Som Roi Yod Beach Bar-B-Cue

 

This is a meal – a trio of simple recipes, comprising a spicy salad, some meat kebabs and sticky rice, with a sauce for garnish.

Pig sticking

After many trials and errors, it is as close as I can get to the food served by the beach grill restaurant, on the beach opposite the Krua Chom Thale resort, Dolphin bay in Som Roi Yod, southern Thailand. The restaurant has no name, and no menu, no address. I was unable to communicate effectively with the chef to the level of cooking methods and ingredients, despite the willingness of both parties.

Here is a meal that won’t break the bank or the belt, but which breaks the taste barrier with a thunderous explosion.

 

Calories and Costs

Salad only, no peanuts: calories 150, cost £0.93

Lean Chicken + Salad with no peanuts, no sauce: calories  375 cost £2.31

Full meal, with Pork: calories 1100, cost £3.10

Priced in pound sterling 7/6/2014

 

Calories courtesy of http://www.nutracheck.co.uk

Costs courtesy of http://www.tesco.com (and others)

 

“Papaya” Salad. (Alias Linda’s Thai Courgette Salad)

Preparation time, including dressing: 15 minutes

Papayas were disappointing. Especially the unripe ones used in this salad were often watery and tasteless, eminently replaceable with a light vegetable with a bit of crunch and a subtle, agreeable flavour. With the spices involved here, courgettes fit the bill superbly.

Ingredients for One Person:

• One medium courgette just-picked (c 150g)
• Carrots (c 150g)- as sweet and crunchy as possible – e.g. chantonnay
• Handful of Peanuts – omit to reduce calories. I just use ordinary, cheap salted ones.
• Handful of Fresh Coriander, chopped
• Portion of Thai Salad Dressing. See below

I don’t bother peeling the veg. Just wash, dry and grate the courgette and carrots together in a bowl and roughly mix them. I coarse-grate them by hand along the grain; mechanical graters can’t seem to do this, producing pieces that tend to be too short with a tendency to disintegrate when mixing. The salad should be crunchy and light not soggy and flaccid.

Place the peanuts in a transparent, clean plastic bag. Crush them with a rolling pin or end of a chopping board, until there are no whole ones left.

(Just before serving) pour over the Thai Salad Dressing and toss thoroughly.

Sprinkle first the crushed peanuts over, then the coriander.

Serve.

 

Thai Salad Dressing

Keeps in fridge for at least 24 hours.

For 1 person:

• 1 dessert spoon of Soy Sauce. I use Healthy Boy brand Dark Thick Soy Sauce. Avoid the ones that contain molasses unless you are fond of that flavour – it is very strong.
• 1 dessert spoon of Fish Sauce. I use Squid Brand
• 1 dessert spoon of fresh squeezed lime juice. You can substitute wine vinegar if you are on war rations
• 1 medium garlic clove, crushed
• 1 heaped teaspoon of soft brown sugar. Use more than this if you wish, not less
• 1 red Thai chilli, including seeds. Remove seeds first and chop the chilli as finely as possible. Use both seeds and chopped chilli. Fresh is best, but I have been using thawed ones from frozen– I can’t tell the difference once finely chopped.

Combine all the ingredients except the chilli and stir well to mix.

Taste test (easier without the chilli), and potentially add more sugar or lime juice.

Add the chilli and its seeds and stir well to mix.

 

Som Roi Yod Kebab Marinade

Exactly the same as Thai Salad Dressing, but use wine vinegar instead of lime juice which can produce bitterness when heated.

 

Som Roi Yod Kebabs

The beach grill served pork or chicken “satays”.

The pork was belly meat, 50-50 fat to meat. It was sliced to about 3mm. Not floppy; thick enough for a 2.5 cm long piece to remain roughly horizontal when held at one end.

Buy some good quality stuff; something Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall would use.

150g is generous for a single serving.

