Where Has All This Food Been Hiding?

As I contemplated whether to leap before I looked into cooking as a full-time occupation rather than a full-time preoccupation, I made a strategic decision—I went on vacation. Weighty life decisions are best evaluated while sitting on a beach with sand between one’s toes and drinking cocktails with little umbrellas sticking out of them, far from the reach of the office.

I visited Thailand in January 2004 with my brilliantly funny work colleague/drinking buddy Keith (whom I nicknamed “Cheers Keith” due to his gregarious personality, enthusiastic thirst for wine, and formal declaration of “Cheers” before sipping a new cocktail). We visited the island of Ko Phi-Phi on Thailand’s west coast for a week of scuba diving, eating, and relaxation. As I pondered my future, I wanted to see how authentic Thai food compared with the Thai food I had so eagerly devoured in America.

After the first day of diving, Cheers Keith and I felt a powerful thirst generated by the blistering Thai sun, the salt water, and the relief of not having to work for a week. We ambled to a beachside restaurant for drinks and food. With the comfort of longtime colleagues, we divided our tasks, with Cheers Keith politely requesting frequent cold bottles of beer while I studied the menu to identify what delights could be had.

A true son of Midwest America with intense reservations about eating anything that swam, had spice, or even bold colors, Cheers Keith was of the opinion that anything that tasted good should include the following in the cooking instructions: add a can of cream of mushroom soup and cook for an hour at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. From past experience on many work trips together, I knew Cheers Keith would be most satisfied by muted flavors and a starchy regimen of spring rolls, French fries, and a simple omelette, with a few beers on the side.

He sank back in his chair, swept his tousled sandy hair back from his wire rim glasses, and announced with his charming chuckle, “Chef Tummy, this island paradise suits me just fine.” My friends address me by my family nickname of “Chef Tummy,” a teasing reference to both my enthusiasm for cooking and the substantial weight I gained while experimenting with the frontiers of food. Then Cheers Keith ordered us more beer.

The restaurant’s head chef was a roly-poly joy of a young Thai woman in her early twenties nicknamed “Nit.” She gently teased Cheers Keith for his fear of tasting robust Thai food. Nit was beguiled by my announcement that I wanted to try everything on the menu and whatever else she and her chefs could offer.

To test whether my interest in trying authentic Thai food was sincere or just a beery boast, Nit served me special food she made as the staff meal for the other chefs and the waiters. On the table, she placed a steaming bowl of tom yam po taek, a spicy and tangy seafood soup of fish, squid, and shrimp with spicy holy basil leaf she said could cure everything from the common cold to a broken heart. Nit spoon-fed me a yellow fish curry called kaeng leuang plaa, perfumed and colored with deep orange turmeric, tangy tamarind, fish sauce, and dried chillies. A plate piled high with sliced chilled cucumbers was offered to cut the pungency of the dishes that were so spicy, steam from my cheeks misted my eyeglasses. Nit comically positioned a waiter with a fire extinguisher near the table in case my exploration of the chilli crop caused me to catch fire. No conflagrations occurred during my stay. Cheers Keith of course declined to join me in sampling these delicacies, and shifted his chair so he would be upwind from the richly scented dishes.

“Have You Eaten Yet?”

The next day Cheers Keith begged off scuba diving as he was suffering from “Irish flu,” as he described it. (Too much beer? not enough? I couldn’t tell, but he confined himself to his room for the day with potato chips and television for company.) So I went to Nit’s restaurant in the afternoon to investigate the catch of the day.

Just delivered from the local fishing boats were plastic crates filled with red snapper, pomfret, mackerel, and shark on ice.

Nearby crates of vegetables overflowed with strange serrated gourds, angled loofahs, lengths of green beans, bunches of coriander, and enough shiny green limes to challenge a team of ten jugglers. I had previously seen some of these ingredients used in American Thai restaurants or Asian supermarkets; some of them, however, looked as though they had been raised on farms from another planet.

Nit heralded my visit with the common informal Thai phrase of “Kin khao laew rue yang?” or “Have you eaten yet?” As my combined Thai language and Thai food study continued during the week, I learned that the Thai word for family is khrawp khrua, or “people that gather in the kitchen,” and khao, or “rice,” was the same word for food . This centrality of food and family made sense to me, like a refrain of a song heard long ago. In my childhood in rural Maine among an extended family of ten, our kitchen was the warmest room in terms of insulation from the cold weather and happy activity as my mother and four older sisters made the evening meals.

