TEN BIRDSEYE CHILIES IN MY TOM YAM SOUP!!!

Tom yam soup is one of my favorites, and, with only three days left to eat here in Penang they will be filled up with a short list of my favorites among the 30 dishes I have eaten here. 

For those of you who have not eaten tom yam soup it is hot (spicy) and slightly sour.  The sour flavor comes from fish sauce and lime juice. This soup knows no international boundaries.  It was born in Thailand; some may claim Laos as well.  You can easily find it in Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, and Indonesia.   It is a popular item on Asian restaurant menus in the US.  Although I can order it there, it just seems to taste better here.

On the second spoonful of my soup I bit into what I thought was a small piece of green bean.  It turned out to be  a birds eye chili.  The birds eye chili on the Scoville Scale, which measures the amount of heat produced from capsaicin, the stuff that makes peppers taste hot, rates them in a category above cayenne pepper and below the habanero.

I don’t know about Mr. Scoville, but if you have ten of them in your soup there seems to be some sort of math you have to apply to get the total heat coming out of that bowl.  By the way, the only reason you see nine in the photo is that the missing one was the one I chomped on.  The bowl of soup was pricey.  At almost ten dollars, they have been charging a dollar a chili.

I actually started my eating countdown last night by returning to my favorite place for crispy duck.  At four dollars for a quarter of a duck, this is one of the most delicious bargains in Penang.

I have eaten 30 hawker dishes all totataled.  I looked over my notes and see that I forgot to tell you about the last two.  Number 29, Chee Cheong Chook needs a little explanation.  Chee Cheong means pork intestines.  Chook means porridge.  The bowl of porridge is just like a congee you would get in China.  Rice is cooked until it turns to a watery mush.  The Chee Cheong tops the porridge in the form of bits of crunchy pork innards, slices of roast pork and chopped chives.  A surprise of boiled pieces of tripe submerged in the porridge awaits the unwary eater .  I pushed mine to the side of the bowl and finished everything else.

   

Here is what the Chee Cheong Chook vendor cart looks like.

Number 30, Satay, hardly needs an introduction.  You see five pork and five chicken skewers in the photo served with that tasty peanut dipping sauce.

And, that rounds out the 30 different foods I have tried here in Penang.  Looking back only two out of the thirty were 'clinkers'.  Even those two were OK.  They just lacked flavor and texture for my taste.

I am creating a menu for each of the countries I have visited.  The one for Thailand is posted below.  Tomorrow I’ll add Laos and Penang.  Penang will include both hawker foods and some Nyonya cuisine,if for no other reason than we all will get to say Otak-Otak.

The purpose of the menus is to encourage our dinner guests to pick out things they would like to eat when they come over.  It will also encourage me to keep preparing recipes I have learned instead of lapsing back into that comfortable stir fry of chicken or pork with vegetables that I seem to make every time when I pull out the wok.

I’ll probably add another entree or two to the menu below after I get home and spend some more time going through my recipes, but it will look something like this:

CHEZ GREENBRIER THAI MENU

APPETIZERS

            PAPAYA SALAD (SOM TAM)

            DEEP FRIED SPRING ROLL (PO PIET)

            FRESH SRING ROLL

SOUP

            SPICY AND SOUR SOUP WITH SHRIMP (TOM YUM)

            CHICKEN I COCONUT MILK (TOM KHA GAI)

            MILD SOUP WITH BEAN CURD

ENTREES

            GREEN CURRY WITH CHICKEN

            MASSAMAN CURRY WITH CHICKIEN

            RED CURRY WITH CHICKEN AND COCONUT MILK

  PENANG CURRY WITH CHICKEN

            FRIED NOODLE THAI STYLE (PAD THAI)

            THICK RICE NOODLES (PAD SEE UW)

            FRIED RICE WITH SHRIMP OR CHICKEN

            CHICKEN WITH CASHEW NUT

            SHRIMP WITH CURRY POWDER

VEGETABLES

            SWEET AND SOUR MIX (PRIEW WAN)

DESSERT

            STICKY RICE WITH MANGO

            FRIED BANANA WITH ICE CREAM

            PUMPKIN COOKED IN SYRUP

I return this coming Friday the 15th.  Reservations at Chez Greenbrier accepted beginning on the 18th.

As we say down home, y'all come.