Remove the rind. Cut the meat into 2.5cm pieces. Mix well with the Som Roi Yod Kebab Marinade. Leave covered in refrigerator for at least a day. For a Saturday bar-b do this Thursday or Friday night.

For chicken use skinless breast fillets, cut across the grain 4-5 mm thick. One breast per serving (150g). Marinade in the same way.

At least 2 hours before grilling, soak some bamboo or wooden skewers in water. This keeps the meat juicy and makes it easy to remove from the skewer.

Thread the meat onto the skewers. Should be about 3 skewers per serving. Don’t overload – these are going to grill quickly.

Grill close to glowing hot coals for probably not more than a minute each side. Timing is not an exact science – a good bar-b master will know. The kebabs should be lightly caramelised each side.

Serve with sticky rice, “Papaya” Salad and “Nam P’to” sauce

 

Sticky Rice.

Staple feculant with grills in Thailand, this is “Glutinous Rice” or “Sticky Rice” (Oryza sativa var. glutinosa)

Paddy Pot – Sticky rice in tuperware container

It needs to be soaked before cooking, for as long as possible. Fill a large tupperware pot or jam jar about ¾ full of the rice grains. Fill it to the top with water. The grains expand and soak up the water. Check the next day and top up if necessary. Leave for at least a day; Preferably 2. If you are planning this bar-b-cue, prepare the rice on the same evening as the kebab meat and marinade.

I keep pot of soaking sticky rice permanently in the fridge, ready for whenever I need it.

Like me you may not have a rice steamer.

Carb-O… rice arrange in a ring to allow steam to percolate around…

Find a fine mesh metal strainer and a saucepan into which it fits snugly. Hopefully the lid will fit over the ensemble and create a good seal. The better the seal, the quicker the rice will cook. With a good home-made solution, the rice needs about 60 minutes. Put about 2 cm of water in the pot and bring it to a rolling simmer. When loading the strainer, concentrate the rice in “clumps” leaving gaps. This facilitates the circulation of steam and also makings turning easier. Place the strainer with the soaked rice clumps over the simmering water and cover.

Turn the rice over half way through, as the rice below will cook quicker that the rice above. Once half cooked the rice is easy to manipulate.

When the rice is cooked it becomes translucent, so loses the milk white colour it starts with and becomes slightly grey. It can be rolled easily into tight balls without sticking to fingers. It is chewy between the teeth. If there is still a floury or grainy “bite” to it, steam it for another 15 minutes.

Leave it to rest (without removing it or uncovering your steamer) for 30 minutes before serving.

Thai restaurants serve this rice at room temperature.

 

 

“Nam P’to” Sauce

This is my best rendition in Latin script of the sauce we were served with this meal as pronounced by the chef. I can’t find it anywhere on the internet.

Exactly the same as Thai Salad Dressing, with the lime juice, but with the addition of plenty of chopped coriander. Important to taste test this and get it right.

 

Sam Roi Yod

 

Sam Roi Yod Beach shack

There is no Paradise on Earth, as folk are fond of saying.

And even in Sam Roi Yod, there are things to complain about. In the first beach shack we settle down in, the owner bemoans the villa that is being constructed across the track from him, right on the beach itself. It is true, that part of his view between the palm trees across beach and the glittering Bay of Thailand beyond, is now obscured by a pile of breeze blocks and girders. We sip Chang and knit our brows in sympathy.

Across the way, massage ladies are waving to my companion. “Madame you want Thai massage?”. Tourists, especially European females, are often seen lain on the beach massage tables receiving the treatment as they stare across the blue bay.

Mai, kap khun ka. Lazer-beam Thai grins… “Maybe tomorrow?”… “Yea maybe” Who knows?

Who knows what will happen tomorrow in Sam Roi Yod?

Sam Roi Yod Beach: Coconut palms

Actually everyone here can tell you that with considerable certainty and confidence.