In watching Nit and her team work, I learned the balancing act that is making Thai food: add a combination of what I call the Fantastic Five Flavors of spicy, salty, tangy/sour, sweet, and bitter, and then taste and adjust. For the fearful like Cheers Keith, Thai food appeared to be lethalchilli-laden and dangerous, like eating a hand grenade. For an expert like Nit, cooking was a job and a passion in using her experience to combine the pungent individual flavors and artfully blend them into a complex and perfumed harmony.

The Thai cuisine balance of the Fantastic Five Flavors was a contrast to the savory French cream sauce and Italian cheese meals I had prepared at home. The Thais I now observed had broken out of the three-meals-a-day prison, making the whole day an opportunity for gourmet grazing. It was “anything goes” for what could be eaten and whenno mandatory breakfast eggs n’ bacon law to observe. So I wanted to taste it all and learn to cook these treasures as well.

Moreover, the Thais seemed to have a mirthful soul, humored by an inside joke that I wanted to understand and join in on. My theory is that a combination of the spicy diet, the warmish weather, the societal ethos of non-confrontation, and a focus on good-natured fun (sanuk) produces a nitrous oxide-like substance in the Thai body, leading to their infectious smiling and goofy behavior that made me giggle and attracted me so. The giddiness of their humor stimulated my inner goofball, and I would find myself laughing along or, for no reason, just laughing aloud. Over time, I learned that the greatest danger I might face in approaching a group of Thai strangers would not be a quarrel, but would more likely be potential hospitalization from being overfed.

During the week, Cheers Keith and I continued to go scuba diving in the mornings. In the afternoons, Cheers Keith devoted himself to improving cross-cultural relationships with the many pretty European female visitors on the island, and I wandered around the island to see what was cooking.

The Aunties Know All

I can confess to some interest in museums and galleries and I do marvel at the artistry and skill in takes to create a masterpiece. But I find more joy in wandering and interacting with people. My innate curiosity and outgoing manner learned from my charismatic Mother usually guides me to greeting people and insinuating myself in their lives. I just love watching people cook.

So I strolled around the small village where we were staying, poking my head in kitchens and houses, mumbling my ineptly memorized Thai friendly phrases at the “Aunties” making food for their families (Leafing through the guidebook I brought with me didn’t make me an instant expert on Thai culture, but I did absorb that addressing a person senior to me with an honorific like “Auntie” or “Uncle” was polite and appreciated.) They didn’t seem offended, especially since I was carrying my little acoustic travel guitar and would sing a little song. I’m not too proud to goof around if I receive a smile and snacks in return.

One Auntie who did my laundry invited me to sit with her as she prepared food. I watched her relentlessly pound in a stone mortar a relish of briny shrimp paste, palm sugar, fiery bird’s eye chillies, garlic, lime juice, and a few pellet-sized pea eggplants thrown in to add a bitter note (She called it naam phrik kapi.) I took a taste and reeled from the punch of the chillies in the fiery dipping sauce. Auntie got a laugh as my face turned beet red, but I was still smiling. Maybe I am a little odd, but I thought hanging out with this cook was worth the price of the plane flight. She also liked my playing “Jingle Bells” six times on the guitar for her, the only English language song she recognized. I pointed to the phrase in my Thai phrasebook for “thank you” and went off to find Cheers Keith to tell him about my day of exploration.

How Was Your Day?

That evening at Nit’s restaurant, Cheers Keith examined with suspicion the richly scented truly Thai food on my plate and shook his head in resignation over my need to explore the frontiers of Thai dining. I regaled him with my story about meeting the Auntie as he listened with his characteristic bemused patience. As was so common in our travels, he muttered, “I don’t mind traveling with a ‘foodie’ like you if the beer comes cold,” and ordered another set of beers and more French fries. Where Keith saw risk and revulsion, I saw rich reward.

Where had all this Thai food been hiding? Having eaten Thai food with vigor in America, I thought I knew a lot about the cuisine. Wrong. Perhaps these spicy and tangy treasures were listed on the back pages of the menus in Thai restaurants I had visited in America. More likely, these delights were available only by special request, and so I was unaware of the pleasure that could await the better informed. However, the subtle force and complexity of the dishes impressed me, and the generosity of Nit and the Auntie in sharing a taste of their culture through food was a flattering epiphany. For sure, I could not have invented these aromatic and intensely flavored dishes on my own. Certainly, this style of cooking was as alluring as the French style I had studied at a weekend cooking school in America.

After a leisurely week of sun, fun, and feeding, Cheers Keith and I had to return to San Francisco to our jobs at the bank. Nevertheless, the experience of being shown a cuisine so nuanced and balanced with our Thai hosts expert guidance remained seared in my mind and in my mouth; the fiery accent of the food balanced with the other flavors lingered on my tongue and in my thoughts. I reluctantly trudged back to the States, the return tempered with the sweet memory of a fling with another cuisine and culture. I was captivated.

