It’s the middle of November already. Yikes. I’ve been in Thailand nearly a week (I got to Chiang Mai six days ago) and already I feel settled. I’ve found a Raleigh to rent, too small for me, but so upright that my knees are nicely clear of the handlebars. The tires are good and the pedals on straight, more than I could say of the bicycle I rented last time I was here.
Today I headed north up the Ping River. It was late, after rush hour, so there was little traffic. The disadvantage of setting out after 9 am is of course that the sun is higher. But I never got really hot and sweaty, because of that lovely cyclist’s breeze that cools even as you work at pedalling in the sun. Coming back down the western bank of the river I was in shade a lot of the way, and that too was a treat.
I was remnded as I sailed along by the moat towards the end of my outing that each time I start into something new I have moments of apprehension: Will this work? or, Can I do it? or, Will I goof badly and hurt myself or someone else? The fears or doubts may take different forms, but they all spring from the same place of anxiety... And so it was this morning. I got worried because I don’t have a helmet, wondered about being too hot at the later hour, wondered if the bicycle was any good. And yet in my first minute, not more, of pedalling, all that fell away and I was truly rolling.
The same kind of thing happened with my travels in Burma. Yes, I’d been before, but still on my first trip three years ago for the cookbook I felt oppressed and a little fearful. I was under no illusions that the junta was paying me any special heed or that I mattered to them. I admit that the oppressive totalitarian-ness of the regime is enough to oppress and to create anxiety, just the mere thought of it, of course, but that wasn’t it.
I don’t think my anticipatory mild dread had much to do with those realities. Rather, it was just exactly that: anticipatory anxiety/dread/doubt/self-doubt. And once I had landed and found my way into Rangoon, it all vanished in a puff of smoke. I was there, I was still putting one foot in front of the other, and even though I was no more enlightened or clued in about what I was going to do, or how I was going to proceed to learn what I needed to learn to do the cookbook, the anxiety was gone.
Perhaps there’s a useful biological basis to anticipatory anxiety. Maybe it stops us from taking too many risks? But I think it’s just a trick, a way of making us uncomfortable, a kind of mean thing that some people suffer from way more than I do. I am lucky that mine goes away quickly, once I’m embarked. For some, every day, every dawn or perhaps every waking moment, is filled with a dread or anxiety of what comes next.
I feel for people in that state. Even the minor worry that I have felt at the start of something new, whether relatively major (Burma) or quite minor(getting back on a bicycle in Chiang Mai) can weigh on me. But it lasts only a short while. A more substantial worry is truly paralysing. People who feel that way a lot have to be brave just to get up in the morning. And they must get so exhausted pushing back the dread enough to function.
I’m not sure why I’m writing this right now. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just come through my small bicycle worry and am exhilarated to be on the other side of it, pedalling freely through the small lanes and busier roads of this complicated animated place. I don’t plan to bicycle at night, but I now feel freed up to head out in the morning for explorations in and out of town, sitting upright on my Raleigh, with my floppy sunhat on, looking somewhat ridiculous!
FOOD AFTERWARD: I’ve been eating a lot of grilled pork here in Chiang Mai, succulent and irresistable, and som tam too, and sticky rice, but I have to say that at the moment my mouth is remembering the taste of the perfectly ripe papaya I ate today. It wasn’t big, a nine- or ten-inch-long cylinder, with dark red flesh and mottled yellow skin. I cut it crosswise, then scooped out the seeds of one half, to make a deep cup. I squeezed half a juicy small lime into it and then slowly spooned out the flesh, each mouthful with a little of the lime juice from the bottom. What I was left with when I’d finished was the hollowed out cup of fine skin, thin enough that light passed through it in a stained-glass kind of way. I saved the other half for later. Yum.
Showing posts with label grilled pork. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grilled pork. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Thursday, November 26, 2009
THE PLEASURE OF LOSING OURSELVES IN PURE DOING
It’s dawn here in Chiang Mai, the sun’s yellow blurred by haze on the horizon, the sky above a pale blue, and the lovely bulk of Doi Sutep that fills the northwest horizon (and the view from my north window) a soft purple-blue. In North America it’s still November 26th and still American Thanksgiving Day, but here it’s already the 27th, Tashi’s birthday. On Monday is Dom’s birthday, so in fact, unencumbered by any need for the exact days to arrive, I have been thinking about birthdays and my (now-grown) kids and spans of time.
