With a packet of rice vermicelli - known as sen mee (เส้นหมี่) - left behind by the previous occupants of the house, I made what amounts to Vietnamese phở. We can call it kuai tiao nam sai (ก๋วยเตี๋ยวน้ำใส), meaning clear noodle soup, if that makes it seem more authentically Thai. Whatever its name, the soup, flavoured with shallots, garlic and soy sauce, with Chinese leaf, mushrooms and tofu, was clean, simple, and tasty.
Making the soup cleared us out of tofu, so we struck out to town to pick up more along with some other provisions. I fear shopping on the market once a week won't be sufficient for our needs. Fortunately, there are a few vegetable shops along the main street.
We targeted the shop closest to the Chinese temple first, on the reasonable assumption that it would provide strict Buddhists and the surrounding restaurants with the firm white squares of bean curd. We were wrong. Soft yellow tofu in tubes they had, but gave us a steer to another shop that stocked it. However, the owner begged to differ, looking baffled that we would even think she carried such an item, and directed us back to the first shop.
Dejected and realising that, as vegetarians, in all likelihood we would simply wither and perish from protein deficiency without a constant supply of fresh tofu, we broke for an ice cream sundae to sustain ourselves.
Both having chosen and eaten a 'Happy Sundae', I was reminded of an article I had read on the cafés serving the beaches on the other side of the island. On their menus, 'happy' and 'magic' are apparently euphemistic adjectives reserved for food containing hallucinogenic ingredients. Fortunately, the crowd in Old Town don't expect their meal to come with a trip and this innocent ice cream had little or no psilocybin.
Continuing our quest for the elusive bean curd, we asked in a grocery and were pointed at the other greengrocer's we had already visited. Along the way, I (almost) learned how to pronounce tofu the Thai way - tau-hu (เต้าหู้) - and so, armed with this new knowledge we tried again. This time, we were bounced to a vegetable market on the crossroads into town.
The market had promising-looking chest fridges, which turned out to contain the holy grail. We would go hungry no longer.
Duly, I prepared a tofu-rich Thai dish for dinner. Mee kati (หมี่กะทิ) is rice vermicelli in coconut sauce. Being new to me, I largely followed a recipe, substituting for the meat and seafood.
I may have been a little heavy handed with the coconut milk, as the result was a bit claggy and extremely rich. With fermented yellow beans, palm sugar and rice vinegar (standing in for tamarind), the noodle sauce was hugely flavoursome. Topped with an obscenely redundant rolled sliced omelette, it was a comforting plate of stodge, if hardly the most photogenic meal I have ever made.
After dinner, we met up with our host, newly returned from her travels to America, at her friend's house. We enjoyed a drink or two sat out in a square hammock shaped like a spider's web strung between four poles out over the advancing tide.
No comments:
Post a Comment