My New Home

The island of Koh Phangan is about seventy-seven square miles in size and shaped like a balloon with a string hanging off the end. It is home to sixteen thousand Thais, about two hundred farangs like me (common Thai slang for Western visitors) who live there permanently, and a varying temporary troupe of a thousand to an estimated fifteen thousand Western tourists, depending on the season. Ko Samui was like a luxury car, with its airport, large shopping malls, several modern hospitals, and many fancy restaurants-all the Western creature comforts. Koh Phangan was like a pickup truck-more primitive but serviceable, with no airport, cinema, shopping malls, or chain supermarkets.

I found sanctuary on Haad Salad (Pirate’s Beach in the local dialect), a quiet beach in the northwest section of the island. The cove was a gentle sandy smile facing the sunset, ringed with coconut trees and offering a live coral reef an easy swim away. On the beach I found a likely seaside hotel. My new home was a one-hundred-square-foot painted red concrete bungalow, basic but clean, with a cold-water shower and fan mounted in the wall. For 300 baht a day, I was well pleased with my modest bungalow at the Haadlad Resort.

I was attracted to the slow pace of the island and the bounty of fresh fish and squid from the local fishermen. The main entertainment at night was watching the twinkle of the squid boats offshore, like florescent seagulls with their lightbulb-draped wings hovering above the wave tops to attract the squid. This hotel had no TVs in the rooms and no distractions except the ones you wished to create or bring. There was nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in.

The hotel owner was an affable and irrepressibly cheerful man introduced to me as “Mister Aow”, a slender Thai man in his late fifties, with deep laugh lines on his face and an irresistible chortle. He told me he was born on the island, was schooled in Bangkok, and had returned to the island after a successful business career to build his hotel. He had grown up in a Thai family of Chinese ancestry that owned a restaurant, so he took joy in preparing both traditional Thai and Chinese food.

As I got to know Mister Aow, I observed the easy charm combined with shrewd people skills typically seen in skilled ambassadors. Everyone on the island seemed to know him and like him. Folks interested in setting up businesses on the island often consulted him. Mister Aow welcomed my interest in learning to cook the regional dishes from Southern Thailand, and he often invited me to dine with him and eat the special Thai food he made for him and his family that was not offered in the hotel’s restaurant menu.

I mentioned to Mister Aow that I had just completed a Thai cooking course on the neighboring island of Ko Samui. I thought I had learned a lot; I realized I wanted to learn more. In coming to his hotel, I got the chance to learn more because Mister Aow later gave me permission to visit and cook in the hotel kitchen (only if the redoubtable head chef nicknamed “Auntie Dam” agreed, of course). However, I had to prove myself worthy. In the succeeding months it became obvious that my Thai cooking school training and helping Nit and her crew on Ko Phi-Phi were only the first steps in comprehending the diversity and complexity of Thai food.

Out of the Pan, Into the Fire

There was something going on in the kitchen at the little bungalow hotel. The smell of frying fish and simmering chilli curry drifted like a tantalizing fog through the open door of the kitchen. I could hear the sizzling sound of food hitting hot oil in a wok, yet I couldn’t see what they were doing in there. The sign above the entry door to the kitchen clearly said “Hotel Staff Only” in English.

The Thai hotel waiters took food orders from the often culinarily cautious farang guests: Toast with butter and jam, hamburgers and French fries, pancakes, tuna sandwiches, and bottles of Coca-Cola and Gatorade were brought to the picnic tables in the open-air dining area outside the kitchen.

In the afternoons when the guests were at the beach, the Thai hotel kitchen staff came out of the hot kitchen to eat their lunch in the cooler dining area. They ate their own style of foodno hamburgers and French fries for them. I saw fresh whole steamed fish with a quick stir-fried relish of purple shallots, garlic, and bright red chillies; duck with bamboo shoots in red chilli curry; minced pork stir-fried with garlic, chillies, and holy basil leaf; and vivid pink watermelon shakes.

I lounged casually on the periphery of the Thai staff table, sniffing quietly. “Mum,” the hotel’s day manager, saw me looking expectantly at the food, like a dog waiting for a juicy scrap to fall on the floor. “Do you like Thai food, Chef Tummy?” she asked with a smile. Since Thais often introduce themselves by their nicknames, I used mine too.