For example, Dom turns 22 on Monday. The last time he was divisible by 11 he was in Grade 6, just finding his confidence in school; this time he is in the first year of a PhD. No wonder as we get older life seems less eventful and time seems to fly by. When I think of all that a child or young adult packs into a year, all the growth of new understanding, the learning, the whole-hearted engagement, it is truly astonishing. When we’re inside it, as young people, it’s all we know. That’s what life is. Then as we age into adulthood we’re busy, but we’re mostly managing time rather than living inside it.
Yesterday I sat in the grounds of a wat (temple) and tried to draw a naga, a dragon/snake that makes the railing and frame for one of the temple staircases. My friend Lillian, who is an artist, did some wonderful line drawings of temple details when she was here last year, and I wanted to try. The result of my efforts was a reminder of the place, but not particularly lovely. What was lovely was the experience of engaging, of losing myself in the effort. Every time I sit down to draw something this amazing thing happens. (And similarly, the focussed concentration on getting a word right in a piece of writing, or on shaping a poem, brings the same wonderful loss of self-consciousneess, this headlong plunge into the now.) It’s a gift, available almost any time, and I think it’s available to all. We need only choose to embark.
Focussed concentration, to the exclusion of almost all else, is the pleasure scholars feel as they wrestle with a text or a problem, and musicians, or artists, or anyone engaging single-mindedly or wholeheartedly with a task know it well. Children have a capacity for intently settling to one thing, playing or jumping or whatever. It’s one of the fundamental pleasures of childhood, that we mostly lose as we get distracted with meeting the social expectations of the adult world (“Come along now; we can’t stay here all day!”).
Just DOING without second thoughts or distraction is a great drug and a balm to the spirit too, for it reconnects us with ourselves, it grounds us.
I sat down in the dawn chill to write about being up north of here on a farm near Fang, the cascading bougainvillea, the glowing green wing-beans, the scent of the lychee trees, the complicated wonderfulness of the Fang weekly market, the village house where I finally learned how to make tua nao (the fermented bean paste that underpins northern and Shan cooking), the coming-into-paradise luminousness of the mountain-rimmed landscape to the north. So much for plans. I do love the way that threads of thought, ideas that have occurred to me during the week and that perhaps I have been mulling over subconsciously, surface and insist on expression as I settle to write each week.
I guess I have come full circle here, for it seems clear, as I reflect on the question of getting grounded by committing wholeheartedly to a task, that the process of teasing out these thoughts on the virtual page each week is one of the ways I find that pleasure for myself. I enjoy it so much, and today, in writing this, I’ve come to understand a little more where the pleasure lies.
We’re in highly self-referential territory here! My apologies if it’s irritating!
And for those of you who want something concrete to taste, in your mind’s eye or in fact, here’s a quick descriptive recipe for an issaan dish called moo nam toke (pork in a waterfall, meaning with a wet dressing). The issaan one uses dried chiles. There’s a northern version: just substitute fresh prik ee noo, Thai bird chiles, to taste.
There’s a vendor set up near the huge plant market (see my entry about the place in November-December last year) about a mile north of my apartment here. She sells grilled pork, som tam, sticky rice... Fern and I dropped by there one afternoon early this week after running some errands and asked for moo nam toke: Start with about half a pound of grilled pork, preferably several small pieces that are not too lean (brush it with a little oil and fish sauce, or rub it with fish sauce and ground black pepper if you wish, before grilling) and chop it into large bite-size. Place in a wide shallow bowl. Add a scant half cup of sliced red (Asian) shallot or chopped onion, some coriander leaf, some dried red chiles ground to flakes or powder, (to taste, say a tablespoon to start with), and about two tablespoons of roasted rice powder (dry roast some raw rice in a skillet, then grind to a powder in a coffee grinder or whatever). To make the dressing, combine fish sauce, lime juice, tamarind liquid (soak tamarind pulp briefly in hot water, then press through a sieve to get the liquid), to taste (about 2 tablespoons each should do it, if anything going more lightly on the tamarind and heavier on the fish sauce), then pour over. Toss to blend well, then serve and eat with pleasure...
A POSTSCRIPT: My Burmese visa has come through, hurrah! This trip I'm headed to Moulmein (now in post-colonial times written Mawlamyine), on the coast southeast of Rangoon (now Yangon). That requires a flight on Saturday to Bangkok, then another to Rangoon, then bus or train along the coast. (The land border between Thailand and Burma that is closest to Moulmein, is at Mae Sot, and is still closed to foreigners.) I am due back here late on December 10. Since internet access is unpredictable in Burma, I may not be able to post until I'm back, though last March I was able to, amazingly, from Myitkyina, so we'll see.
