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Hometown gal Juliet Feibel found herself spending a big chunk of time in Thailand and Vietnam, from 1999 to 2002, while her husband Ken MacLean, an anthropology grad student (now a professor), worked on his dissertation.
She fell in love with the cuisine of Southeast Asia, from “the deep-fried chili peppers, stuffed with ground pork and breaded, of which I’ve been dreaming for years,” to the fried peanuts, the “mysterious” cilantro cookies and coconut-roll cookies, saarai thawt grawp (deep-fried seaweed), mit mai (fried cheese and potatoes with pickles), and Burmese-style khao soi muu noodles in coconut milk and curry that “sing equally of tang and heat,” as she says, among many other delights.
Last July the Feibel-MacLean's, now with two young kids (Camilla, 5, and Ascher, 8) in tow, returned to Thailand for something more than a vacation. They enjoyed a whopping six-month residency in the bustling city of Chiang Mai (which boasts many American expatriates), and adventures at fireworks festivals, massage academies, amulet stalls, elephant sanctuaries, and new schools.
But for Feibel, it was truly the allure of the region’s unique food that brought her back. “There was nothing in particular we needed to do in Southeast Asia,” she avers. “We came back because we wanted to show it to the kids, and we wanted to eat noodles.”
Feibel’s thoroughly engaging blog, “Peanut Butter Sticky Rice,” is a chronicle of eating freshly candied cashews, tamarind leaf salad with “ a texture I want to describe as like al dente ferns, generously salted and dressed with fried broad beans and crispy onions,” and so much more, with dandy photographs and snappy reviews of each dish.
I spoke with the culinary voyager herself this month, as her long adventure was coming to a bittersweet conclusion.
You describe the challenges of getting your kids to undergo a complete change in diet from Western to Thai food. There were a lot of refusals to eat, and plenty of tears, but eventually they came around – or did they?
I would be doing a disservice to mothers everywhere if I told you my kids came around and happily eat Thai food every day. No. Their favorite restaurant here serves cheeseburgers and pizza. They still have not eaten any curry, red, green, or yellow. At home, Ken and I serve them a lot of Thai food, which they ate quite cooperatively. It’s in Thailand that they decided not to like Thai food. We go through a dozen bananas a week at home in the US, and they wouldn’t eat bananas here. “They taste different,” they’d whine. Ken and I wanted to kill them because, yeah, they taste different. They’re better.
When we first arrived, they ate nothing but fried chicken and rice. I mean, nothing. My kids are usually good vegetable eaters, but they wouldn’t touch anything green, or even fruit. I began administering vitamin syrup to them because I was convinced they were in danger of getting malnourished. We’re still trying to understand that eating—or, really, not eating—was a way of exercising control for them in a wildly new environment. But we were so excited about all the foods we’d get to eat that it was maddening for us to have them turn all of our meals into family struggle sessions.
When they began to eat other things—noodle soups were first, and then fruit—I could see that their eating habits were essentially the same as they were at home, just with different foods. Ascher has always been content to eat the same thing day after day after day. Here, instead of peanut-butter-and-honey-on-whole-wheat-bread for lunch, it was fried rice with pork. Day in, day out, lunch and dinner and breakfast if he could, fried rice with pork. Sometimes, he’ll go wild and order it with slices of Chinese sausages instead of pork. He became fixated on pomelo, which is like a very tough and sweet grapefruit. Day in, day out, trays and trays of pomelo (you buy the segments already peeled on Styrofoam trays from the market). Camilla is a much pickier and unpredictable eater, notorious for asking for a dish and then turning her nose up at it when it’s set down in front of her. She does the same thing here, and she’s still driving us to distraction with it. But to her credit, she got the point of Thai fruit. While Ascher is clinging to his trays of pomelo, she’s the one with mango juice down the front of her shirt and panting for another mangosteen.
What are mangosteens? You mention them in your blog, along with lamyais, dragonfruit, and rambutans.
Mangosteens are God’s most delicious fruit. They are a round, dark purple fruit, topped off with a little green cap. You twist them in half, like you wrench the lid off of a jar, to expose an inner globe of white, juicy little segments. That’s the part you eat. You know when chewing gum is “fruit flavored”? Imagine that flavor, but entirely natural and delicious, and that’s what mangosteens taste like. You will occasionally see mangosteens for sale in Asian markets in the US, but unless they’re very expensive, still glossy purple (and not at all brown or leathery) and tender if you prod them, don’t bother. They’ll be dried up and gone to seed already inside, and they will break your heart.
Dragonfruit is found most often in Vietnam, but it’s being cultivated here in Thailand now. It looks like a hot pink football, with leathery green horns shooting off of its pink rind. The interior is not at all what you’d expect, though: it has a tender white flesh flecked through with tiny black seeds. It resembles a kiwi in texture and taste, if not in color. The Thai dragonfruits look the same on the outside, but weirdly enough, have a magenta interior. I don’t think they’re anywhere as good as the Vietnamese; they’re mushier and not as sweet.
