It’s funny that despite the high number of Thai restaurants abroad (interesting article on that) I haven’t found anything close to what can be made at home. But it’s not like ingredients are hard to source, except Thai holy basil and good quality fish sauce. I like making khao pad goong and kai jeow moo sab.
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Huh! That program would have been launched by Thaksin, who’s basically the guy who inspired the last two military coups. I’ll go into more detail soon, but…basically he got too popular for the military’s liking.
The only Thai food I ever had in the US was in Brooklyn, and–man–it was awful. I ate it before I’d ever been to Thailand, but I remember that all the ingredients seemed to be sourced from the same place you buy greasy spoon Chinese food ingredients. I remember the two places near my college used that baby corn that no Asian cooking actually contains.
There’s a pan-Asian fusion place in Manhattan called Obao which I LOVE and has some dishes that manage to taste like all of SE Asia at once, but it’s on the high end and not meant to be authetic to an one country (and isn’t).
Thai omelettes should be pretty easy to make, as long as you use oil and none of the flavors you use in a western omelette (no cheese or butter)–so I bet you have a good recipe for that! It should basically just taste really oily with some of the leeky flavor. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t feel like fried rice is all that popular in Thailand? It’s available, but I think it’s thought of as kind of a Chinese thing? I could be an idiot, but I don’t feel like I ever see any locals order it.
Meat and potatoes dishes would be Pad Krapao–just plain rice, an egg, and basil stir-fried chicken (yeah, that’s the part that would probably be a challenge to make authentic). Pad Thai is genuinely quite popular, though like I said it should be an oddly sweet dish. It has a REALLY unique flavor, and I’m not sure where it comes from–the brown sugar? Stuff on sticks is popular: fish balls, pork balls, little sausages, hotdogs that are apparently almost vegetarian they have so little meat in them. Duck, Duck soup–which isn’t that different than other duck soups in the region (you want bean sprouts, duck liver, duck legs, I think some kind of leek, some red and green chilies, brown sugar, and chili flakes and white sugar on the side).
I try not to pretend to be a food aficionado, because I’m pretty far from it, but I was extremely disappointed by this (below). What kind of Vietnamese POW camp would use white wine, green beans, and shittake mushrooms? Bell peppers? Fuck you dude. My GF brings up a Martha Stewart recipe that went viral all the time. I forget what the big affront was. I think she put lime in a stir fry or something.
living in LA for such a long time made the whole “you can’t get good thai food in the us” thing so confusing to me but now that i’m not there any more i get it. sad.
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You know what Thai food I simply refuse to believe you can get in the US? Authentic laab. Laab is basically just minced beef and spices. It’s the staple of the North, which is ethnically and culinarily very similar to Myanmar. The thing is that it tastes like 5 different flavor profiles all competing at once. It’s not just that it’s, like, spicy and sour or something. It’s…it’s genuinely just…clashing. I introduced an American friend to it once and I was like, “It’s like tasting a magic eye picture, right?” and he was like, “Exactly!”
Oh! You know what Thai people love that SHOULD be a staple of US Thai restaurants? Seafood spaghetti. I think it’s considered a sort of fusion dish, though I think this preparation is unique to Thailand. It’s thick spaghetti, cooked really oily like greasy spoon Chinese food with peppercorn, chilies, and then the standard mixed seafood (shrimp, calamari, shallots, squid). Maybe there’s some garlic in there? It’s seemingly really cheap and easy to make as its a bar staple. It’s not really Thai at all: it’s a Chinese/Italian fusion. But…I think it’s a Thai invention.
Hoi Tod (badder-fried mussels) is another very popular street food that I don’t think Westerners think of.
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Fun Thai Food Facts:
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Noodles were a Chinese import, so Thai people don’t think of noodle dishes as “Thai” per se–with the exception of Pad Thai, which was invented by Thai royalty in an attempt to popularize noodles.
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In Thailand, it doesn’t feel like a meal if there’s no rice. As a result, McDonalds is considered a “snack”–not a meal. McDonalds, Burger King, and other Western fast food is also pretty pricey compared to local joints, so it’s sort of a special treat or somewhat cosmopolitan.
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KFC is a big treat here, and it’s often a destination after a graduation or to celebrate something. When that soccer team was rescued from that cave they went straight to KFC, lol. I can’t tell if KFC is worse here or if KFC has always been slimy and awful. But there are no Popeyes here, and the one in the Hong Kong airport is gone, and and…man I really wish we had a Popeyes.