Tomorrow in Sam Roi Yod there will be 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night-time. The daytime temperature will reach around 35oC. Twice, the waveless tide, looking like a trillion tonnes of blue hair gel, will advance up the magnolia coloured sand towards the coconut trees, whose tousled fronds the breeze will ruffle. It will then recede, exposing the scent of seaweed, salt and catworms to the whispering air. On the white pickets that surround some of the villas, bee-eaters the colours of the maddest of circus clowns will catch wasps and hornets. But the beach diners’ lunch will pack just as sharp a sting.

Bee-eaters

At 11:30 in one of the best restaurants on Earth – nameless, menu-less, palm-roofed, sand-floored and free of electricity and mains drainage – brown fingers will flick a cigarette lighter at the bottom of a half-oildrum. Thirty minutes later the first marinated pork-belly satay will be slammed onto the grill as lip-licking clients begin to occupy the bizarre furniture strewn on the uneven, shaded ground. As the odours of grilled meat waft across the beach, ownerless, sandy-coloured beach dogs with sand-filled pelts will raise their noses to the breeze and peer at the expectant diners out of deep camouflage. Freezing cold beer will change hands. Tepid sticky rice in individual plastic bag servings will be dumped on tables. Ferociously spicy papaya salad topped with crushed peanut, squeezed lime and chopped coriander will be doled out… lunch will be served. No bank, no tycoon, hedgefund nor oligarch could ever buy that view… just for lunchtime, it is all theirs.

Sam Roi Yod Beach: Beach Restaurant

That’s what will happen tomorrow on Sam Roi Yod beach… and like Paradise, it is practically impossible to get to… but well worth the effort.

Next post, how to recreate a Som Roi Yod barbecue.

Sam Roi Yod Beach. Pork belly satay…

 

 

 

Ha Long Bay

It is quite unlikely none of them exist; these men – for men they will be.

They are medium to high IQ male adults with low emotional quotient. They may be engineers, quants, analysts; … degree educated, perhaps, but not people people – not salesmen or HR professionals. Women like their men confident, sharply dressed and generous; these awkward, slobby niggards are consequently single…. and they tour the world on Google Street View.

They might be called “Googlenauts” or “Street View Cruisers”. In the gardens of Japan and from Bombay to Yucatan they have got to know cities by walking the streets virtually. They have the knowledge of world towns they have visited and traversed without ever leaving the comfort (or safety) of their own lodgings.

It makes such excellent financial sense: no flight tickets, no bus, train or taxi fares to shell out for, eat your own food made in your own kitchen and at night, your own familiar bed already paid for. No mess, no fuss, no Delhi belly, no confusing foreign currencies or languages to deal with, and your own non-squat toilet always on hand and furnished with toilet paper. The world at your feet for the cost of highspeed broadband and an HD screen.

But they’re missing something, are they not, these “Mac Packers”?

Those who have made the real, physical and geographical journey to Yosemite will recall this. Before visiting this Californian valley, travelers mostly know what they are going to see. They peer at Ansell Adams’ photos, and a thousand others taken by those on a quest to capture the place on a 2-dimensional image. Colleagues and friends tell them: “Nothing prepares you for actually seeing it when you are there”; like so many tired old cliches, this one too is true.

The sheer heart-stopping, breath-catching majesty of a vertical mile square of sheer rock doesn’t really fit in a Jpeg, nor on the glossy page of a coffee table book. No-one finds their hand involuntarily rising to cover their gaping mouth as they regard a landscape in a computer image. Apart from the diminished visual element, our “Web Walkers” as they click from El Kapitan to Half Dome, won’t get the scent of snow and pine on the icy downdraft that bespeaks a completely different climate up there within reach of your eyes, or the sound of water that spends 30 seconds in free-fall echoing off a flat perpendicular granite face the size of a large town on the other side of the valley. The formic humility of being a tiny human in such a place simply doesn’t come across vicariously.

For the Yosemite experience you have to go there. You always will do. Words fail us, and technology will never be up to the job either.

Dragon’s teeth. Jungle capped limestone outcrops

All this applies with Ha Long Bay as well.

