Dreaming of dishes that don’t involve rice and real beer

Two weeks from Thursday I’ll be at the Bangkok airport and leaving Thailand. I’ve been here since I arrived in January 2011. Many of my fellow volunteers have traveled to nearby countries or gone back to the United States. I have chosen not to. I’m ready to leave.

With my plethora of free time, I made a list of the food and drinks I plan to consume when I return to the United States. Here it is.

Food
– Bratwurst with Silver Spring mustard
– My pancakes with real salted butter and Aunt Jemima syrup
– Papa Murphy’s pizza hot out of the oven
– A baked potato with butter, pepper, Lawry’s and more butter
– Three scrambled eggs, quality & healthy wheat toast (with butter) and half a pound of bacon, three strips mixed in with the eggs with the bacon grease used to lubricate the pan and flavor the eggs
– A bowl of Corn Chex (with 2% milk) lightly sprinkled with sugar
– Raspberries
– Hot, fresh-out-of-the-oven, peanut butter cookies
– Mom’s homemade lasagna
– Jimmy John’s No. 9 sub sandwich – I’ve forgotten what it is, but I know No. 9 = delicious

Drinks
– Rolling Rock beer
– Red wine (anything but Merlot)
– 2% milk (I have a glass about every month here. I plan to go back to three gallons a week in the states)
– Newcastle beer
– Tap water (I took it for granted)
– A Grain Belt or Summit beer at a St. Paul Saints game
– Real black coffee – not an Americano, but a dark cup of coffee from my own home or a locally-owned coffee shop and maybe a shot in the dark (cup of coffee with a shot of espresso)
– Fitger’s Oatmeal Big Boat Stout in Duluth
– An A&W root beer from an A&W stand/restaurant –
– Any beer that’s handed to me by a friend

Short Story: Bad Food in Ayutthaya

As of now, I love Thai food.  I love it because nothing is forced on me and I can make and order what I want.  It wasn’t always the case.

It’s February 2011 and I’ve only been in Thailand a month or so and I’m still not used to the strange food my host family keeps putting in front of me every evening.  I’ve had a few meals of nothing but rice and a few bites of something I don’t like.

Gross.

My host mother’s sister would sometimes visit to tease me in Thai.  One day she brought some food, or at least I think it was supposed to be eaten.  I don’t remember exactly what it was.  My host family put it in front of me during dinner.  Mother, father, brother, sister-in-law and two kids stared at me and waited to see my reaction to the food.  I tasted it.  It was horrible, but I kept a poker face.

They asked me if I liked it and I said it was okay.  They began to giggle and asked me again if I liked it.  They wanted the truth so I gave it to them.  I said I didn’t like it.

The entire family shook with laughter.  It was as if it was the answer they were hoping for.  I asked them what was so funny.

“We don’t like it either!”

It’s not just Americans who can’t eat some of this shit.

If you can believe it, I’m even leaner

“Is there anything to eat that doesn’t give you diarrhea?” – Good Morning, Vietnam

I’m eating well.   I’m getting so used to Thai cuisine that my stomach didn’t feel well recently after eating a cheeseburger and French fries and drinking two cups of coffee.  More importantly, I hadn’t had any rice.

Thai food is delicious, but I’m figuring out what I like and don’t.  Perhaps I should say: I’m figuring out what I can handle and what I can’t.

Some things I eat and think, I could eat this every day – and I do.  Then there are things I look at and wonder how the Thai people can eat it as often as they do and yet remain healthy.  This was more of a case when I was in training and lived near a busy amphur (city) where it was easy to go to convenience stores that have plenty of junk food.

I’ve been told I’ve lost weight.  I have not.  However, I think I have slimmed down even more.  There is less fat on my body and more muscle.  I weigh myself at the health station every week and it’s the same as when I left the states.  I exercise every day and no longer have three gallons of 2% milk a week, bread and bratwurst, not to mention the evenings on the couch with a movie and a bag of Old Dutch French Onion ruffled potato chips and three bottles of Rolling Rock.

I’ll do my best to portray what kind of food I consume on an average day.  Keep in mind that rice is involved in every meal.  I’ve tried to think of an American equivalent to rice and there really is none unless you wanted to say we always eat with a fork.  That’s how often Thai people eat rice: as often as Americans eat with a fork.  I should also mention Thai people don’t eat with forks.  Forks are sometimes found at the meals, but they’re merely used to scoop food onto the spoon.  Eating food from your fork in Thailand is like eating with your knife in the states.

“It’s burning the hair off my feet!” – Good Morning, Vietnam

Spice
Most Thais like their food spicy.  Here’s my stance on spicy food: my mouth is okay with it, but my stomach isn’t.

