A few years back I moved to Leeds, West Yorkshire, and was in search for people to live with. I posted an advert on gumtree and received a heartfelt response from Fern, from Thailand, expressing her love for food and desire to experiment in the kitchen together. So that’s what we did. We found a house, along with a girl from Iran, and we spent long periods of time procrastinating in the warmth of our kitchen where we’d put all our creativity into making bizarre dishes and sharing stories about the food that we ate growing up. It was timeless.
I knew nothing about Thai food at this point, so Fern would often go to the Thai supermarket where she’d attempt to explain what everything was. I like to call this our visit to the food museum. We galavanted around the city with the hope of finding a decent Thai restaurant and a particular Thai desert which Fern insisted I should try. Mango sticky rice, made with sticky rice, mango and coconut milk, sometimes topped with crispy yellow mung beans. A restaurant called Thai Aroy Dee was the closest we could get to finding fairly authentic Thai food, but even they cooked the food with too much sugar in order to please the westerners. In Thailand, Mango sticky rice is usually made and sold for four months per year, Feb - June, precisely because of it being mango season, so the real issue we had was that nothing was fresh.
England is not very well known for it’s fresh food and I was reminded that I had been deprived of one of the most human necessities, fresh food.
When Fern moved back to Thailand, I jumped on the chance to visit her and her family in Chang Mai. Thailand was a voyage of culinary discovery. I tried food of different textures, tastes and smells that I had never tried before.
Every morning I arose to the smell of Ferns mums cooking rising up to my room.
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| Steamed fish with soy sauce, ginger and spring onions |
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| Stir fry morning glory with fermented soy beans |
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| The one and only Pad Thai |
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| Perfectly boiled |
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Stir fry pumpkin with eggs and sweet basil
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| Fresh Thai Coffee |
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| Steamed tofu skin with soy sauce. |
My eyes were hungry as we roamed through street markets around Chang Mai and tried all sorts of dishes until our bellies were satisfied, but not too full incase we wanted to try something else. The markets were different to any market I had been to. They were quiet. People did not raise their voices, creating an unusually calm atmosphere. The only rustling of sounds were coming from the pots and woks being cooked in and washed up, cooked in and washed up. There were all sorts of sweet and sour smells of broths and buns, the smell of fried tofu, coriander and fresh rice/noodle dishes being cooked. I would call it orderly chaos. It was beautiful.
After eating and being out in the heat, we soothed our pallets with fresh coconut water. It was like drinking a waterfall of heaven. It was exactly what we needed. Note to self - do not buy coconut water in England again.
After a week of roaming the food markets, we came across Grilled Black Sesame Pancake, sprinkled with brown sugar. Fern was so over the moon to have found one of her favourite childhood sweet dishes. Served warm, the black sesame melted in our mouths and we grinned at each other like nothing else existed.
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| Black sesame pancake |
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Homemade coconut ice-cream, coconut sticky rice and peanuts
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| Couldn't get enough of the sticky rice |
Chang Mai is the first of many places I want to explore in Thailand. Once again, my palate is married to its environment.
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