If you have seen the films, and the travel programs and the pictures of this place then you have still seen very little. “Nothing prepares you for being there”. Vertical granite abounds, again and plays its role in the ambiance, but with 2,000 islets absorbing its energy the South China Sea is as calm as a turtle pond. Each island has its own cap of tropical jungle, once joined up, presumably, but now a separate micro environment every one. It reminds a traveler of Snoopy and the Coffee Pot, the red rocks of Arizona, but at their base, not scarlet sand but turquoise water…

Heartless and unimaginitive would be the folk who lived in such a place without inventing a suitable mythology for its origin, and the tale of the dragon’s landing and his scattered teeth is fittingly wild and violent.

Feral children at large in rowing boats selling “interesting shells” to deep pocketed holiday makers

Visiting out of season in grey weather, we were upgraded to an almost empty luxury cruiser to make our journey between the draconian molars and canines. We joined a flotilla of shabby white craft threading their way between the spectacular outcrops like a line of floss.

The Vietnamese chef on board produced a series of meals during our 2 day cruise, each one an exhibition of the sophistication and refinement of his country’s cuisine. This can be rare to find in a country where Pho Bo (noodle soup with beef slices) at £1 a go is the staple lunch for most folk, cash-strapped as this country still is.

Some arrangement. Carved veggie flowers, part of on-board cuisine

Junk Food: Squid salad

Watch out for a revival in interest in Vietnamese cooking – it is ancient and complex and packed with tropical flavours – much more than spring rolls and noodle soup.

Put Ha Long Bay on your must see list if you haven’t been there. You know you have to go there to see it properly, and you Googlenauts, get out of the house a little more often.

Melucca

Nyonya cooking, Melucca

A walk across the bridge on the way to Melucca’s busy China town; on the left looking down river out to sea is the old fort. Originally Portguese, then Dutch, then English, this hump commanded the harbour.

Water monitor, malaka river

In the river, reptile heads are held above the surface. Too short and blunt for crocodiles, and the flicking toungue gives away its owner; a water monitor hunting rats and water birds. Orioles fluting in tamarind trees, pester-power tuk-tuks pink-painted and sparkly to catch the eyes of 2-year old princesses tinkle with toddler pleasing music, tour ferries chug up the river with cargos of sightseers. Melucca has an “up-and-coming” feel to it. It is probably a very good place to buy real estate.

We finally discover a nyonya restaurant that is not closed for the holidays. This is a shabby back room with access to the river. We settle on wobbly furniture on the tow-path, feet from the malaka river’s thick brown liquid and read the laminated plastic menu sipping cold Tiger beer.

We go for squid in dark soy, and a slow-cooked curry. This cuisine rivals Thai food. It has the same flavour “architecture” with the salt, sweet, sour and chilli base. Then it has extras such as lime leaf, coriander, galangal etc. Both dishes are utterly delicious and are polished off in short order.

Rice

A bag of rice

To take a guess, at least 10% of the customers in this down town Penang supermarket have never tasted either bread or butter in their lives.

Noodles and rice are their staple feculants and it is this latter we seek, as we have brought doggie bags of sumptuous nyonya curry back from Pearly Kee’s cookery course and need some rice to eat it with.

This ought to be easy. Malaysian families live on rice, and the supermarket is full of the Neapolitan ice-cream of Malay skin tones. They will stock rice; most Malaysians are multi-lingual and will know what the word “rice” means. What could possibly go wrong here?

I make the prediction that there will be a whole aisle dedicated to the stuff, and there will be pallets piled with 15kg sacks of it. We can’t miss it, I foretell.

We do miss it. This oddly shaped shop is disorientating and full of secret caverns. A store manager is here though, let’s ask and get this done – Hello, we are looking for rice?

‘lice??

Ask a UK Tesco store manager which aisle for the live badgers and he will look no more perplexed than this monoglot Malay shop assistant. His face is contorted with the effort of concentration and comprehension.

