Sunday, September 26

On Fridays we eat doughnuts…but when we headed down to the little alleyway under the freeway on Friday morning, our doughnut guy wasn’t there! There were a lot fewer carts out than usual, and we finally remembered Friday was a public holiday. We decided to try one of the other fried treats carts, and got some fried bananas, purple sweet potato balls, and sesame balls. There weren’t just-fried and hot, like our usual doughnuts, but they were still pretty good.

Then in the late morning, I headed to the Big C near Ekkamai for some household odds and ends. Afterwards, I stopped for lunch at a little eatery and had dim sum for one…gai lan with oyster sauce (too much oyster sauce!) and shu mai:

On the way home, maybe because lunch was not that good, I stopped at the crepe cart in front of our closest 7-Eleven, and got one of the stacks of coconut pancakes I’ve been eyeing for a while…

On Saturday morning, we headed to Khlong Toei market, where I finally bought some of the rice crepes I've been eyeing for ages. What rice crepes are those, you ask? WELL. Near the entrance to the market, there is a row of women sitting on an elevated platform. They each have a large, round, hot griddle set up in front of them, and a piece of sticky dough gripped in one hand. They press the dough briefly against the griddle, kind of stamping it with a very thin, round crepe. The crepe cooks in seconds, and they scrape it up and add it to a pile, which they sell in plastic bags.

I was intrigued, because it's an operation I've only seen once before (near Victory Monument), and never on this scale. And it was a mystery to me what the crepes were used for, as I never saw them featured in Thai cuisine. After a great deal of searching online, I finally found an online video of the Khlong Toei market, where the narrator notes that they're making the crepes for roti sai mai, a Thai dessert of cotton candy wrapped in a thin (usually flavored) crepe. Here's a photo from the internet:

I wasn't really interested in having a roti sai mai, but I was interested in the crepes. I guess I just love wrapping things in other things, but tortilla and masa and pita are all relatively expensive here. 

Anyway, I decided to just buy a packet, which was still warm, and only cost 35 baht. As soon as we stepped away, I pulled off a thin piece of crepe and handed it to Roman to taste. He immediately made a face, and I was worried the crepe was super sweet and artificial tasting—but it turned out to just be chewy and a little bland. Roman thought it was a bust, but I sensed the potential. More on that later...

At the market, we also picked up egg noodles, ground duck and duck skin (on impulse), potatoes, limes, napa cabbage, wood ear mushrooms, king trumpet mushrooms, wing beans, baby corn, large pale blue and pale pink duck eggs and small speckled quail eggs, small cucumbers, morning glory, bread for french toast, some kind of sweet puffed rice snack, and a few apples.

Those wing beans, though! They were selling them for 60 baht (or around $2) a kilo, so I decided to just get a kilo...which was such a dumb idea! The lady handed me over a huge bag of them. So, back at home, I put my giant pot on the stove and boiled some water, then blanched and froze about 3/4 of the wing beans. It's hard to capture them, but there were so many:

Spatula pictured for scale. I guess I have to figure out what to do with blanched wing beans

For dinner on Saturday, I used the rice crepes for a kind of adapted moo shu duck. I sautéed the minced duck until it was brown, then added a ton of Napa cabbage and wood ear mushrooms. I pan fried six little quail eggs, and made a kind of hoisin-ish sauce. Meanwhile, I rendered some of the duck skins in the oven until they became like little duck chicharrones. I put out six of the rice crepes and we made our own little bundles.

I had been envisioning this dish since I'd started scheming about buying some of the little crepes, and I was pretty happy that it all turned out.

On Sunday, we chatted with friends and family back in the US, and walked around Chidlom Station, checking out some shops and the view of Khlong Saen Saep from this part of town.

We had a good lunch at the Central mall—tom yum soup with char siu on top:

Back at home, I had finally assembled the proper tools and ingredients to make our favorite brown butter chocolate chip cookies—a kitchen scale, a hand mixer, real brown sugar, and real vanilla. Although my first attempt at making this recipe in our poorly-equipped Bangkok kitchen let me down, I feel much more confident these will turn out. But...the dough has to sit in the fridge for at least 24 hours before we can find out for sure...