Koh Samui - Night Food

Unless you want to eat McDonald's or grossly over-priced and bland "western food" Koh Samui can be a foodie wasteland. Thankfully every night, next to the girly bars, a line of stalls sets up offering up cheap Thai dishes of varying quality.

My Favourite
Baan Lamai Night Market Food Stall

The first night Abby grabbed a Penang curry that left much to be desired, under-spiced, over salted, and tasting largely of kaffir lime.
Thankfully I scoped out this gem of a stall. Serving up freshly cooked Kebabs, satay, springroll, and most importantly to me, Noname. I first ate Noname when I visited Koh Tao (2 islands north of Samui), in that case it was Prawn Noname, since then I have only found Veggie Noname. I have tried time and time again to find a Thai restaurant at home with no luck. The closest thing I can liken it to would be an Indian Pakora, but even that isn't really close.
A heaping plate of Noname with a Kebab and a springroll topped out at a whopping 75 Baht (1$CDN = 32 Baht) so under $2.50. The next stall over is the shake stand (Thai Shakes are raw fruit, ice and a lot of sugar), mango shakes are the most expensive at 30B, all others are 25, if you opt for "alcohols" all shakes are 50B and contain 2-3 shots of Sang Som (Thai Rot Gut Whiskey)

Thai Veggie Noname

Pad Thai - Part 1 of ?

Asia is a land of amazing street food, especially so in Thailand. While many lament the loss of traditional home cooking, the quality of what is available on the streets puts Toronto to shame, even with our new expanded "healthy", "international" options. Even the worst street Pad Thai is freshly prepared to order, unlike those hot dogs that sit, drying out, on the top rack of the grill only to be finally sliced and cooked again to oblivion.
We grabbed this Pad Thai from some random stall lining the walls of a downtown Bangkok park.

Temple Spice Crab

I have never really been one for seafood, for myriad reason. Foremost is our general treatment of the oceans, meaning it is at once a toilet and a pantry. The few fish species that I do enjoy eating (fresh blue fin tuna, salmon & swordfish) carry such a heavy price tag (in terms of both price and cost) that I feel more and more guilty with every bite. There is a reason why it is so hard to find decent Toro (the fatty under belly of the Blue Fin) these days; the mature tuna that yield the best cuts don't exist anymore.
Wild seafood is the one product that people have no qualms about eating into extinction. In Canada I could not hunt a moose and then serve it in a commercial kitchen (and with good reason) yet there is nothing stopping me from serving mass quantities of our dwindling salmon stock. With the exceptions of trout, carp and catfish, farmed fish is an environmental nightmare.
Another reason I eat little seafood is that often it is expensive, of poor quality and generally not overly fresh.
Anyway, enough ranting about fish. When I do eat seafood outside a sushi bar it is only because it has been out of its native waters for hours, not stored in a tank for days, or flown on ice half way around the globe. The only lobster I have eaten and liked was in Mexico and we bought it from the fisherman almost immediately after it was caught, and we ate it shortly thereafter.

The crab served up at Temple Spice Crab (in the Temple Street Night Market) was wonderfully fresh and sweet. The platter (carrying one lone crab) arrived smothered in wok fried garlic and chili peppers. The crab is market price, so we ended up paying 120 HK$ (or just under 20$CDN).


We also paired the crab with Spicy Eggplant with Pork. The eggplant is a fave from home, both Abby and I make this regularly, and first started eating it at New Ho King on Spadina St in Toronto. The eggplant wasn't as good as either our homemade version, or that from New Ho King. Not so strangely, it tasted a little fishy.

Wanderlust...

Our first wedding anniversary is fast approaching and with it a full calendar year since I have been outside of Canada. Abby and I casually resolved to go away for 5 weeks this November, at first I was a little unsure that we actually would. A number of events have conspired to give Abby a year off of school, so we plan to take advantage of the time off. So it is official now; we are Thailand bound!
The plan is to spend most of our time kicking around the Islands. Friends of ours, The Loves of Ol' Blighty, suggested this little paradise on Koh Phangan. We can't make it our first stop though, as this seems exactly the type of place where a week turns into a month and then we have to rush to the border before our visas expire. Not that 5 weeks on Phangan would be a bad thing.
After the 5 weeks Abby will have to come home and return to work, I don't have to though. I am going to stay behind to take a two week Thai cooking course.
I am so excited!

Rude Light Switches and Damn Fine Pizza

Growing up I spent most of my summers in a small railway town really far north of the city. The town itself grew up around two different industries and two different populations; the railroad and the Italians, and logging and French Canadians, the two were, and still are, divided starkly by the Chapleau River and the CPR Tracks. This division isn't important to this post, it is just an interesting fact, and as another aside, as both these industries are dying a slow death so is the town.
My grandparents lived on the Italian dominated side, not to far from the tracks. I have to say that I only vaguely remember our next door neighbour, Tony Principe, except for 2 things, he had a glow in the dark light switch where the toggle represented a pantless trucker's penis, and he made the best pizza I have ever had. According to the legend the secret to Tony's pizza, was the pan, he brought it from The Old Country; the copper relic had belonged to his grandmother, and perhaps even to her grandmother.
Pizza is the second food that I learned to how to make, and it was all in an attempt to recreate his recipe. Since then only twice have I ever found something close (and both lacked the chili pepper heat), at a little pizza shop on Prince St in NYC, and at a long gone bakery at Kane and Eglinton, an area once settled by Italians, slowly shifted to Jamacian and West Indian, as each community improved their lots.
Like all good food, Tony's pizza was perfect in its simplicity; thick crust baked in a lake of olive oil, which would soak into the dough as it baked, topped with whole canned tomatoes, broken up with a fork, season lightly, heavly spiced with hot pepper flakes and nothing else. The mouth numbing tomatoes would collect in divots in the lightly sweetened dough making each bite a sweet infernal heaven.