Newley Purnell

Don’t miss Tom Fuller’s IHT/NYT story about the quest for an odorless durian. My favorite passages:

“To anyone who doesn’t like durian it smells like a bunch of dead cats,” said Bob Halliday, a food writer in based Bangkok. “But as you get to appreciate durian, the smell is not offensive at all. It’s attractive. It makes you drool like a mastiff.”

And:

The litany of legends and myths surrounding what Malaysians call the “king of fruits” is long and colorful. The durian is said to be an aphrodisiac: when the durians fall down, the sarongs fly up, goes a Malay saying.

Not to mention:

Rarely does durian season pass without newspapers somewhere in Southeast Asia reporting a durian death. The fruit, which is rich in carbohydrates, protein, fat and sulfurous compounds (thus the smell), is said here to be “heaty,” and can therefore be deadly for those with high blood pressure, according to Wilailak Srisura, a nutritionist at the Thai Department of Health. Tradition also dictates that mixing alcohol with durian should be avoided at all costs.

And finally:

Many durian lovers fear the nearly odorless variety is just another step toward the erosion of durian culture. Durians are a social fruit, traditionally sold and eaten on the roadside by groups of friends.

(Emphasis mine.)

Note: I snapped the photo above in a hotel lobby in Kuala Lumpur last year. On that same Malaysia trip, with my buddy Matt G., I made the mistake of eating a large quantity of durian — my durian culture initiation rites, if you will — and then I consumed several glasses of beer. You cannot imagine the indigestion. You simply cannot imagine.

The fine folks at Jaunted asked me to write a brief post about mistakes that tourists make in Bangkok. Here’s what I said.

Previously, Phil Lees — the author of the excellent blog Phnomenon — wrote about what not to do in Phnom Penh.

A and I recently spent a long weekend near the town of Udon Thani, in northeast Thailand. Here’re some pics.

The countryside.

The house and pool.

A with the friendly ladies who cooked our meals. Cuisine from Isan — this region of Thailand — is particularly flavorful and spicy, so every meal was an absolute delight.

Whole fried fish and som tam.

A with lunch — krapow.

Khao pad — fried rice.

Stir-fried morning glory.

Larb.

One afternoon we took a small motorbike — a 100-cc, four-stroke Honda — out for a spin. A filmed this three-minute video, and I polished it up and added a soundtrack.

Click on the image above or go watch it on YouTube.

For additional pics, check out the whole photoset.

Seriously. Click on the link for a bigger pic of what appears to be a pizza with sausage and cheese embedded in its crust. Can any Japanese readers out there help me with a translation?

(Via.)

Last week I went down to Banglamphoo to eat fish and chips with Austin Bush, of RealThai fame. Check out his excellent description and pics. In the image above, I’m getting down to business with some fried snapper.

My pal Austin — who you’ll remember from our street food expedition last month — has just posted some spectacular images from another adventure: he accompanied photographer Eric Valli on a journey gathering bird nests inside caves in southern Thailand. Don’t miss it.

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading a bunch of images from when my family was in town over the holidays. It was lots of fun to see everyone; my mom, step-dad, and little brother Colin came from South Carolina, while my brother Mechum popped over from Seoul. (His girlfriend K also joined us toward the end, but sadly I don’t have any pics from when she was here.)

Here’s the whole set; following are a few of my faves:

Mike, Mom, and Colin at dinner

Mech, Me, and A

One night we had a party at my house; my landlord’s sister was there and she made fresh som tam. It was delectable.

We all went to the Samutprakarn crocodile farm (a place Mech and I visited, as a matter of fact, the very first time I came to Thailand, back in January 2001). Animal lovers might recoil at the conditions and treatment of some of the critters there, but the place is certainly memorable. Colin snapped this pic of a funny sign.

They’ve got a live liger (or tigon?) on display there, interestingly enough.

The croc handlers have nerves of steel.

In addition, there’re some very well-trained (though some might say exploited) elephants at the croc farm. One particularly precocious pachyderm had mastered the art of driving a pedal car. Go watch this video on YouTube to see a quick demonstration of his skill.

Great information design. Edward Tufte would be proud. What more, honestly, could you want from a croc farm — you’ve got your food, bathrooms, guns, an exit, croc shows, and souvenirs!

After several days in Bangkok, we made our way to the tiny, idyllic, gorgeous island resort of Koh Mun Nork.

Sunset

There is nothing to do there. Except relax…

…and play cards…

Again, here’s the whole photo set.

A great, great visit.

Not new, but worth mentioning. God bless America.

Junk Food Blog:

The Jimmy Dean brand of breakfast food won my nod of approval when I found this lovely new entry.

Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick Chocolate Chip pretty much takes what my wife often eats at IHOP and puts it all on a hand-held form factor, allowing junk-foodies like us to revel in frozen food fanatacism.

Better yet, these are microwaveable, so just nukem and pukem.

(Thanks for the tip, Miles B. and Mike W.)

