Tom Yung Goong

A good and light Thai dessert made from tapioca/starch, banana & grated coconut. It tastes like the Filipino dessert "palitaw".

Red Curry Thai Fish

Mysterious delicious fish in turmeric, herbs and sauteed in oil.

The secret is in the sauce! Well, just lots of fennel, really.

Oh, baby it sizzles! Gobble it with rice vermicelli/noodles, peanuts and nuoc mam.
There was a guessing game that ensued between me and my friend as to what kind of fish was used in this deliciousness. My guess was some sort of cat fish while my friend's guess was an eel. I was really curious and Googled it and stumble upon the name sturgeon. Why are ugly fish so delicious?
Sturgeon, sturgeon? Why does it sound so familiar? Oh, right. I've seen it on TV, it's called dinosaur freshwater fish because of its bone structure. Sturgeon roe also makes the best caviar. An Australian friend explained to me that they are endangered. Yikes.
If it is indeed sturgeon fish, I don't think I will eat it again or I'll just cook Cha Ca Thang Long on my own using another kind of fatty fish.

The best Cha Ca Thang Long can be found at 21 Duong Than, Hoan Kiem
Useless Trivia:

• Cha Ca means "fish paste" in Vietnamese
• Chaka means "ugly" in Philippine gay lingo.

On Sunday, I saw a deer in front a restaurant. It was tied to a post. When I returned the next day it was gone. Oh, deer. Rudolph didn't make it to Christmas, he must have landed on a banquet table.

Happiness is Cotton Candy

What could be more fusion than the bahn mi served outside of Goethe Institute?



It's a  fusion of Vietnamese, French, Middle Eastern & German cuisine! Roasted pork in kebab/gyros style and served in ubiquitous baguettes. It's one of the best Bahn Mi I've had in 'Nam.





This bahn mi is served with sauerkraut (pickled cabbage) and caramelized onions together with the usual lettuce and tomato.



It's 15.000 VND or around $0.60 cents of awesome deliciousness.

Orame / Or Lam, a Lao dish I had in Luang Prabang. Know in many names in different restaurants but better known as the signature dish/stew of Luang Prabang. It has so many complex flavors like bitter, spicy and the piquant taste of different herbs.

This a thick soup with eggplant, chili, lemongrass, cilantro, watercress, dill, grilled sticky rice, mushrooms, basil, pork rinds (chicaron), pork, chicken and the special spicy wood chunk of sa khan. Sa khan is spicy wood that you chew on, it gives your tongue a mild numbing sensation.

You Know You're Getting Old When...

You know you're getting old when...you have started dreaming of a farm and have started gardening. Today, I planted some kaffir lime seeds in hopes that they would germinate seedlings. I asked mom to plant the galanggal a few months ago. We have plenty of chili and lemongrass plants and after a few months I could cook Thai food whenever I want to.

If you're wondering if these things are available in the Philippines, yes they are. But you must understand we rarely or never use kaffir leaf and galanggal in our cuisine like our fellow SE Asian neighbors do - Thailand, Indonesia, Burma and Cambodia. These plants/herbs are also called a different name, in Davao kaffir is called biasong. Getting seedlings is also difficult unless you are lucky to source them in Manila Seedling Bank or in Legazpi and Salcedo Weekend Market. You can score some kaffir lime leaf in Rustan's supermarket but they're bloody expensive for ten pesos per leaf.

These seedlings will never bear those ugly but fragrant citrus kaffir fruit. It needs some special cross pollination with another kind of citrus fruit but it doesn't matter since the kaffir leaf is the one used for cooking.

I'm looking forward to inviting you for some tom yum goong someday.

Oh, Hello Manila.

Being away for almost four months I really missed Filipino food. The first thing I said to mom at the airport was "Mommy, I'm hungry. Take me to Jollibee drive-through, I want daing bangus (milkfish)!". It was around six in the morning when I arrived in Manila so my beloved daing na bangus is not yet served and I had to settle for longganisa (Filipino sausage).