Lamyai is Thai for longans. Longans are about the size of a very large cherry, a light brown color, and grow in thick bunches on trees. You can find a longan tree just about anywhere in northern Thailand. The longan itself has a thin, crisp shell of a rind, which protects the tender translucent fruit inside. They are fantastically sweet, and you often have to battle swarms of sugar ants over them. They have a smooth black little pit that’s enormously fun to spit. Longans, like a lot of Thai fruit, go into what I think of as the “social fruit” category. Because it’s fairly messy and demands a degree of attention, what with the peeling and the pits, it’s best consumed sitting around with friends, so you can talk as you eat it.
Rambutans are another small fruit grown in thick bunches, with an even more translucent interior. But their red shell is thicker, and is covered with tendrils of hair. You can gently crack the shell of a longan to expose the fruit, but you have to wrench the shell off of a rambutan. They’re weird and delicious, and more than a little obscene in their appearance. Both canned longans and rambutans are available in the US, and are quite good.
Why is the infamous fruit “durian…. especially in combination with beer… too dangerous and intoxicating a fruit to be eaten when one is at the mercy of tuk-tuk [mini-taxi] drivers”?
Any Asian culture at all influenced by China classifies foods as “hot” or “cold,” which has nothing to do with their actual temperature. It’s instead of measure of their qi value, or what we could crudely call their effect on our metabolism. Some food heats you up, some cool you down, and the ways you control your heat through food is an important part of Chinese medicine. This is a huge topic, but suffice it to say that durian is an extremely hot food, and so is beer. Ideally, any food as hot as durian should be balanced out by a cold one; otherwise, you risk endangering your health. Whenever we publicly drank beer while eating durian, total strangers would advise us that the combination put us at risk of heart attacks, at the very least. I am not a follower of Chinese medicine, but durian and beer together have wild effects. If good durian were widely available in the US, I think the DEA might have something to say about that combination.
How does the Thai food in Thailand compare to a Thai restaurant we might patronize in St. Louis?
Thai restaurants in the U.S. tend to serve a steady stream of Bangkok fare, standard Central Thai dishes with an enormous Chinese influence. In fact, you could make the case that outside of the standard red and green curries, most of the food you get in Thai restaurants is actually Chinese in one way or another, and that includes chicken satay, which is called “grilled chicken Chinese style” here. Thai food here is far more funky. It tastes and smells more strongly of fish and shrimp pastes, and, depending on where you are, is more sour and pungent and sweet. It also includes a lot of animal products that you’re just not going to find on an American restaurant menu, like coagulated pigs’ blood and liver.
You worked in the kitchen of a khao soi (a Burmese-style noodle dish) restaurant. What made you decide to do that? Can you cook khao soi at home now?
I worked there for three long mornings, between five a.m. and noon-ish, but have made myself a nuisance in their kitchen far longer than that. I wanted to do this because I wasn’t completely satisfied with the recipe we had for khao soi and because I’m just nosy and wanted to find out what it was like. Right now, I know how to cook khao soi for one hundred and fifty. I will have to scale down the recipe.
-You went gaga over Bánh mì pâté sandwiches and rich, sweet coffee in Vietnam; Malaysian food (“sour with tamarind, sweet with shallots, rich in seafood and fruit, tangy with coconut, and balanced out by the simple flavors of classic southern Chinese home-cooking”); and kanom wong pumpkin/rice-flour donuts so good you “almost wept” over them near Burma. You really make people want to follow in your culinary footsteps with the blog. Were you excited to return to the Southeast to try these old favorites and new favorites? Did you enjoy watching your kids enjoy new tastes?
Mostly, the kids whined about new tastes, and we did not have the family culinary adventure we’d hoped for. To be fair, the kanom wong were a hit with them, as were the Malaysian rice balls. As for me, I was thrilled to return to all these foods. Absolutely everything lived up to my memory of how good it was.
-You didn’t hesitate to try crickets, grasshoppers, grubs, and mystery meats of all kinds. You’re a regular Tony Bourdain. Does any food give you pause?
Heavens, yes. There a lot of Thai country dishes I won’t eat, like cockroach paste, which I am assured is made of rice field cockroaches, supposedly cleaner than city cockroaches. Jellied pig fetus is a serious delicacy in Northern Vietnam, although it has a much fancier name. My friend Kate choked that down once at a village festival; I could not possibly. But really, it’s the processed foods that are microwaved and sold at 7-11 that scare me the most, like shrimp cocktail-waffle sandwiches and sweet tuna steamed buns that have no expiration date at all.
Finally, why is your blog called “Peanut Butter Sticky Rice”?
When we first arrived, and the kids were living on nothing but air, we fed them peanut butter sandwiches—which they still like for breakfast. Then they graduated to sticky rice. It seemed like a good way to describe our hybrid lifestyle here.
