Costa Rica

I went to Costa Rica last September.  The country pleasantly surprised me.  It would seem like a third-world country from a distance, but the economy is actually fairly strong and infrastructure solid.  It’s great for Costa Ricans, bad for tourists wanting a cheap holiday.  The food in Costa Rica is amazing however.  There is so much fresh fruit and wonderful flavors to savor.  I ate Comdia Typico for breakfast almost every morning.  Comida Typico is a meal consisting of gallo pinto (white rice mxed with red beans), fried eggs, natilla (Costa Rican sour cream), sweet fried plantains, coffee (what Costa Rica is known for!) and fresh juice- usually fresh strawberry made daily.  It was a huge meal, but the whole time I was in this beautiful land, I felt really good and healthy with what I ate.  It also helped that we were walking through the cloud forest, swimming in the ocean or sightseeing a live volcano to work off the calories.  The country itself is lush and green everywhere.  There are rolling mountains with many coffee plantations and cattle farms (I had never seen a country with so many cows) that seem to go on forever with amazing valleys and friendly locals.  Then there is the cloud forest, a rain forest so high up that it is literally in the clouds.  I had the most amazing meal just outside the forest in a small village we stopped by.  It is a traditional dish called Cusado.  Cusado is rice and beans with fish or meat, fried plantains, a mild white cheese similar to a harder mozzarella, soft corn tortillas and a lettuce salad with avocado.  The dish itself doesn’t sound particularly unique, but it was the quality of the ingredients that made the dinner so memorable.  I chose meat with my Cusado, not tough like I had thought it might be, very tender especially since the meat only comes one way- well done and still it was fabulous.  The beans were flavored with onion and chilies, which added a slight heat to them, but what really stood out was the freshness of the vegetables used in the salad.  The avocado was perfectly ripe.  It’s hard to find good avocados, not too soft and mushy yet not too firm and under-ripe with an avocado flavor that you don’t come across very often.  I had the feeling that it had ripened on the plant verses in a bag on a truck.  The tomatoes in the salad were juicy and sweet, like candy and the cucumber fragrant- the slices beading with the natural water that is made in a cucumber.  Lastly the corn tortillas were freshly made, warm and soft giving the dish a real homemade feel.  Costa Rica is a great place to eat as I can tell you and many people have told me.  I am getting hungry just thinking about it now; the Thai food I will probably eat tonight suddenly doesn’t sound as appealing compared to my memory of Costa Rica.

Keep eating!!

cooking with Lek

Lek is a 25 year old Thai woman we met through Jack, the bar owner who took Nir and I to get our traditional tattoos from the ex-monk.  She had come along with us to get our tattoos and had offered to teach us how to cook some traditional Thai dishes.  This is exactly what we were looking for; we had been dying to cook with a family in their home.  She lived behind Jack’s bar in an apartment located in a kind of alleyway.  It was slummy, I’m not going to sugarcoat or glamorize it.  It was basically two rows of about 6 apartments with a ‘courtyard’ between them.  Lek’s apartment had two rooms with a bathroom for her and her three small children and all cooking was done outside with tanks of gas.  At first glance you would think Lek was a much sadder case than I later realized.  She had four children, one living with another family in another city so all in all one boy and three girls.  The youngest was a girl and was half Danish.  The father lives in Thailand but didn’t want to have anything to do with Lek or the baby.  Lek said she had a 65-year-old boyfriend who was from The Netherlands and was coming to visit her the next week.  The apartment itself was kept clean, but it was very old and run-down.  I had the feeling no matter how much you cleaned it; it would still look like it hadn’t been cleaned in ages.  Nir, Lek and I went to the market to choose ingredients for the dinner.  The market was crazy but not huge. There were all types of vegetables, exotic fruits, cuts of pork and salted fish.  Whole chickens laid there, their necks lifelessly hanging over the counter.  The smell wasn’t as bad as some markets I have been to here in Thailand, but still the area could have used a giant sized douse of Febreeze.  The smell of sewer and swine should never be mixed.  Never.  So we chose some ingredients like Kefir lime leaves, chilies, chicken thighs, minced pork, soft tofu, fresh shrimp, fresh squid, pork sausage, cabbage, cucumbers, tomato, bean sprouts, and bamboo shoots.  We were ready to cook.  We headed back to Lek’s house and organized the ingredients according to dish.  We were making a tofu, and cabbage soup with minced pork balls; a shrimp, calamari salad with red onion, cucumber, white seaweed, pork sausage and fresh chilies; and lastly a chicken stir-fry with bamboo shoots.  To my disappointment every household seems to keep a healthy amount of good ‘ol MSG lying around to boost the already pungent Thai flavor and Lek’s kitchen was no exception.  We started with the soup; boiling the water, putting some sort of powdered salad seasoning and MSG into the pot along with cabbage and the minced pork balls.  The pork was flavored with oyster sauce and the tofu was added last.  She set it aside and started on the salad.  We cut up the squid into rings, sliced the sausage and cleaned the shrimp, and trimmed the lime leaves, boiling all lightly.  We then made the dressing from limes, sugar, MSG, fish sauce and dried chilies.  Adding them all together plus the tomato and cucumber the salad was done.  Lastly we made the stir-fry.  We cut up the chicken, right through the bones and marinated them in a heavy soy sauce- looking sauce that was labeled seasoning.  A bit suspicious, but it tasted good.  Lek stir-fried the bamboo first and separately cooked the chicken, then added them together with chilies.  While the food was cooking I was flashing away with the camera and entertaining the children who were running wild down the alley.  I thought we would all eat together, being about 6 adults and 4 children in total, but Lek and another Thai woman were the only ones to eat with us.  The food turned out to be good, Lek had also fried pieces of pork that somewhat reminded me of bulgogi (a Korean dish of marinated, broiled meats) in flavor, it may have been my favorite of the dishes.  I am grateful to Lek, her family and friends for letting us into her home and taking the time to cook with us.  She was a kind and strong woman, a good mother and does her best to provide for her family.  Although her situation is sad and difficult, she has four beautiful children and is close with her friends and family.  It gave me a close up look into a world I do not know much about and I feel appreciative of the life I have.  