Less than 48 hours after I arrived I already ate the following:

1.) LongSiLog (Sausage, Eggs & Garlic Fried Rice)
2.) Inihaw na Bangus (Grilled Milkfish)
3.) Kare-Kare with Bagoong (Kare-Kare with Shrimp Paste)
4.) Leche Flan (Filipino Creme Brulee) - an extra creamy version since it was made from duck eggs.
5.) Ube Halaya - Purple Yam dessert
6.) Suman sa Lihiya - Rice Cake with Coconut Sugar Sauce
7.) Sinampalukang Manok - Chicken in Tamarind Soup
8.) All sorts of pasalubong from Aklan - Bukayo, Ube Piayaya , Sampalok and Barquillos
9.) Chicken in Lemon Sauce, Dumplings, Stir Fried Tofu w/ Veggies and Dried Fish (Tuyo) Fried Rice

I indulged myself the first two days but I'm back to my pescatarian diet. It wasn't that hard to switch despite the fact that my family are carnivores. My mom and pop have special diet restrictions so we still have a variety of food served during lunch or dinner. Maybe it's just me, I'm finding it more difficult to eat meat whenever I try to since I feel bloated after. I would still occasionally eat meat since barbecue and grilled meat are amongst my brothers' favorite meal.

We're gonna have some mighty meaty pork ribs barbecue next week, good luck resisting that.

Yakult Copy Cat in Litro!

I seriously almost peed in my pants when I saw this in Tesco Lotus Supermarket in Bangkok. It's prebiotic milk or commonly known to us a Yakult (Lactobacilli Shirota Casei Strain). It's another brand - but that's not the point! It's huge, I think it's a liter. I've never seen prebiotic milk in this size! There's a Facebook fan page of people wishing there was Yakult Litro.

This takes me down to memory lane. We used to pass by the Yakult factory in Laguna whenever we went to my lola's place. They had a hugggge and massive bottle of Yakult in front of the building and it was tall as the building. I never missed this landmark. I don't recall seeing it these past few years. Is the giant Yakult bottle still there?

How hot do you want it?

I had stir friend bell pepper and onions for dinner but I forgot this is Thailand therefore they don't use pussified bell pepper. The type of pepper used in this dish is called "siling pang sinigang" in the Philippines or "chili used for sinigang (sour soup dish)". It's a mildy hot pepper...if you use one or two but if it's one of the main ingredients in a dish it could be a little fiery. Fortunately, the cavity and seeds where removed from the chili so it was tolerable to me.

It had a bit of chicken liver but didn't the meat it. It was hella good.

This 3 ingredient simple dish reminded me the time when we were served ginataang sili (chili in coconut milk) in Bicol. Bicol is a province in the northeastern part of the Philippines. They like everything with chili over there. The ginataang sili was served in a massive kaldero (cauldron). I'm not sure if this is Bicol Express recipe for it had only two ingredients, coconut and unseeded siling mahaba (finger chili). One of the cooks told me they used a bit of meat to "season" it or pampalasa in Tagalog. I was amused with this anecdote for whatever other ingredient you put in that pot it would be quite indistinguishable in a sea of chopped chilli pepper. Kinda like Filipino pork n' beans where there is only one tiny cube of actual salted pork except whatever meat you bite into will it just taste like chili or will just numb your tongue. The estimate ratio of chili in that pot was 3/4 and the rest is coconut milk. I only had one tiny, itsy, bitsy spoon to taste it and my butt was on fire. It was that hot.

The answer to the question "How hot do you want it?" is entirely dependent on one's tolerance for spicy food. So when it Thailand, you must specify 'little, very little, tiny bit hot'. The ordinary Thais' tolerance for spicy food is waaay up in the Scoville scale.

Case and point, we dined al fresco in a Chinatown seafood restaurant and ordered tom yum sea food hot pot. When asked by the waiter "How spicy do you want it?". We said "a little itty bitty spicy". My interpretation of a little itty bitty spicy is --- maybe just add one piece of bird's eye chili. When the hot pot was served, I counted about five pieces of chili.