Posed this unexpected linguistic problem, I reflect that rice is a pretty international word and there seems little point in the circumstances, in going through all the very similar sounding list of eurolanguage versions. I go for Portugese “ahhoz” which does sound different in the hope of raising a spark of recognition, and then, scraping the barrel since noone will admit to any knowledge of Japanese here, I try “gohan“. Now it’s like I’m asking, not for a bag of every day starchy cereal, but for a live female, yearling badger on a lead with a diamond encrusted collar. At this stage my interlocutor’s face now looks like he is in great pain. The agony of international communication seems to be overwhelming him. He is calling security – no wait – a friendly-looking polyglot colleague advances with a smile to save the day. All is not lost. Working together pooling our collective ingenuity and resource, we may still meet the colossal challenge of finding a small bag of rice in a Malaysian supermarket.

What you want? I just want Rice… AAAaaaaahhhh! Yes!! Lice!!

At last the sun of comprehension ascends over the horizon. A brief exchange in malay with Mr. Monoglot. Much mirth on both sides. I am quite delighted to see how much amusement I have brought into the lives of these two gentlemen today.

Is easy! You go out here, is lestaulant, there is lice. You buy you eat.

It’s fair enough – I am, quite visibly and audibly, a man so abandoned by god as to be anglo-saxon and consequently some sort of semi-sentient neanderthal from the frozen north. An idiot, capable of who-knows-what sort of spectacular acts of brainless tomfoolery. Manifestly he thinks I have knuckled past and refused the wares of the scrum of high pressure, rice-pushing restaurateurs that hunt clients on the pavement just in front of the shop entrance and then that I’ve lumbered in, hungry as a horse and begun to pester his long-suffering supermarket staff with fatuous requests for them to prepare me steaming bowls of cooked rice so that I can (presumably) sit cross-legged on the floor of aisle 12 and eat it with my fingers. Now this has all been cleared up, all that is required it to coax the cretinous snowman (he may never have seen a supermarket before) back out to the rice hawkers in the hope that he will this time have the common sense to purchase what he wants.

The desire to sigh petulantly, roll my eyes, or close them in ironic prayer to the god of calmness and restraint begins to well up within me like an inexorable tide.

Canute-like I set my jaw against such sentiments and explain calmly, politely and meticulously that I would like to purchase a small bag of rice that I can cook for myself at home. Would they perchance have such a thing in their shop?

Light dawns again and we set off at last for the supermarket’s rice cavern. There after all are the 15kg bags piled high on pallets, as prophesied and a whole aisle dedicated to the cereal with all types and pack sizes. I take a deep breath and thank my multi-lingual guide.

The Malay word for rice is Beras.

Pearly Kee

Roots: Pearly Kee in her favourite place on her favourite topic.

Pearly Kee is the granddaughter of a Victorian Sugar tycoon. She is the daughter of his 6th. son. She has a stormy life story to tell; loss of her mother at an early age, brought up by “strict aunts”, having to pay her way from age 6, health issues and dead-end jobs have marked her life. But this Penang, Malaysia native is bright, happy and superbly knowledgeable about cooking, dietary medicine and culinary botany. She reminds me a little of that other Malaysian Chinese prodigy, James Wong. And like James, Pearly too is an evangelist. A day in Pearly’s cooking school is a breathless whirlwind of experience, information, trial, error and success.

Taxied from their quarters, her cookery school students’ day starts at the Penang wet market where Pearly starts a whistle stop tour of her favourite stalls. Taste this, notice this, look at the way she is doing this, the market is the ultimate visual aid for entry-level nyonya cookery students, who leave this first stage of the day course with a mouth full of flavour and head full of information. Tapioca root contains vitamin B18, helpful for cancer patients; Chinese market stalls are arranged in terms of how the veg is grown, not how it’s cooked. Listen up and don’t get lost – Pearly’s pearls of wisdom are coming thick and fast. We sampled steamed rice noodles flavoured with pandanus, peanut muffin, ripe small banana and sipped iced coffee.

