Back in Thailand!

Hey friends! I didn't blog at all during my last two months in the US, and now I've been in Thailand for a month. So I suppose I'm a bit behind. But there's no race going on here, so I'll just jump back in with a picture of my favorite Thai dish: SomTam!

SomTam (ส้มตํา) is called Papaya Salad in English. If you've ever eaten fresh papaya, you know that it is a vibrant orangish-pink color, but you don't see any of that here! This is because SomTam is made with green papaya, or papaya that has not yet ripened. The flesh, still a light green color, is grated into narrow strips that look a bit like noodles. It's made in a big wooden mortar and pestal, where all the ingredients are pounded and mixed together. This includes garlic, tomatoes, green beans, and peanuts, plus the four elements of salty, sweet, spicy, and sour. Thai chilies provide the spicy, lime juice the sour, a sugar cane paste the sweet, and fish sauce is usually the salty.

So last year in Thailand, fish sauce was the one animal product that I only gave a half-hearted effort not to eat. It's usually considered such an integral part of Thai cooking that it cannot be replaced without altering the dish's true taste. Sadly, I was also a bit too shy half the time to even try to order without it! Well, there's a student in the program I'm working with this year who is allergic to all seafood, including fish sauce. So it basically became my job to find delicious Thai food with no fish sauce - 100% vegan!

This very dish of SomTam you see here was my first try at ordering it without fish sauce. I said ไม่ไส่นํ้าปลาค่ะ ("mai sai naam bplaa" = please don't add fish sauce), and amazingly enough, the woman making it thought nothing of it! She just used salt instead, calling it SomTam Jay. Jay - เจ - more or less means vegetarian. So how did it taste? Fantastic! And only 20 Baht (about 66 cents)!

Here are two other random vegan eats in Thailand. Passion Fruit Juice...

... and Stir-Fried Noodles with Tofu & Veggies (ผัดซีอิ๊ว = Pad Siew):