I shuffled over, trying to look cool and noncommittal. Mum gave me a spoonful of the minced pork. Ambrosia. The basil had just come out of the garden behind the kitchen, Mum informed me. Feeling like a kid at a high school dance imitating cool courage before asking one of the popular girls to dance, I tried not to blow it by showing too much enthusiasm. I casually mentioned that I had made something similar when I attended the Thai cooking course on the neighboring island of Ko Samui. “I might have a few photos of the food we made at the cooking school if you would be interested,” I said quietly.

The Thais were skeptical about my sincere interest in their food. “You really like Thai food?” Mum asked. They asked to see the photos and huddled around the screen of my digital camera. We paged through the pictures of omelettes stuffed with a savory pork and vegetable medley; curried chicken with raisins, pineapple, and rice stuffed in a pineapple shell; a dessert made with a pumpkin filled with a steamed egg and coconut cream custard; southern Thai Matsaman chicken curry with chunks of potato and onion. When they saw the photos, the staff exclaimed “Rawy jang huu” - “delicious” in the Southern Thai dialect. The hotel chef nicknamed “Auntie Dam” was summoned from the kitchen. Auntie Dam was a petite and shy, dark-skinned woman in her early fifties who had worked in hotel kitchens for over twenty years. Polite speech in Thai culture employs the use of honorifics to show respect based on age, title, or social status. Although she was only five years older than was I, I learned to address the hotel chef as “Auntie” to demonstrate my recognition of her seniority in years, her position as the head of the kitchen, and in anticipation of special treats from her stove. Even Mister Aow (who was her elder and senior in social status as her employer) addressed her with this term of respect and affection. Although there are many fine male chefs in Thailand, the majority of the senior chefs in restaurants and food stalls are women, and you may be sure I properly address them by their well-earned polite title of “Auntie” or “Grandmother.” My Mother always said that good manners can open any door, and my obeying her advice has gotten many kitchen doors open to me. My Mother is a wise woman.

Auntie Dam Throws Down the Gauntlet

She asked to see the photos. I paged through the photos again. Auntie Dam corrected my recently learned Thai as I tried to describe each dish by its Thai name. One of the staff collected the other helpers at the hotel so they could also see the pictures.

Auntie Dam was not convinced that I could cook these Thai specialties. With Mum translating, Auntie Dam teasingly challenged me to cook for the staff. Auntie Dam declared with a smile that since I was a farang, I could not have made these dishes. No man can shrink from a challenge, especially when given by a tiny but fierce Thai woman. I don’t mind being kidded about my rotund appearance, but when it comes to food, them’s fighting words. I volunteered to cook haw mok plaa, the steamed fish, coconut cream, and red chilli paste curry I had learned to make at cooking school with Chef Roongfa. Auntie Dam smiled and made a remark over her shoulder in Thai as she returned to her kitchen. Mum diplomatically translated the parting shot: “Auntie Dam will look forward to your cooking and will watch carefully to see if she can learn from you.” Based on the laughs I heard as Auntie Dam departed, I think what she said amounted to “I’ll believe it when I see it.” We agreed to meet the next day for my cooking audition. The gauntlet had been thrown.

The Salt and Pepper Swedes

At dinner that night, I mentioned the cooking challenge to the other guests at the hotel. While a couple of the adventurous German tourists wanted to sample my version of Thai food, a group of young Swedish travelers were gravely concerned that I might get sick from eating fish. I called the group of five traveling teenagers the “Salt and Pepper Swedes” because of their aversion to eating Thai food. They were traveling in Asia for six months prior to entering university at home. They wanted to broaden their minds through world travel, as long as it did not involve trying any local food. Each day they stuck to their perceived safe regimen of hamburgers and French fries, eggs and toast, and Coca-Cola. The Salt and Pepper Swedes carefully moved away the tabletop tray of condiments that contained ground chilli powder, in case a gust of wind should blow these toxic flavorings into their food. The boldest eater in the group did use salt and pepper on a dish, hence my nickname for these travelers. The others were not as bold. I assured the cautious eaters that I would be careful and urged them to try my creation, arguing if it was safe enough for me to eat, it would be safe enough for them.

Doing My Homework

The next morning, I sat in my beachside brick bungalow preparing for the Main Event. On the right side of a notebook, I carefully copied down in English the ingredients I would need for the haw mok plaa dish. The list included fresh fish filets, eggs, red curry paste, coconut cream, lime leaves, and fish sauce. I took out my Lonely Planet World Food Thailand Thai food dictionary. Next to the English words, I copied the Thai name in Thai script from the food dictionary. I never got a gold star in penmanship back in grammar school, so I transcribed extra slowly. Trying to copy the Thai alphabet of loops and lines and tone marks was very difficult. Knowing how a slight change in the written tone mark in a Thai word could radically alter the meaning, I hoped I wouldn’t carelessly mark a word’s tone incorrectly or transpose letters and accidentally spell out “poison” or “dog hair” or something insulting or bizarre.

