I'm sure you all missed me terribly when I swanned off to the South Thailand Islands for a quick pre-Christmas holiday. I'm sorry I neglected you for so long, but every once in a while it's desperately needed to get out of the Sydney fishbowl and spend time eating and enjoying rather than cooking. It was undeniably invigorating, inspiring, relaxing and a whole bunch of fun.
I had been to Thailand before, years ago, and had travelled up into the region around Chang Mai, where you can stop on the side of the road and eat a plate full of live, wriggling grasshoppers tossed with chilli (I passed). There is a lot of fantastic, lively, regional food in Thailand, and there is a lot of foul, gluggy, sugary pad thai that should never associate itself with the fresh, crunchy, spicy and delicious South East Asian cuisine I was looking to find amongst the palms and coves of the islands. More about that later.
Maybe I shouldn't start the tale of the food we ate while away with a tube of Pringles but I just had to put these up here because they are soft shell crab flavour! Can you believe it? I couldn't. Amazing. The crab flavour wasn't overwhelmingly fishy, it was very subtle, I loved it. I was just so glad to see something better than sour cream and onion.
Our first stop was the Island of Koh Lanta, it's very quiet there. There are no huge clubs and hardly any tourist shops selling that wooden crap you buy because you feel you should and then are left with boxes of wooden dolphins that sit at the back of your cupboard for years.
All there is is a long stretch of beautiful beach, dotted with wooden longtail boats here and there, and lit up by these little beach bars with a seafood BBQ out the front behind the deck chairs and coloured lanterns. We played connect four, drank Tiger beers and ate crisp spring rolls, we moved onto the next bar along the sand for cocktails and sizzling hotplates of chicken and cashew nuts that arrived with a cloud of steam wafting through the restaurant.
Phi Phi Island was next. The above photo was the view from our bungalow balcony. It was literally five steps to the ocean and we went ran down there at 6pm, just as the sun was setting and flung ourselves into the water after everyone else had packed up their towels and umbrellas for the day.
I'm usually a complete advocate for hawker food, I love sitting at little stalls filled with locals and chewing on skewers and freshly tossed noodles. We went to a market held to celebrate the King's birthday and found these little stalls that were selling fried quail eggs. They broke the eggs into those little pans with little indents that you see selling poffertjes (Dutch pancakes) at carnivals, and they served you a little plate piled high with about ten, doused in dark vinegar with a fresh sprinkling of fried spring onion on top, although I only made it halfway through before it dawned on me that i had probably eaten a weeks worth of eggs and it was high time to step... away... from... the... stall...
The seafood is incredibly cheap, these beautiful crabs were about $8 AUD and were so fresh and gorgeous, I had never really eaten whole crab before and ended up with juices running all down our arms and dripping off our elbows but with huge smiles on our faces.
Another winner was this whole fish, gently steamed so that the flesh just collapsed under the tooth, slipped in a zing of lime sauce and sprinkled with a crisp wheat that finished the whole thing off with complete delight. We had some seriously good food on Phi Phi, all washed down with frosty margaritas and a few Tom Collins.
Back to the hawker food, I picked up these coconut and pandan jellies at the local market, I had tried them before and remembered them well, they are called Wun Ka-Ti and are so good. It's a layer of pandan jelly topped with a coconut cream then is all wrapped up in pandan leaves to make a little box shaped jelly. If you're texture paranoid I wouldn't go there but the taste is unlike anything else.
Alright i'm going back to my lunch of leftovers now. Tear.
No comments:
Post a Comment