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McDonald’s had a tough go of it initially, until students embraced it as a place to hang out after school and do homework and such–sort of like Starbucks. McDonalds resaurants tend to be huge with lots of seating, compared to a Thai restaurant.
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In Thai schools, you basically eat home cooked meals that are unique to what your school wants to cook. The idea of packaged school lunches was shocking to my GF. I had to explain that western food is kind of expensive by nature. Most Thai stables can be scaled up really easily and cheaply, so there was never any reason for them to standardize school lunches.
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If you want to get your kids to eat rice, and they refuse, you give them “American Fried Rice”. This is fried rice with ketchup and raisins. Thai kids LOVE it. And Thai people don’t realize that it’s not actually from America.
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Sometimes Thai seafood will be available with cheese on it. Took me a while to realize that this isn’t a Thai thing. Thai people think it’s an American thing. I also saw it in an anime set in LA recently. I guess from an Asian perspective, Westerners put cheese in all kinds of weird places, so why not lobster?
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I was in LA for a week last year, but I didn’t eat Thai food once. I just ate a bunch of burgers, lol. I think Jumbo’s Clown Room is in Thai town; there was…either a massage parlor or a Thai travel agency next to it. I couldn’t tell which.
I mean, I think if you were visiting from Thailand going to a Thai restaurant would be sort of an insane thing to do, but there is a surprising variety of Thai places both inside of and outside of Thai town. There is also obviously a HUGE amount of really mediocre American style Thai food (and some really good American style Thai places too!) It’s always a fun adventure to figure out what kind of place you’re dealing with.
Thai town is weird though because there is basically only one strip mall that is all hardcore Thai stuff, and then the rest of it is just like any other LA neighborhood but with a slightly higher density of Thai businesses. I mean it’s not like a touristy place like Chinatown is.
And yeah I think Jumbo’s is around there. Not really my thing but I feel like if you have to go to a strip club in LA that is probably the one to visit…
I think what really sets good pad thai apart is tamarind paste for the funky sourness (and additional sweetness) and the use of shrimp juice from fresh shrimp heads for that striking warm colour. I feel like you can judge a pad thai by its colour.
Larb is something I really want to make but like nam tok neua and mango sticky rice, it relies on Thai sticky rice which I can’t source. I’ll need to wait until Toronto is safe to return to and stock up on ingredients.
Oh man, Thai tea too, is amazing. I recently had Vietnamese coffee (also uses condensed milk) and that turned my life upside down.
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Honestly I love Jumbo’s, and I think it’s now a tradition that I go there with my friends when I’m in town. To be clear, it has a very burlesque, sex-positive, just-having-fun feel inside. And I always end up going with a full posse of women and gay dudes, so I have social sleaze shields. But honestly, the clientele are just hipsters, and the drinks are shockingly good.
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Laab is usually served without rice, actually!
But I have no idea how many ingredients it takes to get that flavor; unless you taste it here it’s hard to know you got it right, because the dish itself doesn’t taste “right”.
I saw some poor sap on Chopped do laab once, and he got dinged for it having “way too much going on”, and I was like, “Oh, maybe he did it right!”. The Indian chef liked it, which I actually wouldn’t have assumed but kind of makes sense.
Live English coverage of the demonstration happening right now!
Marching from the Victory Monument to the Government House. So far when the protesters meet a police barricade, the police just let them walk around them. Nobody’s sure why.
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Apparently the sticky rice is toasted and ground into a powder for a crunchy element. Maybe that helps explain the unique flavour.
Just asked my GF, because I was like, “What? There’s no rice in laab…”
Actually, you’re right, but it’s not for crunch–it’s more like using flour or something as a bonding agent–it helps it stay moist and stick together. But yeah: they make the rice pop kind of like popcorn and then mince it up apparently? I don’t think it has a taste, and I never actually realized that was in there, lol.
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So today, the royalist news was putting out reports of people protesting in yellow shirts to support the military government (yellow is the color of the king and thus becomes the color of royalists who are also conservatives overall).
It turned out to be civil servants. People started posting memos on Twitter that were distributed in government offices “suggesting” that employees should march in support of the government during work hours. It wasn’t a particularly inspiring display.