There are many levels of spice in Thailand and the Thais view of them is different from mine.  I have to double their view of it, normally.  If they say it’s not spicy, many times it is a little spicy.  When they tell me it’s a little spicy, it’s plenty spicy for me.  When they tell me it’s very spicy, it likely has the chance to melt my face off, much like the climactic scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark when the ark is finally opened and the Nazis’ faces melt off like a plastic bottle in a campfire.

Either this man just looked at the lost ark or ate some really spicy Thai food.

Grease
There’s good reason fried rice tastes so good: it’s fried.  Thai people like to warn me if I eat a lot of fried rice I’ll get fat.  Little do they know of my Jackson-inherited metabolism.  In fact, I do eat a lot of fried rice, but I do something the Thais don’t – exercise.

A lot of Thai food is fried and deep-fried.  There are vendors that drive their motorcycles from village to village with various meats on a stick.  After you choose what you’d like, they deep fry it – very healthy.  At my host family’s home during training, just about everything was fried and if it wasn’t, it was …

Covered in sugar
I like my coffee black.  Some call it cowboy style.  I call it delicious.  When I was given my first cup of coffee prepared by a Thai I was afraid I’d get diabetes.  Thais like their food to the extreme: spicy, greasy or sweet.  I can see why they don’t eat hamburgers – too plain.

In fact, there is a diabetes problem in Thailand.  The first time I went to the local anami (small hospital/clinic) I asked if they encourage exercise to diabetes sufferers.  No.  Surprisingly, when I’m in bigger cities, I do notice a good amount of obese Thai people (nothing compared to the food courts of various American cities).  I don’t notice them in the more rural parts of the country, where there are no convenience stores to buy junk food.

Common foods
The Thais love their cucumbers and I love them for it.  I’ve eaten more cucumbers in my four months here than I did in my first 32 years in the states.  Thankfully, Thais also love vegetables and fruits.  I was never much of a fruit eater in the states (much to my mother’s chagrin), but I eat it all the time here.  Ironically, I’m also taking multi-vitamins regularly for the first time in years even though I probably need them less than ever.

There’s a huge variety of fruits and many of them aren’t in the states, so they’re difficult to describe.  I can say that the appearance of many of them scared me until I tried them.

Typical day

Breakfast:
Fruit (bananas, oranges, rose apples)
White rice
Two hard-boiled eggs
Water

A typical dinner.

Lunch (usually at restaurant):
Fried rice with pork, vegetables and fried egg on top
Sweet hot soup/broth (not sure what’s in it, but it’s delicious)
Water

Dinner:
Rice
Whatever I can throw in a pan: usually cucumbers, eggplant and garlic
Water

In betweens:
Fruit (mostly bananas and oranges)

I haven’t exactly learned how to cook Thai-style yet.  I’m pretty much doing the same I used to do in the states: gather my favorite ingredients and throwing them in a pan.  The main difference is I’m eating them with rice.

When I do escape to larger cities like Bangkok and Surin, I seek out foreigner food like pizza, hamburgers and real coffee.  I do dream of Mogie’s Garcia burger and pizza in Chicago from time to time, but I’m eating well in Thailand and probably healthier than I did in the states.

P.S.  I miss eating with you.

Where’s the rice?

I have one question for all of you living in the United States.  How do you not eat rice with every meal?  What is wrong with you?

The thought of not eating rice all day blows my mind.  I love it.  I must have it.  My body craves it.

I have rice with every meal.  Sometimes it’s fried and sometimes it’s brown, but most of the time it’s white rice.  It has no taste, but it’s delicious … like zucchini.

My return to the states in April of 2013 is becoming a nightmare knowing I probably won’t be eating rice every day.  I don’t know how my body is going to handle it.  When I came here in January, my body needed some time to adjust to eating so much rice as well as other assorted strange foods.  Now I know I’m going to need to adjust when I start stuffing bratwurst, bread and 2% milk back into me.

When the Thais ask if you’ve eaten – which is much too often – they don’t ask, “Have you eaten yet?”  Instead, they ask, “Have you eaten rice yet?” (gin kao leeo ru yang).  To not eat rice would be like not eating corn in Iowa or not drinking beer in Wisconsin.  You’re surrounded by it; what else are you going to eat?

I have a rice cooker.  I put a cup of rice and water in the bowl, plug it in, push the “cook” button and in about 20 minutes I have a plate of kao arroy (delicious rice).  For breakfast I’ll eat my rice with a few hard-boiled eggs and some sliced cucumbers.  For dinner I tend to fry some eggplant and garlic to accompany my rice.

When I’m hungry, I dream of rice.  I don’t dream of pancakes, bacon, biscuits, ham, bratwurst or Caesar salad because they’re not options.  Well, I guess I do dream of them, but I dream of them the same way I dream of coffee shops in Paris.  They’re attainable, but not right now.