Satisfied that I had accurately copied the ingredient names in Thai, I walked across the sand to the kitchen to begin my test. My recipe list detailed the name of the proposed dish prominently in large letters in both English and Thai. Mum looked at my list of ingredients with surprise. She complimented me on my awkward attempt at writing, as if I were a precocious kindergartner bringing home my first attempts at practicing the alphabet on construction paper. So far, so good.

Mum suggested we fold banana leaves into open cups and staple the sides of the leaves together to simplify the process, rather than making the traditional intricately folded leaf packets. I deferred to her sound judgment. No reason to be a purist. I had been taught to make this dish by Chef Roongfa at the cooking school on Ko Samui, but I had only made it once.

Since I had been able to say a few words in Thai, such as “thank you” and “delicious,” Auntie Dam assumed that I was being modest about my Thai language skills when I stared at her blankly as she delivered a rapid-fire question in Thai at me. If she only knew that I had much to be modest about when it came to her language! She spoke to me only in Thai for the remainder of my stay at the hotel (Auntie Dam never had the opportunity or need to learn English.) Her assistant spoke a little English but liked to taunt me by making me ask for Thai ingredients by their Thai names. For more complicated communications, I called in Mum to translate. I paid Mum in discrete gifts of tamarind candy from the market in town. Fair deal.

Can You Cook?

Auntie Dam handed me a tail of fresh barracuda. No problem, I thought. It turned out to be my first test. The eighteen-inch tail had the skin on and was filled with sinews stretching from the tail through the body of the fish. Careful not to sever my fingers, I shaved off the fish skin with a keenly sharp cleaver. Auntie Dam had honed the cleaver by scraping the blade against the rough surface on the bottom of her ever-present granite mortar. The use of a heavy granite mortar and pestle for pounding spices, making chilli pastes or aromatic vegetable relishes is emblematic of true Thai chefs. Some cooks use electric blenders to finely chop ingredients and make chilli pastes, but the tearing action of the machine blades results in an inferior product compared to the traditional mortar and pestle pounding method that produces a smoother paste. If I am in a home or at a restaurant where I can hear the rhythmic sound of the pestle thudding into a mortar, I relax with an assurance that the flavors will be authentic because of the time-consuming but superior traditional method.

I attempted to separate the fish flesh from the inedible sinews with the cleaver. Auntie Dam observed me with a bemused giggle. When she and her assistant had finished laughing, she gave me a spoon with a sharp edge and showed me how to scrape the fish from the sinews. The job was completed in two minutes. They had never taught me that trick in cooking school.

I combined the fish with the coconut cream and other ingredients in a stainless steel bowl, carefully measuring in three tablespoons of red chilli curry paste as I had learned in Thai cooking school. Auntie Dam stuck her finger in the raw fish and curry paste mixture to gauge the seasoning. She added more curry paste. I stirred the ingredients to combine the curry paste evenly with the shredded fish and coconut cream. She tasted again. She added more curry paste. I stirred again. She tasted. She grabbed her mortar and pestle and quickly added the ingredients to make more curry paste: bright red long chillies she had already soaked in water to make them easier to pound, purple and white shallots, galangal root, lemongrass stalks, garlic, dried coriander seed, coriander root, and pungent shrimp paste that smelled like a seaweed-covered beach at low tide. Auntie Dam banged away at the ingredients in the mortar until they were a smooth paste. Another tablespoon of the fresh curry paste was added to the fish mixture. It had turned a husky pumpkin color. Once Auntie Dam was satisfied that the seasonings were correct, we carefully poured the mixture into the banana leaf cups. We placed the curry filled cups in a steamer on the gas stove and covered the pot.

Ten minutes later, we took the banana leaf cups from the steamer. Mum helped me arrange the leaf cups on a round metal platter. We carefully topped the haw mok plaa in each banana leaf cup with a tablespoon of fresh coconut cream, red chilli strips, and finely julienned lime leaves for garnish. Auntie Dam then gave me a Thai kitchen knife with a waved blade for cutting decorative cucumber and carrot slices. We evenly placed a ring of carrot and cucumber slices, coriander leaf, and red chillies on the platter to surround the banana leaf cups. The final tray looked beautiful, and I was proud of the creation-then nervous, as Auntie Dam gave a taste. She nodded in appreciation, and one tentative spoonful became several.

