Spicy Chinese Sausage Salad - Yam Kun Chiang (ยำกุนเชียง)

Dried Chinese sausage (aka lap cheong or lap chong), which the Thai call kun chiang (กุนเชียง), is widely used in Thai cuisine. It was also a staple in our house.

When I was a kid, my nanny would cut a few links of kun chiang into thin diagonal slices and saute them in a pan just to crisp up the outsides. A portion of glistening, perfectly seared pieces of aromatic dried sausage would then go on top of steamed Jasmine rice followed by a couple of glugs of Maggi sauce.

Read more...

How to Choose, Prepare, and Eat Mangosteens

My love for mangosteens or มังคุด Mangkud* (the first syllable rhymes with "young" and the second with "put") is legendary. There's even a picture of me as a toddler sitting next to a gigantic pile of empty mangosteen shells with curious purple stains around my lips. With an innocent face, I stare blankly at the camera as if to say -- I have no idea who ate these.

Read more...

Kanda Yabu Soba

In trying to come up with a succinct way to describe my time in Tokyo in the past several days, the only (non)word that comes to mind is noodle-centric.

I am planning on doing a Tokyo roundup post, but I felt Kanda Yabu Soba deserved a separate post just because I had such a great experience there. Established in 1880, the excellent artisan soba here makes this quaint little soba shop one of the most famous in Tokyo - a favorite among the locals and foreign visitors. For soba fiends, Kanda Yabu Soba is an institution. I hopped into a cab and all I had to do to get myself there was telling the driver I wanted to go to Kanda Yabu Soba. He nodded and took off. No elaborate directions needed.

It was early Sunday afternoon when I joined the throng of hungry people outside the restaurant (which looks like a very nice and cozy Japanese-style house). People patiently waited in the hot sun for a good half hour before slowly making their way to the lobby where they had to wait some more (but at least the lounge has air-conditioning and offers a roof over your head).

Once you reach the lounge, things move quite fast. The smaller your party, the more quickly you get seated, it seems. I have to admit, my heart was pounding quite audibly when I peeked into the dining area from the lounge and saw people slurping hand-made soba. Before you pass judgment on my gluttony, you have to first understand how many years I had waited for this moment.

By the time, I was seated, I was ravenously hungry. A meal of Soba Toro (fresh artisan soba dipped in grated yam and cold tsuyu) seemed great, so I went for it. Both hot or cold tsuyu broths are offered, but since when it comes to soba, my feet are firmly planted in the cold broth territory, I opted for cold. Besides, it just seemed so perfect for such a warm and humid day in Tokyo.

The simplest of soba costs 700¥ (about US$7). More elaborate dishes cost anywhere between 1,000¥ to 2,000¥. If you're very hungry, order two servings. It may look like a lot of noodles in the picture, but the bamboo box in which the soba is served is very shallow. We're talking a cup of noodles, loosely packed. Every little bit satisfies, though.

Non-noodle items on the menu include a variety of small side dishes in the same price range as the noodle dishes. When I say small, I mean small. The three thin slices of duck breast in the top photograph are all you get. I also ordered a side of steamed fish cakes which came with finely grated fresh wasabi -- a rare treat. The fish cakes vaguely reminded me of the time when I, out of curiosity, took a bite of an eraser in preschool. The duck breast, on the other hand, was exquisite.

All in all, it was a pleasant experience. The soba was as great as you could possibly hope soba would be. The cold broth was delicious and perfectly seasoned. Even if you're new to soba, you can tell that the difference between the broths you find at Kanda Yabu Soba and those you might find elsewhere is vast.

Read more...

PED XING

[By the time you're reading this post, I would have already left Chicago for a semi-long vacation in Asia. I'll be checking back with you as time and opportunity permit while I'm roaming about. Some normalcy will resume once I get settled into a hotel with internet connection at my next destination.]

See this PED XING sign? At a risk of being reckoned an idiot*, during my first year in the US, I had no clue what the sign said let alone what it meant. To make my ignorance more embarrassing, there was a time when I thought the sign bore the name - Chinese name - of a place.

And if, up to this point, the depth of my stupidity hasn't become clear to all who are reading this, I once even told someone to meet me at a restaurant located in a strip mall right across the place called Ped Xing. "You can't miss it," I said. "They put two big bright yellow signs on both sides of the street right in the front." Not until a year later did I come to realize what the sign said. Good thing I'm always a careful driver and don't need the dumb sign to tell me to slow down when I have to anyway.

