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For a Dollar
ThailandTom
Veteran
This is mainly for @LeonBasin because in a thread a few days ago we were discussing food in Thailand for a dollar. I normally eat at a variety of either street vendors or what I call 'open air restaurants'. This meal was purchased at one of these open air places, they have tables and chairs, nortmally 1-2 chefs at the fornt of the place, a buddhist shrine and that is about it. They chefs normally own the place and live upstairs. You can help yourself to free water and ice if you eat there but I took it home to take a pic for Leon. Bleieve it or not, she had ran out of rice!! So I ordered 'pasee-eel' which is a wide noodle with vegetable and you choice of either chicken, pork or seafood. You also get some spices and stuff if you want to add them, here is the picture.
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I had a friend (a doctor, in fact) who went to Thailand, and for 2-and-a-half weeks, she ate at these roadside stalls... health and safety was tossed to the wind, and she would sit and watch as these various little insignificant cooks conjured up the most wonderful miracle-dishes out of ingredients open to the air, the traffic and passing flies....
she had a wonderful time, but on the last evening there, decided to indulge herself and eat a 'proper meal' in the hotel restaurant.
by the time she had returned to the UK two days later, she had developed a really nasty bout of food poisoning... which eventually, was traced back to the hotel meal.
nice....
such as washing up plates in a sink, then having to wash your hands - again - in a hand-washing sink before touching the food....
so - your hands are clean and washed, from washing dishes and rinsing them - then you have to go and wash your hands in a hand-sink, before picking up that loaf of bread.....
however, due to the colossal amount of food wastage in the UK (upwards of £12 - £15,000,000 per annum) the government is looking to abolishing the 'best before' labelling, and confining it to just the 'use by' dates.
See attached file....
I also think that if people are too clean then they also are prone to killing a lot of the bacteria that helps fight disease and illnesses etc. Again like a lot of things, middle way :om:
you couldnt make me any more hungry (if my body had its way, I'd never stop eating!!) - I'm one of those who likes every food (thus far) and Thai food especially - made me smile imagining you sitting in the bustle of it all with that delicious dish to consume... happy for you and yes, I'll be going to Thai restaurant with the picture in hand!!! Thanks for the heads up!
I have weird tastes, but i'm sorry - it was delicious!
I'd love a shot at those road side restaurants.
In Japan, in Winter, I had big bowl of steaming udon noodles from a street vendor; they were the best noodles I've ever had.
But here's my story. My significant other in Thailand has aplastic anemia. That's not just anemia, that's where you usually have to have bone marrow transplants and chemotherapy, etc. You almost never get fully cured, but it's more often somewhat manageable. And, it increases your likelihood of contracting other diseases, such as Hepatitis. For years my friend would end up in the hospital, sometimes for weeks at a time, usually 4 or more times a year. And what did he eat day in and day out? Street food.
When I arrived to live there, I put a stop to that. Almost every night we ate out in a sit down restaurant for a full meal or I cooked, and there were a number of Thai meals I got pretty good at. Guess what. For 2 full years he never ended up in the hospital even once. The doctors couldn't figure it out. But I knew. It was eating well-rounded meals on a virtually daily basis. Far less coconut oil. Higher protein. After the riots and virtual martial law, I left and returned to the US. He reverted to daily street food. 2 months later he was back in the hospital for 2 weeks, and has returned to the hospital for multiple days at least every second or third month ever since.
Again, I like Thai street food on occasion. But I suggest you also go to where the street vendors go to buy their food -- a wet market. Few Westerners ever see these places. Open-air...by that I mean the meat just hanging on hooks and not at all refrigerated (and keep in mind how hot tropical Thailand is), flies buzzing about, no one handling the meat washing their hands, etc.
And although it's getting a little less common in Bangkok (but you still see it), they deliver ice to some of these vendors in old-fashioned blocks (melts slower), and sometimes those "naked" blocks of ice are just dragged along the street and chipped apart on site as needed.
Even in some of the better small store front noddle shop types of places, food will sit out in large pans from mid-morning until closing. No refrigeration at all, often not covered.
I want to close by saying once again that yes, I ate street food in Thailand. But mostly I restricted that to food that I could watch them cook (heat does wonders to cut down on bacterial growth) and it wasn't a steady diet.
It looks nummy nummy.
And you've never lived until you bite into deep fried chicken feet on a stick. You're supposed to spit out the toenails.
My grandmother used to raise her own chickens, and would occasionally 'prepare one for the pot' ...
Realise this was from scratch, because of course, most people now just think of pre-packed, pre-prepared chicken wrapped in plastic and polystyrene....
I'm one of the few people i know who knows precisely how to prepare a chicken for the table....
and she used to throw all the good 'spare bits' into a big stock pot..... and when she had finished with them, i got to eat all the bits she wasn't going to use in the final dish - and my favourites were the feet!
http://newbuddhist.com/discussion/14730/the-newbuddhist-official-nostalgia-thread