Related:

God bless Korea. The infamous Korean french fry-encrusted corn dogs, which Mech and John E. and I encountered this time last year in Seoul.

Fatty foods on a stick. They’re the lingua franca of the junk food world…

That’s the subject of my latest Gridskipper dispatch.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of undertaking a fantastic culinary adventure with my pal — and fellow Thailand blogger — Austin B, author of the excellent RealThai blog.

Austin is a gifted photog, a foodie’s foodie, and an old Siam hand. He’s got a great write-up of some of the delicacies we sampled on Langsuan soi 6, which is just around the corner from my house:

Today was something of an informal Bangkok Bloggers Summit. I trekked all the way to the Lang Suan area to meet with Newley Purnell of www.newley.com fame. Newley has been blogging since 2001, an era when, I believe, the word blog had yet to be coined. What did they call it back then, Newley? Online Diarying? Internet Loggery? Pointless Frivolity?

Newley lives just minutes away from Lang Suan Soi 6, a tiny alley that, come lunchtime, is a virtual magnet for hungry Thai office staff of every stripe. We decided the partake in the madness and dove directly into the heart of the soi. More or less halfway down we came across a raan khao kaeng, rice and curry shop, that serves up some very interesting looking nosh, and our fate was sealed.

Pictured above is an image Austin snapped of some tasty nam phrik kapi with deep-fried mackerel we tucked into; be sure to check out his post for even more great photos. I felt honored to break bread with Austin, as he has an amazingly vast knowledge of Thai vittles. (And, as Austin points out, we ate at the very curry shop where I was famously laughed at by a gaggle of Thai women back in August.)

More of Austin’s photography can be seen on his portfolio site and his Flickr page.

Snip from a recent NYT story by Abby Ellin:

Even as science, medicine and government have defined obesity as a threat to the nation’s health and treasury, fat studies is emerging as a new interdisciplinary area of study on campuses across the country and is gaining interest in Australia and Britain. Nestled within the humanities and social sciences fields, fat studies explores the social and political consequences of being fat.

For most scholars of fat, though, it is not an objective pursuit. Proponents of fat studies see it as the sister subject — and it is most often women promoting the study, many of whom are lesbian activists — to women’s studies, queer studies, disability studies and ethnic studies. In many of its permutations, then, it is the study of a people its supporters believe are victims of prejudice, stereotypes and oppression by mainstream society.

“It’s about a dominant culture’s ideals of what a real person should be,” said Stefanie Snider, 29, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, whose dissertation will be on the intersection of queer and fat identities in the United States in the 20th century. “And whether that has to do with skin color or heritage or sexual orientation or ability, it ends up being similar in a lot of ways.”

TimesOnline:

A spicy sausage known as the Welsh Dragon will have to be renamed after trading standards’ officers warned manufacturers that they could face prosecution because it does not contain dragon.

The sausages will now have to be labelled Welsh Dragon Pork Sausages to avoid any confusion among customers.

Jon Carthew, 45, who makes the sausages, said yesterday that he had not received any complaints about the absence of real dragon meat. He said: “I don’t think any of our customers believe that we use dragon meat in our sausages. We use the word because the dragon is synonymous with Wales.”

His company, the Black Mountains Smokery at Crickhowell, in Powys, turns out 200,000 sausages a year, including the Welsh Dragon, which is made with chilli, leek and pork. A Powys County Council spokesman said: “The product was not sufficiently precise to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food.”

(Incredulous emphasis mine.)

(Link via. Cartoon via.)

That’s the subject of my most recent Gridskipper post. And here’re some additional pics of Sirocco, a rooftop restaurant perched 64 stories above Bangkok — and with little more than a glass railing separating patrons from the sheer drop.

Remember my trip to Malaysia back in March?

Well, I went there to meet up with my buddy Matt Gross, who was writing a story about Malaysian food. His article — and it’s really fantastic — ran in last weekend’s New York Times. Don’t miss it.

Not only has Matt accurately described the many flavors of the delectable food there, but he’s done an admirable job of explaining the history and culture that has informed Malaysian cuisine.

Guinea pigs: they’re not from Guinea and they’re not pigs.

Discuss.

But seriously:

The CSM’s Chip Mitchell:

Guinea pig: It’s what’s for dinner in Peru - and the US: Farmers in Peru boost their income by exporting guinea pigs to immigrants in the US.

I tried this special dish on a couple of occasions when I lived in Ecuador — the Spanish word is cuy (pronounced coo-ee). Doesn’t taste like chicken. Tough. A bit oily. But maybe my own particular issue was that as I munched on those tiny drumsticks I couldn’t help but picture Betty, my late, great, beloved pet, whose lustrous coat I used to groom lovingly with an old toothbrush when I was but six years old….

Previously: Ecuadorian Soup in The New Yorker.

For what it’s worth, in the photo above, that’s not, in fact, cuy I was cooking with my Ecuador friends Mike F. and Angelica last year…