For example, Dom turns 22 on Monday. The last time he was divisible by 11 he was in Grade 6, just finding his confidence in school; this time he is in the first year of a PhD. No wonder as we get older life seems less eventful and time seems to fly by. When I think of all that a child or young adult packs into a year, all the growth of new understanding, the learning, the whole-hearted engagement, it is truly astonishing. When we’re inside it, as young people, it’s all we know. That’s what life is. Then as we age into adulthood we’re busy, but we’re mostly managing time rather than living inside it.
Yesterday I sat in the grounds of a wat (temple) and tried to draw a naga, a dragon/snake that makes the railing and frame for one of the temple staircases. My friend Lillian, who is an artist, did some wonderful line drawings of temple details when she was here last year, and I wanted to try. The result of my efforts was a reminder of the place, but not particularly lovely. What was lovely was the experience of engaging, of losing myself in the effort. Every time I sit down to draw something this amazing thing happens. (And similarly, the focussed concentration on getting a word right in a piece of writing, or on shaping a poem, brings the same wonderful loss of self-consciousneess, this headlong plunge into the now.) It’s a gift, available almost any time, and I think it’s available to all. We need only choose to embark.
Focussed concentration, to the exclusion of almost all else, is the pleasure scholars feel as they wrestle with a text or a problem, and musicians, or artists, or anyone engaging single-mindedly or wholeheartedly with a task know it well. Children have a capacity for intently settling to one thing, playing or jumping or whatever. It’s one of the fundamental pleasures of childhood, that we mostly lose as we get distracted with meeting the social expectations of the adult world (“Come along now; we can’t stay here all day!”).
Just DOING without second thoughts or distraction is a great drug and a balm to the spirit too, for it reconnects us with ourselves, it grounds us.
I sat down in the dawn chill to write about being up north of here on a farm near Fang, the cascading bougainvillea, the glowing green wing-beans, the scent of the lychee trees, the complicated wonderfulness of the Fang weekly market, the village house where I finally learned how to make tua nao (the fermented bean paste that underpins northern and Shan cooking), the coming-into-paradise luminousness of the mountain-rimmed landscape to the north. So much for plans. I do love the way that threads of thought, ideas that have occurred to me during the week and that perhaps I have been mulling over subconsciously, surface and insist on expression as I settle to write each week.
I guess I have come full circle here, for it seems clear, as I reflect on the question of getting grounded by committing wholeheartedly to a task, that the process of teasing out these thoughts on the virtual page each week is one of the ways I find that pleasure for myself. I enjoy it so much, and today, in writing this, I’ve come to understand a little more where the pleasure lies.
We’re in highly self-referential territory here! My apologies if it’s irritating!
And for those of you who want something concrete to taste, in your mind’s eye or in fact, here’s a quick descriptive recipe for an issaan dish called moo nam toke (pork in a waterfall, meaning with a wet dressing). The issaan one uses dried chiles. There’s a northern version: just substitute fresh prik ee noo, Thai bird chiles, to taste.
There’s a vendor set up near the huge plant market (see my entry about the place in November-December last year) about a mile north of my apartment here. She sells grilled pork, som tam, sticky rice... Fern and I dropped by there one afternoon early this week after running some errands and asked for moo nam toke: Start with about half a pound of grilled pork, preferably several small pieces that are not too lean (brush it with a little oil and fish sauce, or rub it with fish sauce and ground black pepper if you wish, before grilling) and chop it into large bite-size. Place in a wide shallow bowl. Add a scant half cup of sliced red (Asian) shallot or chopped onion, some coriander leaf, some dried red chiles ground to flakes or powder, (to taste, say a tablespoon to start with), and about two tablespoons of roasted rice powder (dry roast some raw rice in a skillet, then grind to a powder in a coffee grinder or whatever). To make the dressing, combine fish sauce, lime juice, tamarind liquid (soak tamarind pulp briefly in hot water, then press through a sieve to get the liquid), to taste (about 2 tablespoons each should do it, if anything going more lightly on the tamarind and heavier on the fish sauce), then pour over. Toss to blend well, then serve and eat with pleasure...
