Dear Dad, (farger...whats a farger?)

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Your sweet tooth would be jumping out of your mouth in Thailand trying to get ahold of the desserts here. (I'll knock on wood that it doesn't...with all of the dental problems of the family's mouths this year.)

1. Waffle: BTS sky-train stations smell like a waffle. I find this a nice comparison to the urine/manure smell of the train stations in India. They have ham/corn waffles, raison waffles, maple waffles, and white rum waffles. Ok ok, I haven't tried one yet. Waffle doesn't really scream "THAI ALERT!" to me. I just really enjoy the smell.
2. Crepe: The man on the corner calls it a pancake. I assume thats the only English word he knows though; but, its not really a crepe either. He stretches out a piece of dough like a pizza crust. Then he fries it in oil, turning the edges in to make a square shape and puts jelly or a banana-egg mix on top. He folds it again and drizzles sweetened condensed milk on it all. (They sure love sweetened condensed milk here.) He wraps it in a paper cylinder for easy unwrapping on the go. I don't have a picture of this. I gobbled it down too fast and he hasn't been back to the corner since.
3. Mango Sticky Rice: I have yet to see this on the street, but I had went looking in a restaurant for it. I was pretty surprised that it was 70bt! Thats the equivalent price of 3 meals and a gauva on the street. Anyways, the name can tell you whats in the dish, but I can tell you that you could never understand how good it tastes. Something we can try to replicate at home...but probably would fail miserably 😞
4. Potato balls: So..I don't know the real name for these. Its just a donut hole without the sugar on it. But the special thing about these donuts is that they're made from potato flour. The inside is hollow, but just beneath the crispy crust is sort of gooey like the ratna gravy. When you bite into it, the insides stick together. Yah, yah good story, but I just thought it was neat.
5. Egg: Lots of sweets here have an egg yolk filling. Not your normal egg yolk, but egg yolk thats been curdled into ribbons in boiling sugar. There are little cookies that are just that: nests made of sugared egg yolk. They taste like scrambled eggs so I'm not out searching to get my daily fill of those, but I did have a pancake filled with sugared egg yolk ribbons today and it was quite tasty.
6. Pancake: Speaking of pancake, I had another pancake here too. But this had a condensed coconut milk filling. (See! condensed milk)
7. For the old people without any teeth: They have grilled bananas. They usually serve these with some sort of chili sauce. You can get in the peel or out of the peel...I guess it probably depends on how many teeth you have.
Also, I'm assuming this candy I tasted is for the old people because it has the nastiest, softest texture you could ever find (therefore, the young people couldn't possibly enjoy it? haha). All it has in it is rose water, sticky rice flour, and sugar. And the only thing I can think of that the texture reminds me of are those boogers from the "Gooey Louie" game at Nick and Alli's. Today we tried two others: one with a coconut flavor and a coconut filling; one with yellow bean sprinkles (?) and a bean filling. I didn't take seconds of either one...

Even after a few misses in the sweets department, I'm still having fun trying all the new flavors and textures. I hope you don't think I'm some sort of glutton...I'm being polite actually. My PI and the girls keep buying Kyle and I sweets so...we eat them. They enjoyed our faces today biting into the the gooey bean candy. THAT has probably been the biggest culture shock for us all so far. The Americans don't like their favorite candy!

I'm off to Krabi now for the weekend. Gotta catch my 12 hour bus by 8 and we're leaving at the peak of rush hour. eek!

Until we meet again,
Amy

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Comments

[Alli Downing]

Gooey Louie
I love your blog Amy!