Tag: Food and Drink

Categories
Misc.

A Long Weekend in Udon Thani

Udon Thani, Thailand

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

Taking the One Less Traveled By...
The countryside.

House and Pool
The house and pool.

A with Cooks
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.

Dinner
Whole fried fish and som tam.

Lunch
A with lunch — krapow.

Khao Pad (fried rice). Incredibly tasty
Khao pad — fried rice.

Stir-fried Morning Glory
Stir-fried morning glory.

Larb (Beef Stir-Fried with Bits of Rice)
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.

Spotted in Japan: Pizza Hut Sausage Crust

Pizza Hut Sausage Crust

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.)

Eating Fish and Chips with Austin

Eating Fish and Chips in Bangkok

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.

Categories
Misc.

Austin’s Bird Nest Gathering Expedition

Southern Thailand [not my image]

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.

Pancakes and Sausage on a Stick

Jimmy Dean Chocolate Chip Pancakes & Sausage on a Stick

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:

John and My Brother with French Fry-Encrusted Corndogs

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…

German Food in Bangkok

Bei Otto German Restaurant in Bangkok

That’s the subject of my latest Gridskipper dispatch.

A Street Food Expedition

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.

Categories
Misc.

Fat Studies

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.”

Categories
Misc.

Dragon: the Other White Meat

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.)

Bangkok’s Most Extreme Rooftop Restaurant

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.