Asia Trip 20: Learning how to cook Thai food in Chiang Mai

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After our amazing trip to the food market (see pictures below) we went back to the cooking school at the hotel and made four different dishes. Spicy Beef Salad, Spicy Ground Pork with Basil, Chicken Green Curry, and Phad Tai. The results were amazing. There were two other “students” besides John and I (me?). The chef-instructor would demonstrate and explain and then we would each go back to our own little kitchen areas and try and replicate it. The beef salad we ate right after we made it because it is best eaten straight away. The other three dishes waited for a feast at the end of the lesson.

Along with the trip to the food market, the cooking lesson was the highlight of our experiences in Thailand.

Hygiene is a chef’s best friend.
I am about to dig into my delicious and spicy beef salad. I hate beer, but I had to take a sip of John’s after eating this salad to put out the fire in my mouth.
Here is John perfecting his Thai Green Curry.
Learning how to make a “net” out of eggs.
Easier than it looks.
My Phad Thai wrapped in my egg net.
The best part about cooking. Time to eat.

Asia Trip 19: Tour of a food market in Chiang Mai

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Here are pictures from a trip to the fresh food market in Chiang Mai. Our guide Tu was great, we got to touch and smell and taste all kinds of things. And best of all we got explanations for what everything was.

The yellow blocks are margarine, the bags of yellow liquid are cooking oil.
A Thousand Year Egg. Essentially a preserved egg. There is an explanation here on wikipedia for the Chinese version, but I think Tu mentioned something about using tea for the Thai ones, although that may have been for the green ones (below), not the pink ones.

Dried fish/seafood in the foreground.
This shirtless gentlman (at 7:30 in the morning–and it wasn’t hot, I had on a jacket) took coconut meat, add a bit of water, put them into a machine and put the resulting coconut milk into the bag he is holding for us to take back to the cooking school to put in our green curry.
Somekind of coconut dessert. It was too early in the morning for me to try much, but John got into the swing of things. His particular favorite was taro custard.
The beautiful and tasty Dragon Fruit. The flesh is white with black specks.
I was hoping these were pigs in a blanket, but they weren’t.
How pretty is that ice?
Tu assured us these were better than Krispy Kreme.

Asia Trip 18: Our peaceful retreat in Chiang Mai

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JANUARY 8, 2010: We left hot, humid, hectic Bangkok for a stay at a resort just outside the town of Chiang Mai in the mountainous north of Thailand. The sky was blue, the air was fresh, the temperature was cooler, and everything was quiet.

Both its Lanna-style architecture and amazing landscaping make this place look quite natural in the Thai landscape. They even built working rice-growing terraces. Locals farm it for the interest of us tourists and the rice itself gets donated to charity.

They have two water buffalo including this albino one. Check out the growth pattern of his hair.

The spa was great.

A little welcome nosh in our room on our first evening.

Hangin’ out by the pool. That would be one Pina Colada, one Mai Tai, and homemade potato chips with herbs and parmesean cheese.

I forgot my swimsuit so I was looking for a leaf to cover my bits. (No, not really Mom.)

Asia Trip 17: Fast Food Fun in Asia

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Ronald seems to have assimilated Thai culture quite well. And no, we didn’t eat at McDonalds.

Can someone explain what all of these words have to do with each other?  Salsa, steak, spaghetti, peppericious…

Anyone who knows me knows that I love the Dairy Queen. Imagine my surprise when I saw a DQ at the airport in Bangkok. But I was really surprised when I saw one at the tiny airport in Siem Reap (shown below). By the time I saw one in the big mall near our hotel in Bangkok (last picture) I was no longer surprised but did find myself lining up to get me a cone. It was a “large” cone but it was smaller than even the smallest cone in the U.S. Maybe that is why Thai people are thin and Americans are not.

Book Review: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

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The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood

I first read The Handmaid’s Tale sometime in college in the late 1980s. After about 20 years of recommending it, I have been thinking maybe I should read it again to make sure I would still think it recommendation-worthy. Although given my pro-Atwood bias it seemed unlikely I would change my tune. My husband (at my urging) brought The Handmaid’s Tale along with him on our trip to Thailand and Cambodia. I casually picked it up just to remind myself what he was going to be reading and suddenly found myself drawn in. And not surprisingly I enjoyed reading it again, remembering things I had forgotten and noticing new details. Some of the themes may be slightly dated, but the story is still very compelling.

The brilliant thing about Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction is that she is such a master of language that she can create a new world without the descriptions seeming forced. The details of her dystopias just unfold as part of the narrative. There are none of those klutzy moments like those found in the works of lesser writers. Those writers who, like an old fashioned opera singer who has no sense of drama and who can’t sing and act at the same time, walks to the middle of the stage plants his/her feet, faces forward and sings the whole damn aria like they were giving a recital. Although, having said that, I must admit that Atwood does get a little cutesy when she applies proper nouns to some of her made up people, places, and things like she did in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.

My biggest problem with The Handmaid’s Tale is the same issue I had when I read it 20 years ago. The ending feels too frivolous to me. I think the story is quite devastating. It just seems wrong to end on a humorous note. No doubt Atwood is satirizing academia and academic conferences, but the emotional effect is a little jarring for me.

But none of the quibbles really matter. The book, like Atwood herself, is brilliant. And I am now contemplating a re-read of all of her fiction. And to those Canadians who may think Atwood overexposed, over-praised and self-important (I’ve read your blogs…), for many of us fans who aren’t exposed to Atwood as a National Treasure, the woman is a goddess.