As I'm drafting this pre-trip post, all my bags are packed and I'm all giddy with excitement. As apprehensive as I sometimes am about being served weird things by doting family members to whom I will forever be a 5-year-old girl, I know home is where nourishment of every kind is. The moment I see my aunt's kitchen, I'll dive into it head first. That's where you find homemade Thai food as it should be. I also look forward to my daily dose of fresh tropical fruits, especially durian. I'll hit the beach. I'll be camping in the mountains. I'll shop. I'll play. I'll roam the country like a stinky tourist with a giant backpack.

Yet, in the back of my mind there is a lingering fear. I am afraid of dying while crossing the road in Bangkok. I am not kidding; it almost happened several times before. My friends, or whoever happened to be with me at the time, had to physically restrain me from darting mindlessly into the street and getting killed by oncoming vehicles.

Without realizing it, over the past several years in the US, I have gradually adopted the way Americans cross the road. While failure to re-adapt to my own culture in other areas may not be so catastrophic, failure to remember how to cross the road properly in my hometown could easily turn me into Bangkok roadkill.

You see, one of the privileges which people in the US sometimes take for granted is the pedestrians' ability to cross the road in anyway they want, wherever they want (oftentimes yards away from the crosswalk), and manage to get away with it. (If you have never witnessed this type of thing, please camp out somewhere between the exits of your neighborhood grocery store and the parking lot right in front of it and you'll see a lot of what I'm talking about.) Regardless of the circumstances, it seems the motorists are responsible for stopping for all pedestrians whether or not the pedestrians cross the street in a responsible or considerate manner.

This kind of thing could easily get you killed in most places around the world, including Bangkok. Pedestrians are to cross the street only at crosswalks where they have the rights of way. Outside of the "zebra" crosswalks, you're on your own, man. Even so, you have to walk fast; leisurely strolling while swinging your hips as if on a catwalk is strongly discouraged. The streets of Bangkok are already extremely dangerous as it is; you don't need to inject drama into this whole thing by jaywalking. Promenading the street hoping the cars will always stop for you at the mere sight of your right ankle is a sign of lunacy. If jaywalking doesn't get you badly injured, it will at least get you fined - perhaps posthumously.

I need to remember this. Oh, I pray I remember this.

I will be gone from my blog for a few days before I re-emerge somewhere in Asia. I'll try to post pictures and updates on Twitter, so please follow me if you care. Check out the sidebar for a hint on where I will be blogging from next. Until then, thank you for being a loyal reader. I promise I have so many cool things to show you in the next several weeks, including recipes from my family vault. Please stay tuned.

But if I disappear from my own blog permanently, there's only one explanation -- I've become one of those Peds Xing the perilous Bangkok streets where I'm not supposed to X.

*Yeah, like that hasn't already happened ...

Read more...

How to Make Chewy Homemade Udon Noodles

It took a village to bring these udon noodles into existence. The inspiration came from Marc Matsumoto at No Recipes who recently wrote about homemade udon. His description of how it was done made me feel like I should be able to tackle this without dying in the process. The detailed instructions came from Harumi Kurihara who taught me through her book how to knead the dough with my feet. And lastly, the list of ingredients came from the package of my favorite brand of frozen udon. [Since I can't find the fresh kind in my area, don't like the dry type as much, and can't stand the unpleasant texture of the instant or almost-instant type that comes in plastic packages, frozen udon is the only choice.]

Read more...

Grilled Octopus Cocktail with Sriracha-Jaew Sauce

No story this time. There's nothing to tell you other than the fact that I think I might have just found the best cocktail sauce (or dipping sauce -- whatever suits you) ever. This grilled octopus cocktail was made and consumed (in its entirety) less than 10 minutes ago.

Read more...

Baked Purple Potato and Sour Cream Creamsicles

Ever since I started this blog seven months ago, I have been too timid to participate in any blogging event. So when I found out DoggyBloggy at Chez What? would be hosting this week's BSI (Blogger Secret Ingredient), I decided -- me no hermit no more. (My decisions are often grammatically incorrect.)

It's a good thing that I have some purple potatoes lying around since this week's secret ingredient is potato. There's something about purple potatoes that reminds me of taro or ube even though these things are very different from one another. And as I pondered what to do with these potatoes, first thing that came to mind was, oddly enough, ice cream. It may sound weird, if not repulsive, to many. But for those, such as I, who grew up eating taro or ube ice cream (or red bean ice cream, black bean ice cream, etc.), potato is just another starchy root vegetable which can be turned into ice cream just as easily.

Read more...

Very Crispy Fried Soft Shell Crabs with Thai Sweet Chilli Dipping Sauce

An activity which occupies several hours of my time each week involves reading things that were written as long as millennia ago. It's a fun exercise that grants the nosy me not only knowledge of historical events but also access to the minds of ancient people who, though lived in a different time and place, had the same basic wants, needs, fears, and aspirations as mine. As it turns out, some of them, to my amusement, even had the same bad (?) habit I do.

Read more...