A POSTSCRIPT: My Burmese visa has come through, hurrah! This trip I'm headed to Moulmein (now in post-colonial times written Mawlamyine), on the coast southeast of Rangoon (now Yangon). That requires a flight on Saturday to Bangkok, then another to Rangoon, then bus or train along the coast. (The land border between Thailand and Burma that is closest to Moulmein, is at Mae Sot, and is still closed to foreigners.) I am due back here late on December 10. Since internet access is unpredictable in Burma, I may not be able to post until I'm back, though last March I was able to, amazingly, from Myitkyina, so we'll see.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
THE WELCOME OF SOFT AIR AND NEW HORIZONS
The softness of the air is what happens first, an enveloping welcoming softness and warmth, when the plane doors open in Bangkok late in the evening. And so it was last night at around midnight. The rest of arrival, stairs and the bus to the terminal, and queueing up for passport control and waiting for luggage, etc, passes in a kind of dream, partly induced by the dislocation of jetlag and what day is it? tiredness, and partly by that soft air.
I stayed at a small hotel near the new airport. It's in a kind of small village still surrounded by rice fields (I say "still" because probably development will come soon and cement them all over, but for now...), with temples and small street vendors, like a slice of Thailand in the eighties. I strolled out at 7 this morning looking for my first meal of the trip. There were school kids in uniform walking along the village lanes, and women doing early shoppig, and men and women walking out to the main road to catch the bus to work.
I stopped at a street stall where a woman was grilling pork on bamboo skewers to ask if she also had sticky rice and som tam (pounded green papaya salad). With a yes answer, I went and sat down at a table in the back. Soon the pork came, succulent, with a little fat here and there to give it flavour and moisture, and so did the sticky rice.
Meanwhile another woman got the som tam ready. She asked me whether I eat chile heat: "gin pet mai?", and then showed me the three chiles she proposed to add when I answered "gin pet dai" (="I can eat chile-hot"). Other ingredients at the start include peanuts, dried shrimp, garlic, and tomato (they can include small crabs, but I don't like them so asked her to leave them out). Because it was early, she hadn't yet prepared the usual pile of shredded papaya, so she had to start by peeling the fruit, then chopping it with long paralllel cuts, then slicing off the thinly chopped flesh. The result, a handful of long julienne-like shreds, then got added to the large ceramic mortar and pounded with a pestle to soften it and blend flavours.
The salad came mounded on a plate, sweet with palm sugar, hot with chiles, acidic with slices of tomato and the green papaya and lime juice, and salty and pungent with fish sauce and small dried shrimp. What a wonderful opening to a trip to Thailand: sticky rice, moo yang (grilled pork) and som tam!
And it was a great reminder, after my three days of immersion at the Worlds of Flavor conference, which was focussed on world streetfoods, that there is indeed something magical and special about food made on the spot with skill and care, to order.
I want to say one more thing too, about the conference (there are so many things I could be adding here, about great conversations, new poeple met, old friends, new ideas, great energy and creativity...). There was so much going on: sessions about streetfoods and comfort foods from many places, from Peru and Brazil and Mexico (and John T Edge on streetfoods in the USA) to those from the Mediterranean and southeast Asia. But as Jessica Harris emphasised in her talk on Saturday, we are all very ignorant of African food traditions, even though they are the original underpinning of many foodways in the Americas. She's right of course. But as she was talking about acaraje (from Brazil) and other foods of South America, and linking them to west African foods, I realised again how long and slow the process is of getting familiar with new foods new vocabulary.
We take it for granted that most people will know penne from rigatoni from fettucine, but in the sixties all pasta was spaghetti, or maybe lasagna. It took a good while for the new vocabulary and new dishes to penetrate. How much longer and more difficult will it be then to get a handle on the African and Latin American ingredients and dishes? And that means we had better get started!!
It's good to be a beginner, to not-know, to experience the disorientation of not-knowing and the pleasure of slowly coming to new understandings about things that others know well. Outsider status, or beginner status is what keeps us reminded that we are not all-powerful. It keeps us tuned and humble, and hopefully respectful of others too.
So let's make a commitment to start engaging with the unfamiliar, whoever we are, wherever we are, in at least one part of our lives. In the food world, there's a lot to learn everywhere, but Jessica is right to push us to engage with African traditions. We'll be so much more appreciative, and we'll be enormously enriched too, by what we learn...
Now I'm here in Chiang Mai, the sky clear, the hills that rim the valley visible despite a little haze, the light turning golden in the late afternoon. I've already seen a few friends, and hope to catch up on more of the news this evening at supper. But I do want to remember to just be here, breathing it in, looking out for bigger horizons. It's too easy to get caught up in setting targets, in rushing to get the next thing done, the next appointment made and kept, the next plane trip booked. Those things are important. And I agree that ambition and plans are what get us doing things and completing them.