I tasted one of the fish curry cups. The curry was stop-my-heart spicy, but luxurious. The sweet coconut cream and the soft and smooth fish balanced the sharpness of the chilli paste. I tasted another spoonful. As I mopped the chilli pepper-induced fever sweat from my face, I declared Auntie Dam’s supervised creation the best I’d ever had, thanks to her.

Several of the Thai hotel staff took tastes. They were impressed with the effort, but suggested that the addition of even more red curry paste would have been appropriate to make the haw mok plaa the way their grandmothers had.

I realized I couldn’t serve these incendiary delicacies to the Salt and Pepper Swedes. It could set back international relations between America and Sweden for decades. But Auntie Dam invited me to watch her cook dinner that night. I smiled and thanked her, glad I had passed the audition.

Put Me in Coach, I’m Ready to Play

Having survived my haw mok plaa audition, I noted to Mum that I wanted further authorization to cook in the hotel kitchen. A prolonged discussion in Thai was held between Mum, Auntie Dam, and the hotel owner, Mister Aow. Until I had parachuted in with my haw mok plaa creation, no foreigner had been allowed to cook Thai food inside the main kitchen. I later learned Mister Aow initially wasn’t sure that my passion for Thai food would be matched by my ability. Accordingly, for my haw mok plaa audition, I had been given a piece of barracuda too sinewy for serving on the nightly fish barbeque grill; if I had really messed up the dish, it would have been no great loss to the hotel’s bottom line. Although Mister Aow agreed with the staff that my haw mok plaa lacked enough spice, he admired my enthusiasm.

The recap of the debate from Mum indicated that I had proven my skill with the steamed fish curry. The committee approved of my doing more cooking. Moreover, they trusted me to go to the island’s main town to purchase supplies at the farmer’s market by myself. I requested permission to make a dessert called sangkhayaa fak thawnga custard made with eggs, palm sugar, and coconut cream. The custard is poured inside a pumpkin shell or winter squash and steamed, then cooled and sliced.

My Rookie Mistake

I hitched a ride in the hotel’s pickup truck the nine miles to the main town of Thong Sala. I walked to both of the fresh food markets to look for the perfect pumpkin. In the intensive Thai cooking school I attended, we had used pumpkins about eight inches in diameter. I did not see any of that size and so purchased a larger sample, figuring it could serve more people. This was my first rookie mistake.

Upon my return to the hotel, I proudly presented the sixteen-inch pumpkin to Auntie Dam. She shook her head sadly. Auntie Dam asked Mum to translate. Auntie Dam told us that the pumpkin was too big. Mum gently informed me that because the larger pumpkin was too old, the flesh might be tough, and the thickness of the shell meant the custard wouldn’t cook correctly. I felt like a child that had been sent to the store for Camembert and had brought back Velveeta. The Thais were too polite to mention my rookie mistake the rest of the day, at least in English. Auntie Dam used sections of the giant pumpkin in other dishes that week, so no food was wasted.

The Walk of Shame

I returned to town the next day on my quest. Explaining to the vegetable seller that I needed a small pumpkin for sangkhayaa fak thawng, she said in English, “Why didn’t you tell me that yesterday? The pumpkin you bought was too big for a dessert.” She produced a smaller pumpkin, a perfect specimen.

Back at the hotel, I received Auntie Dam’s approval on the new pumpkin. Under her close supervision , I cut open a hole in the pumpkin around the stem. I scooped out the seeds and fibers from the inside and set them aside, then combined the eggs, coconut cream, and palm sugar in a bowl. I crushed fresh green fern-like pandan leaves called bai toey, taken from the garden behind the kitchen, in the mixture to give it a vanilla-like flavor. After removing the pandan leaves (they are inedible), I poured the custard mixture into the pumpkin and placed it inside a steamer to cook for about thirty minutes. Once Auntie Dam pronounced it appropriately cooked, we removed it from the steamer to cool. The finished fak thawng dessert was sweet and light with the fragrance so important in Thai cooking. It was deemed authentic enough to serve to the Thai staff and the hotel guests.

As the months went on, I was allowed to watch and learn from Auntie Dam. I realized the commonality between her cooking style and the French and Italian styles I had learned at home. Fresh seasonal ingredients were combined with simple and timeless cooking techniques to create a balanced flavor. However, Auntie Dam would assess proper cooking with her nose as much as she did by taste, and she would judge the readiness of a dish by the sound of the food in the cooking wok. She would wait until the last minute to add coriander or basil leaves into the cooking pot to preserve their flavor, color, and aroma.

