“Sweet potato leaves were very common in our kampung. We ate them so often when I was young, until I got quite sick of them,” my dad revealed. “But as I grow older I start to miss these leaves and I wish to eat them once again.” I noticed that he became rather obsessed with this vegetable of late, often requesting for hanzi ye (蕃薯叶; Hokkien for sweet potato leaves) whenever we dine out.
Like any love affair, the early days of my Thailand obsession—which is into its ninth year—saw me taking to well-known Thai dishes; but as the relationship goes on but with a bit less sizzle, I started seeking out lesser-known comfort dishes, such as paak paet thort (fried duck beak), a low-key Isaan dish that not many people knew about. My food-loving Thai colleague, Sai, introduced it to me one day while we were having lunch at a street-side Isaan stall beside a petrol station. I never knew that duck beaks could be eaten, but Sai assured me that it was yummy. After sampling this chewy delicacy, I was intrigued—and hooked.
Mr. P has been telling me about eating hoi khom (หอยขม), or snails, for the longest time. Whenever we pass by a stall selling snails in Bangkok, he would say, “Oh, how I miss the snails made by my mum!” But when I requested to taste them, he would turn me down, citing safety reasons. “You don’t know where these snails come from. They may be laden with pesticides. Let’s get my mum to make them the next time we’re home,” he urged.
Xin: “Hey, come and see what I did!”
Mr. P: “It sure looks like you. Eyes of uneven sizes, a flat nose, a big mouth… Oh, and the sparse hair too.”
Sometimes husbands do say the darndest things.
Despite its Vietnamese origin, naem nueng (Vietnamese fresh spring roll) is Udon Thani’s most famous food export. While Vietnamese immigrants have been moving to Thailand’s Mekong River provinces since the French colonial years, the region, or, specifically Udon Thani, isn’t famous for naem nueng until the recent decades. Word has it that a group of Vietnamese descendents, who originally settled in Nong Khai, made famous naem nueng in Thailand when they opened a restaurant selling this specialty in neighboring Udon Thani.
2012 began on a slightly unusual note for me: the New Year marked my virgin attempt in cooking for Mr. P’s family in Udon Thani. My mum-in-law has heard about my new-found interest in the kitchen—Mr. P was always telling her of our homemade concoctions—so she requested to taste my cooking. Cooking a Chinese dish was a much safer option as the folks would not have any basis for comparison, as opposed to, say, som tam. I decided on bak kut teh because its thick, peppery broth is most likely to satiate Thais’ strong flavours-inclined palates.
I love seeing a hawker’s dedication to his trade. It doesn’t matter if he’s just peddling lime juice along the streets of Yaowarat, but he makes the best out of the tools available—and his creativity—to come up with simple yet ingenious ways to display his citrusy drinks. At this humble roadside store, the limelight (pun intended) was shone on its sole product: limes. A row of limes, with their skins peeled into segments, folded and tucked inwards, were perched atop wooden sticks, resembling lotus flowers emerging from a sea of ice. There were no shortage of lime juice sellers—and presentations—in the vicinity, but none could beat the work of art showed by this particular vendor. Thumbs up to Thai creativity!
