Return to Bangkok Food

I believe it was Chucky who said it best, “I’ll be back; I ALWAYS come back!” And so here I am, back in Bangkok, the City of Angels and Blisteringly Spicy Food. We woke up magically without jet lag and headed off to our first Thai meal of the trip. For me that always must be tom yum kung, the spicy sour shrimp soup that makes me a pig at the dinner table and wreaks havoc on my entire digestive system for 24 hours. My little taste of what it must be to have an addiction problem. Sheesh.

My mother-in-law ordered a second bowl, insisting I take on the first all by myself. (Enabler!)

And if that heat wasn’t abusive enough I sent in some yellow curry pork to turn it up to 11.

(Som tam, spicy green papaya salad, another great dish we were missing back in the States.)

In the evening we visited the new fancy schmancy shopping complex Terminal 21, a multi-destination themed shopping complex directly connected to the Asok BTS Skytrain station. An Italian/Thai/Japanese restaurant — I know that sounds like a food version of a wedding band: play everything, but not very well — on the 5th floor. It wasn’t too bad though and the real purpose of being there was to meet up with our good friends Ray and Nok.

Among several dishes, we ordered a laab moo pizza. Not because we thought a Northern Thai spicy lime ground-pork sort of meat and herb salad on a pizza sounded like a good idea, but because we wanted to know if perhaps we were missing something. Um, we weren’t. While it wasn’t awful, each half was pretty good by itself and it was a shame to mix them up.

But a creative appetizer went with a safer bet, relying on that bit of cooking wisdom we all know: bacon makes everything better. Take an Isaan-style fermented pork sausage and wrap in the magic and fry it. Big win for the table!

This weekend we will head to an island in the Bay of Thailand for some jet-lag therapy in the sun on the beach. Koh Samet – Watch for it! While the snorkeling isn’t much there, I aim to try out our new underwater case for our Canon PowerShot S100