Last night’s diner

Thong Pa Pun is on the border of Thailand and Burma and is a drowsy small town with friendly warm people and amazing food.  Nir (the friend I’m traveling with) and I stopped in this tiny settlement on our way to Burma, which was another hour away.  We rented a small motel room that was a lot less sanitary than what we wanted and with ‘beds’ that were basically box springs on top of wooden boxes without the ‘spring’.  But what more can you ask for at 300 Baht a night?  Strangely the room had a pretty new looking t.v. with satellite cable.  Priorities, priorities, priorities…!  We walked around the town in search of a place to eat, something different- something other than coconut curry or pork and basil leaf stir-fry.  Walking for what seemed like an hour, we spotted an oasis in the night air.  The rather large eatery was lit up from a distance in the standard fluorescent tube lighting and I could see an apron-clad cook doing something in the open kitchen.  The fresh seafood, various meats and vegetables were on display neatly over ice for passersby to tempt them- and tempting it was.  There were fresh whole red snapper, pork intestines, snakehead fish, frog legs, and then the usual pork, chicken and shrimp.  We were sold.  The kitchen was just behind the display and was clean- no fly in sight.  It was actually a nice kitchen and I’ve often wanted an outdoor kitchen myself like this one.  The cutting tables were sanded down tree stumps, they looked pretty cool.  We sat at a table and this is when the frenzy started.  First off, the menu was in English, which was great because we could order more than the same old dishes we seem to order time and time again because we knew the Thai names for.  It was a huge menu, about 4 pages front to back and some really crazy things on it like a fried pork intestine salad with cucumber and chilies.  We ended up choosing: deep-fried hard-boiled black eggs (British?) with minced pork and fried basil leaves, glass noodle salad with minced pork and chilies, a custard-like tofu and seafood soup with a clear broth, stir-fried frog legs with basil leaves, and stir-fried marigold leaves with salted mackerel.  Plus we had sticky rice that the waitress went to another restaurant to get for us.  We watched a little of the cooking, starting off by a little girl bringing the chef his hat- a Rasta beret.  It was the signal to get down to business.  Nir filmed most of the cooking; I just took some photos of the kitchen set up.  We sat down as the first dish was finishing.  Now Thai people usually like to take their time to eat; talking, drinking whiskey, watching t.v. - what have you.  We did not do as the Romans do in this scenario.  The food looked so fresh and the dishes so unique that we went into a feeding frenzy.  It was almost like a fever, human piranhas unable to control the sheer joy of the smells, tastes.  To our embarrassment we must have looked as if it was our first meal in days, greedy ferong (foreigners in Thai)!  My favorite dish was the salted mackerel dish.  The sauce was sweet, balanced the bitterness of the marigold leaves and the saltiness of the mackerel.  Truly amazing!  Nir’s favorite was the frog legs.  The frog legs tasted like a cross between chicken and squid texture-wise as well.  The sauce was thick, oily and salty.  The greens served with it were bitter but evened out the dish.  I also like the black eggs.  I have never had black eggs, let alone hard-boiled and then deep-fried black eggs.  The actual eggs didn’t have much taste, but the minced pork was good and the light sauce was sweet.  The fried basil leaves made the dish- crispy and light as air with the strong basil flavor.   After our culinary high wore off and we returned back into civilized human beings; I felt stuffed to the gill, Nir said he felt just right.  It was the best meal so far in Thailand.

