Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [60]
That’s the method we employ at our second lunch later in the afternoon at Vithi’s ancestral family home, a large but not ornate wooden residence near the center of Lampang. His grandmother lived here for many years and then his aunt, who died recently. Now only servants stay full-time, and Vithi visits when he can. Within minutes after we pull up in our van, we see confirmation of a growing hunch, that Vithi comes from a patrician background. Neighbors start appearing at the front door individually and in groups to deferentially seek his counsel and support on various issues, particularly damage from a recent flood. He seats them in a parlor adjoining the living room where we’re sitting, saying he’ll talk with them after lunch.
The servants fix and serve the meal, under instructions from Vithi to focus on exotic northern specialties we won’t find elsewhere. The dishes include tempura-fried pumpkin, fresh bamboo shoots, fried crickets with a sweet and tangy dipping sauce, pig brains wrapped in banana leaves, pork with lemongrass, water buffalo sprinkled with dried red chile in both tartare and sautéed versions, vegetable pickles, and a couple of nam priks for seasoning everything to taste. For dessert, we nibble on bright gems of look choob, a marzipan cousin fashioned from sweetened bean paste, and we wash everything down with Thai iced tea, a potent brew diluted with sweetened condensed milk. It’s all splendid to us since nothing makes food more memorable than enjoying it at a friend’s home.
On our return to Chiang Mai, we hit two more markets, as if we haven’t seen nearly enough yet. The first is an evening event, set up to catch people leaving work. The vendors specialize in partially prepared foods that take less time and labor to finish at home, such as skewers of roasted tiny eggplants, shallots, and garlic to mash together as the base for nam prik. The second market features street-food stalls, where we pick up a couple of snacks for a light supper: pretty, crispy banana fritters made from fruit the size of our fingers and fried, pork-stuffed long green-yellow chiles that look like the chiles rellenos in New Mexico. Both taste great.
On our honeymoon visit two decades ago, we loved the Thai enthusiasm for eating, a facet of life that we see again in abundance with Vithi. He introduces us to an incredible range of new tastes, not all personal favorites for us, but each characteristic of northern cuisine and intriguing to sample. Some of the dishes thrill us with their complex and bold flavors, especially khao soi. Many others—such as meang kum, the roasted rice in bamboo, wing beans, lemongrass juice, stuffed chiles, and more—delight us in simpler ways. What matters most to us in the end, though, is the breadth and intensity of our Chiang Mai eating adventure, a truly Thai experience we feel privileged to share with Vithi.
The gray skies of Bangkok pour rain during most of our visit, seriously dampening our spirits and washing away many of our plans. It’s still the monsoon season, as we knew in advance, but our stopover falls at the end of the annual cycle, which leads us to hope that storms would be decreasing in frequency and intensity. This year, the weather turns worse instead.
On our arrival from Chiang Mai, the taxi ride from the airport to our first hotel, the Siam City, takes almost two hours due to the wet roads and Bangkok