous moo yang, or grilled pork. We stopped at a corner shop, which looked like an old coffee shop. The moo yang vendor faced the street, luring in customers by the hunks of meat!

Check out the killer knife and the ginormous piece of pork! The meat is liberally seasoned with a sort of sweet and sticky marinade and grilled until the generous amount of fat has formed into a nice crust. After picking up more than a kilo of moo yang (my dad was greedy!), we finally made our way over to a pier to take a boat over to the island. Koh Sukorn, which means Pig Island in Thai, is located off the shores of Trung about a 30-minute boat ride with a handful of surrounding smaller islands.


Since it wasn't during the peak, tourist season, my mom, dad and I were the only ones at the small resort on the north side of Koh Sukorn. We stayed in a bungalow (a couple of pillows, sleeping cushions, basic amenities, running water, and electricity from 7pm to 7am), which was barely 20 steps from the beach. We had an amazing snorkeling tour guide, and probably the best snorkeling I have ever experienced in Thailand. The folks running the resort were locals on the island, and they made every single meal just for the three of us! Our last dinner on the island was a seafood feast--crabs, steamed whole fish, grilled squid, seafood Poh Tak (hot and sour seafood soup, similar to Tom Yum Koong) and seafood fried rice.

In Bangkok, it is not easy to find roti vendors so whenever we travel out of town, like this trip to Trung, I always have to cure my cravings of roti. Roti is essentially very thinly hand-rolled dough, fried in a large skillet with oil AND margarine to a crisp brown, then removed from the heat and dressed with drizzles of sweetened condensed milk and sugar. Does that sound indulgent enough for you? It's probably one of my favorite sweets ever since childhood. Most roti are simply rolled up in paper and eaten on the go; some people like it with banana or even eggs cooked inside the roti. I usually enjoy mine plain or with banana. I would kill for a roti right now.

And I shall leave you with a few more random photographs of the rest of my trip to the motherland.

Kao soi, a Nothern Thai speciality, consists of egg noodles and coconut curry and either minced pork or beef, topped with a variety of toppings such as crispy noodles, diced red onion, preserved Chinese cabbage, ground chili, and lime juice.

Some Thai instant noodles at the Taipei International Airport on my transit back to San Francisco. The lady at the restaurant inside the terminal was nice enough not only to fill my cup of noodles with hot water but also gave me a bowl and chopsticks.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of one of my meals on the plane. This one wasn't as bad as it looks. Steamed rice with minced pork and gravy, along with the usual dinner roll and fruit. The calamari and rice vermicelli salad was actually decent and the mochi was not bad of a dessert at all. Although I still mostly avoid airplane food and stick to my Thai instant noodles or whatever I manage to sneak in my carry-on luggage.

Coming soon: Little Miss Contrary & Mr. Tall's culinary adventures in and out of the kitchen!

Enjoy,
Little Miss Contrary