minced pork with glass noodles

soft tofu and squid soup

salted mackerel with marigold leaves

deep fried black eggs

frog legs

99 Baht All you can eat in Bangkok photos

 Sorry to take so late....  But getting more stories to tell!!!!!  Take a look at the gluttony!!

99 Baht All you can eat in Bangkok

Hot.  From the food to the weather, Bangkok is hot.  It is a city for the senses, extremes of every kind around every corner.  Those of you that have been here can understand what I mean.  I have spent 3 days so far in this gluttonous haven, this place that assaults the senses in every turn.  I am still trying to absorb and digest everything from the unrelenting traffic and food vendors to last night’s dinner.  The combination of the heat plus air pollution is damn oppressive, it weighs down on me and I feel very tired at the end of the day.  Maybe it’s something I need to get used to.  But I digress; what I really want to write about today is last night’s dinner.  My friend Nir (who I have embarked on this Asian voyage with) and I ate at a 99 Baht all-you-can-eat restaurant, which is about $4 American.  This was a place that pretty much sums up Bangkok as a whole: crowded, loud and masses of food.  The theme of the restaurant was a combination of Korean Barbeque and Japanese ShabuShabu.  ShabuShabu is thinly sliced meat usually pork or beef that you poach at the table in a heated metal contraption with a stock or dashi as the poaching liquid.  Korean Barbeque is thinly sliced meat usually beef and is grilled at the table on small grills.  This 99 Baht place of culinary debauchery was a combination of the two.  It was a small grill on top of hot coals with a ring around the grill with water, for poaching or drinking.  You place pieces of pork fat on the grill and let it run off into the water, along with whatever else you are cooking on the grill or poaching in the water.  Eventually the water becomes almost like a soup, Nir seemed to love drinking it, me not so much.  There are about 50 different cuts of meat and poultry, bacon and sausages; you can have anything from whole shrimp and tiny clams to beef liver, marinated pieces of chicken or stomach lining.  There were a few foreigners scattered here and there in the gigantic monstrosity, but for the most part it seemed to be the place to go with your family or groups of friends, I even saw a couple cut-rate dates taking place.  The sweltering heat from the city mixed with the warmth of the grills and humidity from the river was an experience on it’s own.  Sweating, grilling, eating; a really appetizing combo.  But nevertheless we ate, oh and did we eat, we ate our share plus that of probably a small village, dipping meats and other parts of animals into a variety of different sauces and chili vinegars.  Fish balls and sausages galore!  They also serve desert, traditional Thai deserts like sticky rice and ice cream or strangely unnatural sweet jellies that were made with so many chemicals they could probably survive a nuclear blast or five.  It was a gigantic restaurant right next to the river that runs through the city and I couldn’t help but wonder just how fresh the seafood was…  But seriously everything looked fresh and was kept chilled, I felt pretty safe eating for the most part.  The place was lit up like a stadium and amongst the multitude of families and friends eating in the place there was an even brighter lit stage at the head of the restaurant with a man and a woman enthusiastically singing throughout the night.  They looked like real pros with their number and email address advertising the duo hanging up behind them painted on a blue tarp.  Their play list consisted of a Thai rap and r&b song or ten, some kind of romantic soft rock tunes and even a few cover songs like Hotel California (I think), all sung in Thai of course.  After we finished stuffing our gobs we rolled ourselves back to the hotel in awe of the whole experience and a slight feeling of repulsion from the sheer amounts of animal flesh we not only saw but consumed as well.  I recommend seeing this place to any meat loving person who happens to stop in Bangkok for night out.  But be prepared to eat, sweat and be awed.

To Market To Market

London'd Borough Market.....  Need I say more?