Thanks for the congrats, and good luck on your quest.
Yeah, Thailand has specific regional food groups: Central, Southern, NorthEast (Isan) and North. Most of what you find in America is central, with some changes which can be blamed on the FDA, which has this thing about not allowing poisonous plants. Any time you see broccoli on a Thai menu, it is a substitute for either water lily or marigold, both of which are bitter because of the toxins. I miss them.
Central has the curries which clean your sinuses as they choke you. And everything is over rice, unless it is over rice noodles. Non-curry dishes have the tiny hot chili peppers which kill taste buds. The Thai word for that chili is "prick Thai". Typical breakfast is BBQ pork slices over rice with hard boiled egg, or rice soup if you're not feeling well.
Southern has a lot of Muslim influence, since half of the south was Malaysia before WWII. Lamb, beef tongue, "cow mook guy" is basically paella, but it is made by setting up a big pot of rice with chicken parts and saffron cooked into it.
NE is the home of sticky rice, raw ground pork, pig's blood and unidentifiable pig and chicken parts cooked in sticky rice inside banana leaves or bamboo tubes. Papaya salad (Somtom) is from there too. I can't stand the stuff, it's made from grating the peel.
Northern is where honey BBQ everything comes from. They are big on insects there. Lately those have started showing up in Bangkok near the bars where the girls are trafficked from the north. Actually, most of the ones I talked to came for the money, and go home regularly to visit the child they couldn't support up-country.
The whole country does duck, chicken, fish and shellfish in some form or another. And fruit, lots and lots of fruit.
A lot of the restaurant staff in the US come from the NE, which is where the USAF bases were, so there is some NE food in all the Thai restaurants here.
As for Chinese, my birthday dinner growing up on Long Island was Lobster Cantonese for many years. Here it's just called lobster. My one week in Szechuan my hosts took me to places meant to be incendiary or very fatty, so difficult to handle with chopsticks. I was coming from 3 weeks in Thailand, so my taste buds were already gone, and I've been good with chopsticks since I was 6. Thais don't use them except for Chinese or Japanese food, because eating with sticks is for barbarians. China has a lot of cuisines. One of my co-workers a dozen years ago worked part time in his parents' Hunan style place, and you probably know about Mongolian.
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Date: 2017-02-18 03:14 am (UTC)Yeah, Thailand has specific regional food groups: Central, Southern, NorthEast (Isan) and North. Most of what you find in America is central, with some changes which can be blamed on the FDA, which has this thing about not allowing poisonous plants. Any time you see broccoli on a Thai menu, it is a substitute for either water lily or marigold, both of which are bitter because of the toxins. I miss them.
Central has the curries which clean your sinuses as they choke you. And everything is over rice, unless it is over rice noodles. Non-curry dishes have the tiny hot chili peppers which kill taste buds. The Thai word for that chili is "prick Thai". Typical breakfast is BBQ pork slices over rice with hard boiled egg, or rice soup if you're not feeling well.
Southern has a lot of Muslim influence, since half of the south was Malaysia before WWII. Lamb, beef tongue, "cow mook guy" is basically paella, but it is made by setting up a big pot of rice with chicken parts and saffron cooked into it.
NE is the home of sticky rice, raw ground pork, pig's blood and unidentifiable pig and chicken parts cooked in sticky rice inside banana leaves or bamboo tubes. Papaya salad (Somtom) is from there too. I can't stand the stuff, it's made from grating the peel.
Northern is where honey BBQ everything comes from. They are big on insects there. Lately those have started showing up in Bangkok near the bars where the girls are trafficked from the north. Actually, most of the ones I talked to came for the money, and go home regularly to visit the child they couldn't support up-country.
The whole country does duck, chicken, fish and shellfish in some form or another. And fruit, lots and lots of fruit.
A lot of the restaurant staff in the US come from the NE, which is where the USAF bases were, so there is some NE food in all the Thai restaurants here.
As for Chinese, my birthday dinner growing up on Long Island was Lobster Cantonese for many years. Here it's just called lobster. My one week in Szechuan my hosts took me to places meant to be incendiary or very fatty, so difficult to handle with chopsticks. I was coming from 3 weeks in Thailand, so my taste buds were already gone, and I've been good with chopsticks since I was 6. Thais don't use them except for Chinese or Japanese food, because eating with sticks is for barbarians. China has a lot of cuisines. One of my co-workers a dozen years ago worked part time in his parents' Hunan style place, and you probably know about Mongolian.