To compliment our spicy hot pot we were given 3 kinds of dipping sauces. Chili paste, vinegar with chili and Thai fish sauce with chili. Hehehe.

There was nothing more comforting than a great spicy sour soup on that rainy night.  Brings me back right home with memories of sipping home cooked sinigang (Philippine sour soup) with my family.  Enough heat to warm our hearts and stomachs, like vodka to Russians in freezing winter. Specially comforting when there is a Pacific typhoon with winds at 100 to 185 kph trying to tear down our roofs and coconut trees. Oh, wait. We got rid of coconut trees a long time ago since they are the first trees to get uprooted during typhoons. I miss sinigang, I miss typhoons and I miss home :(

Not Fun to Eat Healthy Cookie

In an effort to eat healthier I've stopped buying junk food and had opted for healthier over-the-counter quick fix snack such as multigrain cookies and nuts. I love nuts (insert inappropriate joke here). When I went to my dearly beloved Tesco Supermarket, there wasn't a lot of options for multigrain cookies. Most of them were advertised as healthy packed with this and that vitamins, minerals etc. Upon careful inspection of the label you will discover that it's loaded with sugar or with icky artificial-low-calorie-sweetener-possibly-cancerous- aspartame.

Balikbayan box never tasted this good.

There was one brand that looked okay to eat, Iko, with a variety of multigrain cookies. Iko is a Malaysian brand. I picked a small pack of the oat and pumpkin seeds variety. Oh, it was a big mistake. I would like to borrow a phrase from a friend to describe it; "lasang Balikbayan box". The literal translation of that is "tastes like cardboard box." I've often wondered if my friend then had  tried eating cardboard box to come up with such fitting description. But the moment I bit into this thing I soon realized what my friend meant. Try sniffing a cardboard box, it has that distinguished paper pulp smell and if you take a bite of that smell or god forbid, the cardboard, that's how it tastes.

So I guess I'll stick to tropical fruits for snacking.

I miss having my own kitchen. I miss baking cookies and eating cookie dough. Can't wait to go home in two weeks to make some healthy and non-shitty cookie.

Eat Your Insects

Eating insects and bugs is common in Thailand, Laos and some South East Asian countries. In Thailand it's popular in the north where they are a good source of protein. The United Nations has even encouraged eating insects to fill the gap of malnutrition with kids in Laos. Don't laugh because these insects are healthier, nutritious and safer than your average industrial farmed meat. 

So, when Yanni, an Indonesian woman I met in the guesthouse in Bangkok said she wanted to try bugs because they didn't eat them in Indonesia, I thought she was joking. The part that I thought she was joking was Indonesians didn't eat insects. You see I have this notion that every culture has their own version of weird or odd food item. Food that is common to one culture  and unthinkable to another. And of course, we're Asians, we're the go to place for weird food. Surely at least one inhabited island in Indonesia must have a culture of eating insects and bugs.

Yanni, went out that night to get some fried insects. Moonsoon season has hit Thailand and five minutes after she left it started to rain heavy. I was expecting that she had given up but she came back victorious with a plastic bag in her hand. The plastic bag had a little bit of everything:

I've eaten insects before in Pampangga, Philippines. It was cooked stir-fried Adobo style,  wings and feet removed, so uhmm it was still a bit saucy. But god bless those Cabalens for it was still  pretty good. 

I tried the grasshopper first. The Thai version is deep fried, salty and i'm afraid I tasted MSG. The bugs are fried with what I seem to recognize as fragrant pandan leaves . It tasted like fish, or exactly like dilis (crispy anchovies). Not bad.

The cricket had the same taste although a bit more crunchy in texture. This one had a weird aftertaste. Like old butterball candy that has lost it sweetness and just tasted, expired. Yikes. The funnest (is that a word) to eat was the beetle. It was crunchy and it sounded like you were eating pork cracklings. Ok, I said as if one was eating pork cracklings or chicaronnes but I wasn't exactly craving for more after the first bite.

In summary, would I eat bugs again? If  it was cooked a different style and provided it was a different insect, sure why not. But if I want to eat something fishy again, I would just eat crispy fried dilis.