Health & Fitness
Food
In which I take the Reader on a tour of the upcountry food scene and consider the idea of drinking a big glass of Purell.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The whole food thing sometimes makes me feel like I'm trapped in one of those TV shows where they have people eating things we usually think of as pests, bait or other non-foods. To see the full spectrum of the local diet in all its fascinating variety, let's take a short walk through the market:
On this table, the insect dealer has arrayed before her neat piles of grubs, ants, crickets and other winged or crawling creatures. Each is piled on a banana leaf, ready to fold up for easy takeaway. Some piles are motionless and some squirm with life. Over here is the chicken egg dealer, but instead of the shell containing egg, it contains a chick that was ready to hatch but instead was roasted alive inside the shell. Now let's drop in on the rodent guy. He has four or five variants of mouse, squirrel and rat lined up. For variety, you will note he has featured a bunch of small birds tied together at the foot. Unlike the rodents, the birds are still sort of alive. They are inexpensive and I am tempted to buy them for release but they look like they may be past the point of no return and would only end up as easy pickings for the stray cats. So turns the Wheel of Dharma.
There is a bucket of turtles and many types of fish. There are animals and there are parts of animals and there is blood and flies. There are roots and fruits and vegetables I've never seen before. Pause for a moment at the seafood dealer with her impressive number of live crabs and admire them appreciatively, now understanding the amount of time and skill and possibly battle scars their collection entailed. Hours ago they were hidden in a nearby rice paddy, and very soon they will be eaten with a handful of sticky rice.
About once a day we head out to the fields for what I will quaintly call a picnic, but what is actually some old-school foraging which would probably not have been much different than what people in this area did 100 years ago, and probably even 1,000 years ago as well, during the time of the Angkor Empire.
Today's menu was to feature seafood, so we set off for the knee-deep muck of a partially drained irrigation ditch. An incredibly filthy and mud-caked process resulted in the harvest of four or five different kinds of fish; a crab; a giant snail; and a creature which was about three inches long, looked like a gigantic aquatic cockroach, and was utterly repulsive, at least to me, although judging by the speed with which it was later plucked from the communal lunch tray represented a delicacy to my friends.
This bounty was brought back to our camp where someone had already kindled a fire. A woman went through the fish one at a time, slaying them with a sharp stroke to the neck with the back of the knife and then chopping off the fins. The entire process was completed on the ground, and within minutes everything was swarming with large red ants. This was, as I now knew, just an added bonus because red ant rice is a delicacy and was to be part of the meal anyway. After lunch we dozed on reed mats beneath the mango trees for a couple of hours, each person making their own way home upon awakening.
Meals are eaten sitting on a reed mat with a variety of shared dishes placed in the center. For every two or three people there is a basket of sticky rice which is placed at our sides. The way it works is that you take a large handful of sticky rice and hold it in your left hand, giving it a gentle squeeze to firm it up. You then break off a small amount which is rolled between the fingers of the right hand and formed into a flat little patty about an inch or two wide. Holding this against the thumb, you either use it to soak up some sauce or use your index and middle fingers to pinch some food against the rice. The whole thing is then eaten in one bite. There is no silverware. A roll of toilet paper is available as a napkin, but no one uses it. Off to the side is a container of water and a single glass, from which people drink a few mouthfuls of water at the conclusion of their meal. This whole process took some getting used to, and on numerous occasions I was sorely tempted to pass around some Purell before we started eating (especially the day we went foraging for seafood as described above.)
As a vegetarian I am spared some of the more challenging foods, but my hosts have caught on that I will eat fish and sometimes shrimp. There's one fish dish in particular which is delicious, and involves cutting a fish down the middle, scooping out the guts and replacing them with a handful of herbs. The outside is then crusted with some spices and salt. The whole thing is then roasted on a fire, and tastes amazing. Once they saw I liked this, it appeared every day, although it did turn into a gateway food for other, riskier dishes. There was a very spicy shrimp paste they cooked which I was managing to eat until I found out that it was not actually cooked. It was merely "prepared." What I mean is that it was raw shrimp, diced and then ground up with a mortar and pestle, then mixed with strong spices. I believe it may have had some other unmentionable ingredients as well, but this could not be confirmed.
At every meal, my incredibly kind hosts present one special dish cooked just for me, which is usually some combination of eggs, tofu, vegetables, rice or noodles. This duty is rotated between three or four of the women, and once the meal starts, the dish is usually tasted by the women who didn't cook it that time. There sometimes follows some good natured teasing, because for the most part they are just winging these dishes and are cooking many of these classic Thai meals (like pad thai, or fried noodles) for the first time. Two of the girls have adopted me as an older brother and take great pride in serving me amazing meals every day.
The provenance of the actual food aside, meal time was a very special time of day. There were often 10 or more people gathered around the food, each sitting facing to the side to maximize the number of people who could fit. I would relax and roll the sticky rice around in my hand, listening to their laughter and soaking up the joyful atmosphere created by this warm and wonderful family.
