Food

Here it is finally! I think I've finally got an expansive enough set of pictures of some of the food I eat here. Before coming to Thailand I had never had Thai food and had no idea there could be so many ways to make rice. It's like potatoes for us. The first thing you learn when eating Thai food is how to eat it. Almost all the dishes are eaten with a fork and spoon. the fork is used to push the food onto a spoon. Even a lot of noodle dishes are eaten that way. Occasionally they will use chopsticks to eat soup or noodle dishes. It just depends. When I first got here I bought a lot of my food at the grocery store, but now nearly all of it comes from the local market or street vendors I pass on the way home or on the way to school. The fruit here is just wonderful. I eat fresh pineapple nearly everyday! Also eating at the garage kitchens around here is really inexpensive so nearly every day that's where I eat my lunch with Sarah 3 of my teachers as well as several other students.

This first dish is called Kai Jee-oww Muu saap which is a Thai-style omelette with minced porked meat cooked in it (or plain or with vegetables) served on a bed of rice and with thai chili sauce over it! It's a must try if you ever eat Thai food. When Dang teaches me how to make it, I will even cook it for you!

The next is called satay and it's often found at street vendors. Basically meat on a stick served with sticky rice that you eat with your hands. Following that we have types of food that are called kap-khaw which means "with rice". So they are plates of food that are supposed to be eaten over rice and range from fried minnows to stir-fried veggies.These are a couple examples of kap-khaw: egg and squash and bitter-root with eggAnd ginger chicken with black fungus.

The next one some people are familiar with. It's Phad Thai. Since it's often served with shrimp I don't always order it but it is still pretty good, and what most foreigners are familiar with. This brings me to the next plate which is one of my all-time-Asian-food-favorites; fried rice. This isn't the kind I usually get. This is a pineapple fried rice that I got at a hotel.

The next on our plate is my latest favorite called Phat-see-eww. It is rice noodles that are stir-fried with egg, veggies or meat and then covered in soy sauce! Mmm...so good!

Next on our plate are desserts. If you ever see bundles of banana leaves, you are almost sure to find some sort of desert sticky rice, that either has banana, taro or some other sort of sweet mixture on top of it. Don't pass it up though and even enjoy it with a cup of coffee or thai tea.Another desert, are these little things; fried banana! They are coated in -I don't know what- but they are really good. All the visitors we've shown around here we've had them eat these.

Thai food can be very spicy, especially dishes like Phat-phak boong, and Som-tom. More than once I've cleared my sinuses and burned my lips eating hot food, but not all of it is like that, and you can always ask for it to not be spicy. This is only a very small portion of all the different food I've had here. Some foods like this: I avoid. I'm not a fan of having my food watch me eat it, and I stay away from things like frogs, crickets, snails, and organs too!

I think that's about all for now on the food. We'll see what the next topic will be. For now though there are a lot of things coming up very quickly in the next two weeks, so I'll try hard to keep up with them! Cheers!