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.