One of the simple pleasures of life in Bangkok is street food. Luckily, I live very close to one of the best areas for street food vendors: Sukumvit Soi 38. Apparently people drive from all over to eat a quick and cheap dinner here.
I have three favorites: one stand has delicious quay tiow rad na mu (flat noodles with pork and thick gravy) and kuay gai mai ao blaa muk (flat noodles with chicken and egg, hold the squid please). Another favorite is the noodle soup stand, although I have gotten in the habit of eating the noodles dry: ba mee hang (thin noodles, no soup) is what I order. The noodles come with mu daeng (red pork), shredded bu (crab), bitter greens, picked veggies, bits of fried pork skin, lots of garlic and various other herbs and spices. It is unbelieveably good for such a simple, cheap dish.
My third favorite is dessert. One stand has delicious ma muang kao neow (mango with sticky rice) but my real favorite is ... well, I don't know the name. Bascially the idea is that you put scoops of a lot of different fruits and jellies into a bowl and cover it with ice. I don't know the name because all I do it just point at the goodies and they serve it up. Some of the goodies include ma muang, sopparot, and luk chit (mango, pinapple, and a opaque, oblique hard gelatin chunks). I also like the little circular red geletin balls and various dried fruits of which I have no idea what they are called. Top it all off with a scoop of nam lum yai (longan juice) and I am a happy camper.
Mmm. I'm hungry.
ur real fav. desert called "ka-nohm nahm kaang"
red geletin balls and various dried fruits called "thab thim grob"
which is my fav. one too hehehehe .....
Mmmm, I LIVE for khao niew ma muang. So, so good... those juicy mangoes and sweet sticky rice. Unfortunately, they're also saturated with about a gazillion calories! Quite the dilemma, really. ;P
(Oh poo, now I'm hungry too.)
"quay tiow"?
"kuay gai"?
Khun SGTowns' palate must have a preference for the exotic dishes. Perhaps he's merely encountering the linguistic difficulties of Thai-English transliteration. Or, it just might be that he has absolutely no friggin' clue what the word "quay/kuay" in Thai means. Whatever the case, let's hope his constitution holds up. *cue theme music to The Crying Game*
BTW, if any male local invites you to a clam bake or an oyster fest (gin hoy)...it ain't gonna involve any seafood. ;)
it all sounds aroy mahk mahk, i'm gettin hungry just reading it. my friend's g-ma puts coconut milk on the sticky rice with mango dish... yes... calorie rich but so yummy.
-J.
Peter: "kanom nam kang".... or "ice snack", right? Ok, I can remember that one :)
Cog: Yes, Thai to English transliteration is next to impossible. You give a great example... is it G or is it K? Makes a huge difference in English, but not so much in Thai? Same for B and P, D and T, J and CH... That's why I think that learning to speak Thai by kareoke-style roman letters is useless.
Anyway, I don't know what you are talking about (this is a G-Rated site, after all :) but I tried to look up the food I was talking about and my "Lonely Planet Thailand" spells "a noodle soup with fish or pork balls, herbs and spices" as kuay tiaw.
As far as the other dish goes, I am sure I am calling it the wrong thing. I'll have to do a little research on it.
Lynn: Yes, mango and sticky rice is full of calories. Not to mention it's not so good for your teeth as well. Last thing you need/want is sugar that sticks to your teeth!
Ahhh...The Lonely Planet -- sine qua non: the backpacker's guide to botching up cultural nuances; emergency toilet paper for bowel distress in the sticks.
I'd recommend saying and transliterating ก๊วยเตี๋ยว (i.e. noodle dishes) as: Guay-teaw(tiaw), and NOT Kuay-teaw. That is, use "G" as opposed to a "K". The "ก" (gaw-gai consonant) in "ก๊วย" denotes a hard "g" sound - more accurately, somewhere between a "g" and a "k".
For many falangs, substituting the "g" sound in guay-teaw for a "k" probably isn't a big hoo-ha; however, discovering one has just ingested some farm-fowl-fish male genitalia in one's noodle dish may have more of a profound impact. On the positive side, I've heard Tiger penis soup works well as an aphrodisiac.
Choak dee khrap.