Just Desserts

[howeird]

A wonderful bowl of Wor Won Ton soup reminded me that the Chinese don't do dessert. A fortune cookie is but a token, it's more for the piece of paper telling you your fate "between the sheets", and these days lottery numbers, and in today's case a "let's learn Chinese" where they wrote "happy birthday" in English and then in Chinese. That didn't help me much.

Vietnam hasn't any native desserts, but all those years under French rule gave them some great pastries. I can't think of a country in Europe (Western or Eastern) which doesn't do dessert. The Middle East has halvah, India has tons of sweets, kheer and gulab. Thai restaurants in the US usually only offer boring fried bananas and coconut ice cream, and sometimes to die for mango with sticky rice, but in-country there are more "k'nomes" than you can shake a stick at. Many are made with sweetened coconut milk and sticky rice. Malaysia and Indonesia have lots of jellied stuff. I'm not sure about Africa - feel free to enlighten me.

Basically this post is to justify stopping off at the donut place next to Chef Lee's this afternoon. :-)

Comments

[zyzyly.livejournal.com]

I've been sick for the past couple of days, and would kill for a bowl of wor won ton soup.

When we were in Chiang Mai, on one of the market streets, there was a mango and sticky rice booth. It had the longest line of any of the food places.

enjoy your donut!

[howeird]

Hope you're feeling better. Thais would suggest rice soup, I think.

Let me tell you a mango & stucky rice story. Hang on, it's a long one. In 1976 I was on a train from Haad Yai to Bangkok for a Peace Corps meeting, and at Trang or Thung Song, we stopped for a while for some military ceremony, as a General and his entourage boarded a special car.

After an hour or so, an army officer sat next to me and asked, in pretty good English, if I would be kind enough to come to the special car and chat with Gen. Kris. The general had studied at West Point and wanted to practice his English.

As it turned out, the general's English and my Thai were about equal, so we chatted in both, and at one point he said he had a problem, and wondered if I could help him with it. The problem was when the US left Thailand after the Vietnam war, they had not taken the tanks with them, and he was stuck with a dozen or so he had no room for. He asked if I might want one, he would pay for shipping. He was joking, of course. I asked him what a civilian like myself would do with a tank, and he suggested I put it in the front yard and make it into a planter.

It was a pleasant couple of hours, but then it was time for bed, and I did not see him the rest of the trip.

A day or three after I got to Bangkok, I saw a huge headline in a Thai newspaper which said "Kris Dead". I got a copy of the Bangkok Post, since my Thai was not up to reading the whole article, and the story is he had a heart attack, and was in the hospital recovering nicely. As was fitting for the senior general of the southern army, there was a line around the block of people visiting him. Mangoes were in season, so almost everyone brought him a small plate of sticky rice and mango. As is the Thai tradition, he took a symbolic bite of each one. This made his blood sugar level go through the roof, and he suffered a fatal heart attack.

[zyzyly.livejournal.com]

We are sitting in a coffee shop in Ubon, and I read this to my wife. She is still laughing so hard that everyone is looking at us.

Yes, plenty of rice soup. And a few bottles of "Essence of Chicken".