Now that B is on the mend, I can get back to blogging about important things like food. I have to mention a couple of things we've eaten recently in case I forget. I just picked up a Thai and a Sichuan cookbook at the best English-language bookstore in Bangkok, but I'm pretty sure neither of these dishes will be in the cookbooks. My Thai favorites, som tam and tom yum, both are, but in the last couple days in Chiang Mai we ate a few unusual things that I don't know if we'll find again. One day we drove out to the national park just north of the city and ate in a bamboo hut by the reservoir there. We ordered as always the som tam (very very phet--hot papaya salad--soooo good!) and the tom yum (seafood hot and sour soup, phet as well of course) and the fried fish with garlic. Along comes a whole deep-fried fish topped with deep-fried strips of green matter (either Thai basil or kaffir lime leaves--for some reason we couldn't tell) and deep-fried pieces of garlic skin! Now, I eat about a head of garlic a day at home, and for all these years I've been tossing the garlic skin when I could have deep-fried it and had an absolute delicacy to enjoy!

Another day we ate in one of the noveau Thai restaurants which served some (reportedly) delicious mussels in a coconut and some lovely crab--these were of course eaten by my dining companions and not by me. In retaliation, I ordered the fried cashew salad which came with chilis, lime, salt, and green onions--the simplest idea ever, but absolutely the perfect thing to serve for a snack. Although we're cutting back on the spicy food for a day or two--the heartburn I had during my last session of speedwork on the treadmill was probably a sign that I should eat blander food instead of demanding everything maximally spicy at every meal. So today we had sticky rice with mango and coconut for a snack--BEST DESSERT EVER, every time.

Bangkok is supposedly one of the most exciting cities in the world, but we have reached the limit of our ability to take in newness, so today we are hanging out in malls.