The key phrase mentioned early in the day which smashed any expectations of a cosy, unchallenging curry cooking course was “the Chinese eat holistically”. This was a blunt declaration backed up with overwhelming evidence, one example after another, that the Chinese, for thousands of years and still now, see no difference whatsoever between medicine and cookery.

In 2012 the BBC rated the British National Health Service as the 5th. largest employer in the world with its 1.7 million staff. At 26 million employees (factoring up health staff per capita), an equivalent Chinese Health Service would dwarf the world’s top 20 biggest employees summed up together. A bureaucratic organisation bigger than most countries would probably be very hard to run and may never exist. By necessity, then, China’s people take ownership of their own well-being as they have always done. So the Chinese are not going to stop cooking their “medical cuisine”. Maybe the British should start doing so?

All this considered, Pearly’s Njonya cooking class was never going to be limited to recipe-following. This would be a journey into complex medicinal studies, the biochemistry of plants, meticulous food hygiene, diet science, and just for an encore, a trio of restaurant-grade nyonya dishes cooked by the students in Pearly’s delightful tropical herb garden using wet-market produce nibbled and sampled the same morning. Her customers never realised they were such excellent cooks. I am going to cook differently as a result of this course. I will:

– wash vegetables in a bowl of water with crushed galangal – mix coconut milk/cream with water or stock – use more cooking fat in the curry than I have done (“3 elephants” – 3 Tbsp per portion) – be a lot more generous with the garlic – cook more meat on the bone and avoid chicken breast, for example – Take advantage of cheaper meat cuts and slow cook them – see pork in dark soy. – Consider the well-being of my family when selecting what to cook. A big subject, but a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step.A truly outstanding day of learning, recommended to all health-conscious curry fans.

Bangkok Street Food

Outside a 7-11 store in downtown Bangkok a family runs a pavement restaurant in sweltering heat. Great-Gran

Bangkok Street Chefs

and Gran in the kitchen, Mum greeting new customers and taking payment, little 9 year old bringing cutlery, washing up and generally providing cuteness. There is a lot of communication. Approaching farangs much discussed even before we present ourselves. Thai grins in quad.

Table for 2? Big sparkling Thai Grin. Anywhere.

We alight on seats like upturned buckets at a table that looks like it was recovered from a rubbish dump. It is scrubbed clean

Feeding the city… 4th. generation

though.

Menu for you! Kap kun, krap…

A huge list of items in Thai script dreadfully translated into English.

Phad Thai, rice and chicken, 2 beers? So sorry no beers. You buy here..

The pointing finger indicates the 7-11. Of course, no refrigeration, no electricity, no licence, no drinks. In the shop I buy a beer and an iced tea for 60baht.

Returning to the table, lunch is already served. Steaming hot straight from the wok, these dishes are spicy, citrusy, salty and with a hint of sweet. The phad thai is sprinkled with crushed peanut and coriander. You wouldn’t get a better lunch in any London restaurant.

The bill for food comes to 100baht for the 2 meals. So including drinks that is GBP 3.20 or GBP 1.60 per head. Could one produce such a meal at home for the same outlay, including the stove gas?

Fascinated, I begin to take photos and ask questions.

What is this here? And what is that? Can I watch? OK to take photo?

Gran is making the sauces, Great-Gran does the rice and noodles.

Gran has the kind of array of herbs, spices, syrups, pastes, sauces, sugars, chopped roots, nuts, vegetables and pickles that only tropical diversity can provide. All this arranged in old margarine tubs on the half meter square top of her steel trolley. She has a metal spatula, and a wok above a gas flame. Battered straw hat (1); toothy-peg grin (1), happy attitude that exceeds the mass of the visible universe (1). She is immensely pleased by my interest, although linguistic communication is nil.