In the afternoon General/PM Prayut came on TV to address the Thai people. He styled it like a Presidential address from his office, which isn’t really a thing in Thailand. A friend said he watched too many movies about American presidents. Usually this kind of thing would be a press conference.
He read a speech about how we all need to be calm and unite. On paper, it read to me like a typical American speech of this sort: it basically just completely ignored reality and tried to both sides it by saying that protesters shouldn’t attack police and that maybe water cannons shouldn’t be in the street either.
I asked my GF what he was talking about with protesters attacking police (he specifically mentioned them beating police with pipes, which…I never saw). She said at some point during the Friday protest a single guy (in a crowd of tens of thousands) hit a cop with a pipe, and the other protesters grabbed him and calmed him down.
He said that if there was no more violence, they could remove the martial law which was put in place in March (for Covid) and recently extended to September.
Apparently in Thai his tone was very put upon. This is something he’s done before, which apparently works in Thai politics? He’s teared up and said, “I’m trying my hardest!” and that apparently makes people feel sorry for him. Weird. Obviously, the opposition says, “If you’re stressed out, just step down. We didn’t ask you to execute a coup, bro.”
Anyway democracy protesters announced they would start at Victory Monument and then March to the Government House for another surprise.
It’s about an hour march. Along the way there were police barricades. Initially, when protesters hit one they just went around them (police would block one side of the highway, apparently assuming there would still be traffic on the other side). At first there was a light skirmish as police tried to stop them. But it was just a line, not a phallanx, so they really couldn’t stop people from just going around.
After that, the additional police barricades just let them go. Some worried this was a trap. As you can see in the images above, the crowd went for kilometers, down two lanes of a four lane highway, do it took a while to get everyone in one place. At the Government House, rows of police cars and trucks formed a barricade with improvised barbed wire fences in front. They prepped for a siege.
When the leaders of this protest made it to the front, they asked the police commissioner to come out. When he did, they presented him with a giant resignation letter for Prayut and read it out loud.
It was written to be funny: saying, “I Prayut resign for my crimes, such as” and listing all the things he’s done in a flippantly frank way.
EVERY news channel carried this. All the ones that were trying to ignore this movement have given up.
Crucially, the government lost a court case today, in which they argued that they could ban users and news networks from the internet for saying things they don’t like. Their argument was that martial law applies to speech, so they can ban whatever they want, and that this speech fell under an anti fake news law passed a few years ago (intended for just this occasion, I suspect). The court was apparently not corrupt enough to uphold that level of bullshit.
This seems to have encouraged the press in general to at least cover the fact that half the country is revolting.
If Prayut doesn’t resign, the protesters say they will return in three days.
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Oh, also there’s a new nickname for yellow shirt protesters: Minions.
The unofficial mascots of the protests are street food vendors. Whenever you show up at a protest, the vendors are there waiting for you. We joke now that they’re “CIA”–how do they know first?
The secret is that there are vendors all over the city, and the protests are all near major landmarks. So when the location is released, one vendor will call a friend who already has nearby territory.
Still, it’s funny to get all geared up to protest, get the announcement of the location, run out the door to be the first one there, and when you arrive it’s a mobile food court.
It’s very
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Today, PM Prayut announced that he will repeal martial law soon.
Coincidentally, the government just lost multiple court cases, suing them for declaring martial law for no reason.
No major demonstrations today. Everyone takes a break until Sunday, when we resume if Prayut hasn’t stepped down.
My GF’s recovery is taking longer than expected. She should be okay, but the protest FOMO has been frustrating for both of us. We’re hoping that she’ll be able to march after this weekend. The protests don’t really need us, but seeing all of this going on and not participating gives us both his pent up feeling.
I guess after you go to a couple demonstrations you don’t feel uneasy about the “danger” anymore and you realize how much of a psychic relief it is. Before this movement I had only joined in on Occupy for a few hours, and really just to see it.
If you guys strongly believe in something like BLM, and it’s causing you distress, I really recommend joining demonstrations–if only for your own mental health. Memeing on Twitter is it’s own thing, but imo, it’s a pale shadow of the satisfaction and connection you feel from actually joining in with hundreds or thousands of people who believe as you do.
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Just bumping this to keep it alive. I have personal photos and videos from yesterday’s unplanned protest, and can give context to today’s MASSIVE march to the German embassy.
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