Accent on Freshness

The pork, chicken, and eggs Auntie Dam got from the daily market or from farmers on the island had bold, fresh flavors. She kidded around with me about wanting to visit America. I knew our relationship would erode quickly if I subjected her to the bland American supermarket fare, with eggs laid by chickens shut in poultry penitentiaries. Would you lay a flavorful egg if you were trapped in a hen house from hell? In the homogenized Western supermarkets, the poultry on sale are bred to have oversized breasts for the Lean Cuisine set, looking like winged muscle-bound steroid abusers, all show and no real strength of flavor.

Thai pork tastes like it came from a well-fed and well-loved pig. Fat is where it’s at for pigs, and the Thai pigs wore a layer of fat like a fur coat. In America, pork is advertised as “the other white meat”an alternative to the pallid chicken. Sadly, supermarket pork has devolved to become the “other tasteless white meat” no more worthy of purchase.

At the local Thai pig farm, the animals were content to spend lazy afternoons digesting before getting another feeding. I imagined American pigs forced to exercise to a disco beat like suburban housewives fighting flab at the gym. In Thailand, there were no compulsory piggy aerobics, no sweating to the oldies. In an effort to slim down the pork (and its fat and flavor), American pork now resembles a deluded aging starlet who thinks if she just gets rid of all her body fat, she will be more attractive, when all the time we loved her for her curves. Auntie Dam’s cooking featured the full taste of pork belly, the same cut from which bacon is made. In Thai, it was called muu saam chan, with its three layers of pork skin, fat, and meat. It was added to curries, deep-fried, or cooked with vegetables in soup, and gave great depth of flavor and texture. If one were counting calories, one just ate less, rather than a full portion of something insipid and low-fat.

The Sweat Lodge

The hotel kitchen had a tin roof and walls built of concrete blocks. Little of the outside breeze could penetrate this chamber. The average temperature inside was at least fifteen degrees higher than the outside world. It was like being in a Native American Sweat Lodge, where participants would sweat out the toxins in their bodies.

On a particularly warm day, Auntie Dam would show thin beads of sweat over her upper lip. I’d be drenched in sweat, with salty rivulets running down my neck, my arms, and my nose until it hit the hot oil in a wok and exploded a geyser of molten magma on my hands. Maybe that is why Thai food tastes so goodthe secret ingredient is perspiration, at least when I am cooking. If one of the keys to great food is the ingredients, at least my sweat contained a distillation of fresh chillies, lime, lemongrass, and basil.

Auntie Dam’s Sweat Lodge featured a blend of aromatherapy and torture. Sometimes the grassy and floral scent of freshly cut lemongrass and lime leaves wafted through the air as we prepared food. Sometimes when she threw chillies in a hot wok, my eyes would tear up as if I were a protestor at a demonstration and the police had let loose the tear gas.

She would giggle if I touched my face to wipe off the persistent sweat and smear my skin with irritating chillies. The blotches on my face from the chillies looked like a second-degree sunburn, the burn marks from hot oil erupting from the wok on my wrists like tattoos. It wasn’t pretty. But I loved being in the hot heart of the hotel and watching and helping Auntie Dam.

Auntie Dam allowed me to watch her cook and help prep food. She was calmly tolerant of my presence in her kitchen and would take time to help me learn the names of the ingredients and the dishes. If I made the mistake of moving one of her pots and pans out of position, she would give me a silent glare that could burn through steel.

Auntie Dam patiently demonstrated how to prepare food in the Thai tradition that matches elegant form with function. She trimmed the tough upper stems off a stalk of lemongrass, peeled off the woody outer layer, and then sliced the moist bottom part of the stalk with a diagonal cut. When I inquired how that made a difference, Auntie Dam had Mum explain the obviousthe diagonal cut allowed more open surface area for the lemongrass flavor to escape into the soup. The inner purple and white rings looked prettier too. Auntie Dam rejected my cutting green limes into quarters, and showed me how Thai chefs cut off a third of the lime and then trim another section as a mirror image of the first. To extract the most juice out of each lime section, she would squeeze it over the blunt edge of a knife. She claimed that more juice could be obtained from the lime by this method. Fresh slices of the identical lime rounds could be used as a decoration on the plate to make it look more attractive.

Even after we had spent months together, the introverted and quiet Auntie Dam wouldn’t look directly at me. If she glanced at me, she looked from the side, most often with her eyes on the pan of food between us. We communicated through the food. It explained all she knew and wanted to say.

After a few months, I had happily acclimated to the full-strength, spicy and salty food Auntie Dam made for the Thai hotel staff. I concluded that it would be difficult for me to readjust to the muted flavors of Western cooking. On the increasingly rare occasions when I ate Western food, I would miss the spicy flare of Thai food. I was taking my first steps toward turning Thai by taste, as much as one can when one is a French and Scots-Irish ancestry fat boy with freckles.