On her daughter’s signal she cooks, loading up her metal spatula from the array of tupperware pots in front of her, each with its own spoon. In less than a second a primed wok is full of sizzling ingredients.
The four larger pots immediately in front of her are clearly significant. Snail’s pace communication reveals that these are the 4 signature Thai flavours: Tamarind (sour), soy sauce (salty), palm sugar syrup (sweet) and red chilli (hot). She can call on each of these with the flick of a spoon. If cookery were orchestral it might look like her trolley: bass, tenor, alto and soprano choir immediately in front, then at the flick of a baton holy basil, coriander, mushrooms, chopped shallots, chopped peanuts, galangal, chopped lemon grass, kafir lime leaves, limes and the rest of the orchestra arranged around.
Bangkok’s Karajan cooks and grins a gappy grin.

Bangkok

Aperitif, Nr Thewet Pier

Friday 24 Jan.

English winter blues and maladies melt in honey tropical sun. Cold beers and thai snacks. It’s 29oC and the scent of the river mixes with fragrant mesquite street grills, fried shallots and chilli. In this “quiet” part of town, individual tuk-tuks are audible – there being little background din. Jetlag, beer, weird birdsong, unknown plants.

We snack on prawns deep-fried in pastry and a mix of toasted cashews with chopped spring onions and chillis.

Steve’s, Thewet Pier, Bangkok

Friday 24 Jan.

Across a footbridge and along a very narrow canalside footpath the way leads through some folks’ back gardens. White skin, weird blue eyes, bizarre mousy hair, “You MUST be lost; where you go”. “Steve’s”, “Aha  yes – aroy aroy”, big buddhist smiles. It seems the locals approve of this restaurant and indeed of any seekers after its pleasures; they point the way ahead. There is no disappointment. Tom kha gai, massaman curry, prawns in

Steve’s: Dinner is served…

tamarind and a veg dish translated as “morning glory”. There is a chance the kitchen Gods and Goddesses who prepared the food may not be linguists. There is no need for someone who cooks the way they do to be good at anything else at all.

Anyone who has been to  Bangkok and didn’t like town, please go to Steve’s riverside restaurant next visit and then write a full and complete apology to the city on tripadvisor afterwards. You will feel the need to. It’s not just the food, or the blissful sight of sundown across the river from the terrace or the delightful service. It’s the approach to the place past kids playing street football, grandma watching tv with window open, someone rounding up chickens, stepping over stoned looking dogs in pink tea-shirts as you go. Real Thai folk live round here…

The massaman curry (chicken) contained one single whole piece of chicken. The dish was served about room temp. The meat came off the bone so easily (no knives were provided) I deduced it had been slow-cooked in the curry sauce. It was outstanding. Are all the recipes wrong?

Tom Kha Gai. Not as creamy as mine. Plenty of stock, and very citrusy without being sour. Lemon grass?

The food came to 650bh.

Preparations…

We plan a trip East in search of warmth, ambrosial food and tropical gardens and fauna.

Itinerary:

Bangkok, Penang, Melucca, Singapore, Ha Noi, Da Nang, Saigon, Hua Hin, Chiang Mai

On the wishlist: food, cookery lessons, fishing trips and the tropical gardens of the former Malay Straights Botanic Gardens and Forestry department.

Faunawise, we understand the Penang gardens are run by a troop of long-tailed macaques, for example. We have a visit to an elephant rescue centre slated for our Chiang-Mai stage. Tigers, Leopards, Crocodiles… in the mega diverse zone we are visiting, indigenous animals recall childhood visits to zoos; exotic, dangerous and beautiful animals will be around us somewhere, but in their own space.

Waiting at Calcott bus station with England’s damp January winds whistling around the sarong and tugging at the chinstrap of the pith helmet will be chilly, but half a day later sultry conditions will prevail and we will be glad of our light packing.

As our 6-week Grand Tour ticks past, the Earth will tilt, and we hope for friendlier days when we return.

At 54 excitement can be a rare sentiment, but I am enjoying a frisson of anticipation as like many of our ancestors, we voyage East in search of spice…