But targets and goals, specific ones, are also limiting. I want to leave room for the serendipitous things, the events and people that I can't anticipate ahead of time. For those, the lovely unplanned in life, are the things that enlarge horizons, extend the possibilties beyond the boundaries that I can imagine right now...
I stayed at a small hotel near the new airport. It's in a kind of small village still surrounded by rice fields (I say "still" because probably development will come soon and cement them all over, but for now...), with temples and small street vendors, like a slice of Thailand in the eighties. I strolled out at 7 this morning looking for my first meal of the trip. There were school kids in uniform walking along the village lanes, and women doing early shoppig, and men and women walking out to the main road to catch the bus to work.
I stopped at a street stall where a woman was grilling pork on bamboo skewers to ask if she also had sticky rice and som tam (pounded green papaya salad). With a yes answer, I went and sat down at a table in the back. Soon the pork came, succulent, with a little fat here and there to give it flavour and moisture, and so did the sticky rice.
Meanwhile another woman got the som tam ready. She asked me whether I eat chile heat: "gin pet mai?", and then showed me the three chiles she proposed to add when I answered "gin pet dai" (="I can eat chile-hot"). Other ingredients at the start include peanuts, dried shrimp, garlic, and tomato (they can include small crabs, but I don't like them so asked her to leave them out). Because it was early, she hadn't yet prepared the usual pile of shredded papaya, so she had to start by peeling the fruit, then chopping it with long paralllel cuts, then slicing off the thinly chopped flesh. The result, a handful of long julienne-like shreds, then got added to the large ceramic mortar and pounded with a pestle to soften it and blend flavours.
The salad came mounded on a plate, sweet with palm sugar, hot with chiles, acidic with slices of tomato and the green papaya and lime juice, and salty and pungent with fish sauce and small dried shrimp. What a wonderful opening to a trip to Thailand: sticky rice, moo yang (grilled pork) and som tam!
And it was a great reminder, after my three days of immersion at the Worlds of Flavor conference, which was focussed on world streetfoods, that there is indeed something magical and special about food made on the spot with skill and care, to order.
I want to say one more thing too, about the conference (there are so many things I could be adding here, about great conversations, new poeple met, old friends, new ideas, great energy and creativity...). There was so much going on: sessions about streetfoods and comfort foods from many places, from Peru and Brazil and Mexico (and John T Edge on streetfoods in the USA) to those from the Mediterranean and southeast Asia. But as Jessica Harris emphasised in her talk on Saturday, we are all very ignorant of African food traditions, even though they are the original underpinning of many foodways in the Americas. She's right of course. But as she was talking about acaraje (from Brazil) and other foods of South America, and linking them to west African foods, I realised again how long and slow the process is of getting familiar with new foods new vocabulary.
We take it for granted that most people will know penne from rigatoni from fettucine, but in the sixties all pasta was spaghetti, or maybe lasagna. It took a good while for the new vocabulary and new dishes to penetrate. How much longer and more difficult will it be then to get a handle on the African and Latin American ingredients and dishes? And that means we had better get started!!
It's good to be a beginner, to not-know, to experience the disorientation of not-knowing and the pleasure of slowly coming to new understandings about things that others know well. Outsider status, or beginner status is what keeps us reminded that we are not all-powerful. It keeps us tuned and humble, and hopefully respectful of others too.
So let's make a commitment to start engaging with the unfamiliar, whoever we are, wherever we are, in at least one part of our lives. In the food world, there's a lot to learn everywhere, but Jessica is right to push us to engage with African traditions. We'll be so much more appreciative, and we'll be enormously enriched too, by what we learn...
Now I'm here in Chiang Mai, the sky clear, the hills that rim the valley visible despite a little haze, the light turning golden in the late afternoon. I've already seen a few friends, and hope to catch up on more of the news this evening at supper. But I do want to remember to just be here, breathing it in, looking out for bigger horizons. It's too easy to get caught up in setting targets, in rushing to get the next thing done, the next appointment made and kept, the next plane trip booked. Those things are important. And I agree that ambition and plans are what get us doing things and completing them.
But targets and goals, specific ones, are also limiting. I want to leave room for the serendipitous things, the events and people that I can't anticipate ahead of time. For those, the lovely unplanned in life, are the things that enlarge horizons, extend the possibilties beyond the boundaries that I can imagine right now...
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