Living in Bangkok

This weekend we had what's known around here as weekend breakfast...eggs benedict with jackfruit on the side... And French toast with cinnamon apples... We ordered delivery (pad thai for me and a seafood omelet for Roman)... And on Sunday, we got a farm box from an organization that delivers organic groceries from small farms, mostly in or around Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. We got organic morning glory, a little loaf of cheddar sourdough bread, a giant avocado, Northern-style sausage made with lots of herbs, Italian basil, local goat cheese, heirloom tomatoes, arugula, and jasmine rice. Adorably, they use rolled banana leaves in place of paper bags. I mostly picked things I've been missing (Italian basil, heirloom tomatoes) or that I thought would be better to buy organic (arugula, morning glory), or just because they sounded fun (cheddar sourdough, goat cheese). I mean, how could anyone resist this? For our first meal with the farm ingredients, I made the kind of summery m...

Lately, we've been keeping the windows open all the time instead of using the AC. Cross breezes flow through the apartment, and we can hear roosters and birds and the hushed roar of traffic below. Sometimes the winds blow strongly and scatter the pictures I have up around my desk or ruffle the bedspread, and sometimes the rain will fall hard and water will collect on the window sills and floors, but mostly it feels airy and relatively cool and a little less sealed-off than an air-conditioned apartment. Now! Onto What We Ate This Week! I've been cooking using the ingredients we bought at the Khlong Toei market on Sunday. I made a pad sew ew ish dish—I used more Chinese broccoli and tofu and fewer noodles than you'd have in a real pad see ew, but the sauce was the same: I wanted to do something with the rest of the shrimp and the fresh petai beans (AKA stink beans ), and when I looked up recipes for shrimp and beans online, several Creole recipes using lim...

We've moved out of durian and jackfruit season into mangosteen and rambutan season, it's warm and muggy and often rainy here, and life under lockdown goes on. On Fridays we eat doughnuts. We walk in the direction of Phloen Chit to a cart set up near the train tracks. I don't know what time in the morning this guy starts, but while he's there, he works nonstop—cutting up the fresh dough into small pieces, frying it in a hot, oil-filled, wok, and then scooping out the puffed-up pieces of dough to cool in their metal tray before customers come to scoop them up.  Even early in the morning, it looks like hot work. But by 9am or so he sells out and closes up shop. The vendor makes Chinese doughnuts and little round doughnut holes and we usually get some of both and a container of condensed milk dipping sauce, all for 30 baht (about 90 cents). And here's lunch at the cart just outside our condo. One of the women who works there spea...