Incoming! — Flying Vegetables Wing By My Head In Phitsanulok

The phak bung stirfried vegetable winged past my ear and was expertly caught by the adept waiter to my rear. Perhaps I should tell you why vegetables were being hurled at me. But first, let’s discuss why vegetables can fly.

Phak bung is a hardy green hollow-stemmed vegetable with slender and tender leaves that grows widely in Thailand, especially by bodies of still water. It is gathered for cooking as a quick vegetable stirfry, stays crisp after cooking and is packed with vitamin A, calcium, and iron (but not so much iron compared to spinach that you feel like you have chewed on aluminum foil when it is eaten). Names for this common vegetable include the more glamorous and attractive name of morning glory (in the way a Hollywood starlet might change her name to something more alluring), but it is also called water convolvulus or swamp cabbage.

The green is combined in a wok with hot cooking oil, mashed garlic, crushed chillies, and black bean sauce or yellow bean sauce and is quickly stirfried. As cooking oil drips over the edge of the wok, spectacular flames can erupt, giving the dish a smoky flavor. Some chefs tilt the edge of the wok to induce the conflagration, adding to the taste and spectacle of the dish. This flaming version is called phak bung fai daeng or literally “red fire flaming water spinach.”

To further make the stirfry an exciting eating experience, some Thai chefs have invented a new variation―phak bung lawy faa or “sky floating water spinach” where the chef flings the cooked greens through the air in a practiced arc and an agile waiter catches them on a plate. The aeration is thought to give the stirfry an added flavor.

We had heard that tryouts for the flying vegetable caching team were held every night in Phitsanulok, so we motored to the night market and parked by a riverside restaurant. At the side of the restaurant near the open-air cooking station was an aged, rusted, brick red delivery van with a set of steps leading to a platform on top.

I figured having vegetables flung at me was a logical continuation of the ‘Fun with Food” theme of the trip which had already included dodging durians, wrestling with dancing shrimp in Chiang Mai, and later chasing chickens in Isaan.

I resolutely stepped up to the chef and asked to participate in the sport. To get in the swing of things, those trying out for the phak bung catching team could don a Nutty Tourist ensemble of a red rubber apron, which I accessorized with a red hula skirt and a headband into which a waiter stuck two long eggplants as Viking horns. I declined the rubber flesh-colored fake breasts, feeling this added bit of equipment might constrict my catching arm. I climbed the steps to the top of the van and did a few light stretching exercises.

The chef set a large blackened wok over a high gas flame and added vegetable oil. After the oil had begun to smoke slightly in the pan, handfuls of the green vegetable were tossed into the wok with sliced chillies, mashed garlic cloves and black bean sauce and quickly stirfried. The chef tilted the edge of the wok so some of the oil caught fire in a spectacular supernova flare-up, like dragon’s breath. The chef drained off most of the liquid from the wok so just the greens nestled with the garlic and chillies remained. This made a cleaner missile to hurl towards me.

Four motorcycle taxi men thumped on bongos and chanted a song about phak bung to encourage my successful catch. One of them even showed his commitment to the theme music by putting down his bottle of Chang beer. Of course, it was empty.

The chef gave me a rookie oversized vegetable catching platter the size of a truck hubcap, while an encouraging waiter stood by with a plate the size of a teacup saucer. The chef stood fifteen feet away on the ground beneath the van. As I preened for Kitty’s camera, the flying vegetable hurtled past my head and the waiter leapt up to catch it like a major leaguer leaping up to snatch a line drive in the World Series.

How I managed to miss catching the hurled vegetables three times is a matter of debate. I blamed the light from the restaurant in my eyes and the flashbulbs from Kitty’s camera (One of her many nicknames earned during the trip was “Snaps” due her diligence in documenting our trek with hundreds of photos.)

My sports failure echoed my brief and unremarkable career in Pee Wee baseball where I managed to have the ball land anywhere but in my glove. Then I got eyeglasses and the world changed from Impressionist to Realist so I could see beyond my nose, but I had already become interested in cooking and never returned to sports unless compelled by the school.

But I looked great in my phak bung catching gear and have been shopping for my own red hula skirt, size XXXXL.

I’ve since tried my hand at slinging phak bung in the yard in front of my bungalow. I can’t tell if the aeration process substantially adds to the flavor or not, but the neighborhood kids like trying to catch the sky-floating vegetable and the local birds are well fed.

If you are in Phitsanulok, you can practice your phak bung catching skills at the Savik restaurant near the night market on the banks of the River Nan.