Michèle, eat!

The above command is one I hear many times a day.

From breakfast to dinner, Miss Ja keeps a close eye on my eating behavior. Like yesterday, when I only had a small cookie and some coffee for breakfast, she turned up at my 10 o’clock class with a grilled sandwich and some orange juice. Very sweet of her, sure, but I’m used to deciding for myself how much I eat.

Before I came to Thailand, I thought that this would be a very healthy experience, Thai food contains a lot of vegetables and is low in fat. But the amounts of food they eat here is incredible.
It all starts with the pile of rice you get on your plate 3 times a day. Add meat or fish, vegetables and any sauce you like and you have what we call “dinner” for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Everything is delicious, no doubt, but sometimes it’s just too much.

Today, Miss Ja apparently knew that the lunch at school would be very spicy. So this morning she gave me a bag of food to take to school. From what I understood, I had to give this to the other teachers during lunch, as a dessert, as she kept saying “Sweets, sweets! Hmmm, they like, they like”. So after enjoying a spicy, but still OK, lunch, I offered the bag to the teachers.
They told me that this actually was my lunch and that Miss Ja had prepared this especially for me. So today I had lunch twice. Afterwards I really felt a bit sick. The sweet food was very tasty: pink noodles, green rice with coconut, and coconut milk with some colored things in it. I did not eat everything and shared most of it with the teachers. But it still took me at least an hour, sitting next to a fan in the teachers’ office, and using my medicine kit for the first time, before I was OK and no longer felt like weighing a ton.

Second lunch of the day: pink noodles, green rice and coconutmilk with unidentified floating objects... I asked what these were, but all explanation I got was: "Like a potato, but sweet and Thai" :-)

As I said, every dish they present to me here is really delicious. So when Pongsuda told me that her mother wanted to teach me how to cook Thai food, I gratefully accepted. Today was lesson 1: Pad Thai. Not too difficult, and I was kind of proud when I put the dish on the table and Pongsuda’s family enjoyed it. My cooking was officially arroj !
Next lesson will be Tom Yam Kung, a spicy soup with shrimps, and lesson 3 will probably be a green curry, as that is the dish I always order when I go to a Thai restaurant in Belgium. So next time I go out to eat Thai, I’ll be able to be an irritating customer and give the cook some useful feedback after the meal J.

The result: delicious Pad Thai!

Although Miss Ja is very strict on my eating behavior, she is not the best ambassador of Thai food herself. She does not like spicy food and little Ban-Ban does not like to eat rice... Yesterday, I went to the market to buy food for my family. I bought chicken and Som Tam (papaya salad), the same food I had in the house of a colleague this weekend. It was the first time I ate Som Tam and it immediately became my all-time favorite. So I wanted to share it with my hosts.
Ban-Ban went crazy over the chicken, it was gone before I could take a second piece. He donated his rice to the dogs and did not touch the Som Tam. Also Miss Ja did not touch the salad and did not have a chance to taste the chicken. But as I have not yet seen her eat anything until now, I guess she has her own secret stash of food hidden somewhere. So I ate all the Som Tam on my own. My throat was still burning hours after dinner, but I enjoyed every bit of the delicious salad.

Freshly made Som Tam at the market

My colleague Poo, buying the chicken for dinner



Poo and me, enjoying our take-away dinner on Saturday



Juicy, sweet pineapple, my favorite dessert



Friday night dinner: second from the right. Should be pork, but did not taste or look like it.



Ban-Ban, making me an omelet on Sunday