Stomachs on legs are proud to present

How appropriate. Over the weekend, Hock and I went to Bankara Ramen on Sukhumvit Soi 39, on a tip from Austin. And had their ramen with lots and lots of raw garlic.



It was tastey but a little pricey for a bowl of noodles by Bangkok standards. There was a queue of Japanese people obviously waiting for their fix of ramen, with lots and lots of garlic and scallions too.




I had read about Bankara in the Guru magazine, it is said to be the first ramen outlet of this particular chain outside of Japan....is Thailand being food colonised by Japan? With Thai-style sushi now turning up at night markets in outer lying provinces, is this the death of Thai food as we know it? Or the beginning of yet another era of bastardisation?

Haven't seen any Thai-style ramen turning up at street vendors, but its early days yet

Anyway, I still recommend Bankara and would go again. Don't do what I did and put five cloves on garlic in your soup and spend the rest of the day breathing death. Hock also warns against getting funky and ordering the ramen with creamy soup. Just keep it real and go with the original soup or miso. The "sauce applying" looked good, the menu is vaguely amusing on a japanglish tip.



Ra Men Bankara, Sukhumvit 39 (Inside the small arcade called ‘The Manor’ which is on the right hand side about 300 metre from the Sukhumvit entrance. Parking available in the premises. Daily 11am-11pm. T: 02-662-5162-3.

I have been wanting to go to a phat thai place in Bangkok, which my Thai friend told me about some long time ago,,, where they put big shrimps and wrap the noodle in a thin omelette.

I forgot which friend told me and didn't remember the name or location.

With my blurry memory, I googled around and decided it was probably Thipsamai.

I wrote it down before I was headed to Bangkok to see off my Thai friend who was departing to Germany to study.

After seeing my friend off at Svannaphumi airport with a bunch of her relatives, I took a ride with her cousin and her husband.

Although it was getting late, they offered to drive around a bit to show me the Royal Palace lit up at night,,, which we couldn't get near because the roads were blocked because of people protesting against Thaksin.

Then, the wife said she was hungry and suggested we'd stop for a bite.

They parked the car right in front of the very Thipsamai!

I didn't ask them to take me there, what a sweet coincidence.

We had their "superb" phat thai, their signature dish that is cooked with shrimp and shrimp roe and comes wrapped in a thin omelette.

Honestly, I wanted to like it, but I don't do great with shrimp roe.

I still ate it and I can imagine that people are hooked with this signature dish. It was a lot sweeter than phat thai I had elsewhere. You can also table-cook it as you please with all the regular garnish of lime juice, chili powder, crashed peanuts, sugar and so forth.

Maybe I will give it a second try to their "regular" phat thai with no shrimp roe on my next occasion.

The husband had a courtesy to tell me AFTER we finished the meal the story of what people call "pratuu pii", a door of ghost, around the corner from Thipsamai.

According to him, there used to be a prison, and death sentences (then done by shooting, now done by lethal injection) were made, throwing the expired convicts out of the door.

I also found another version of the story, though, that when many people died of cholera, dead bodies were piled up in the nearby temple Wat Siisaket, and the door to bring in the bodies was called pratuu pii.

Anyone knows which story is correct?

Thipsamai
5.30 p.m. - 1.30 a.m.
313 Mahachai Rd. Samranrat, Pranakorn, Bangkok 10200
02-221-6280

This is an adaption of a recipe that was part of a Cook-Do sauce advert in Orange Page magazine. Unfortunately for the advertisers, instead of the pre-prepared chinjaorousu Cook-Do sauce I made a 'spicy chinese sauce-base' recipe from the book '15 min Easy Okazu'.

Recipe magazines can be hit & miss, let alone the recipes in advertisements in magazines, but this is damn good. I'll be making this again for sure. If it had a song it would be The Race by Yello. Your mouth gets this all-over tingly spicy warmth. Every ingredient really shines, from the sweetish pumpkin, to the savoury onion, to the fresh shishitougarashi peppers. The original recipe has thin sliced pork in it but you don't need it at all (EDIT: I made the dish again last night and I now think the pork would take it next-level from being a plain pumpkin stir-fry). If you want to add the small pieces of thin sliced pork, add them at the same time as the onion (50 grams per person).

Shishitougarashi are a small sweetish green Japanese pepper - maybe a bit like the Spanish 'pimientos de padron' but a bit smaller. Similarly to pimientos de padron, they taste awesome char-grilled or broiled until floppy, and you don't need to peel: just eat whole. Apart from the little stalk bit.

Spicy Chinese Sauce-Base
1 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup oyster sauce
2 tbsp Tobanjiang or other chilli bean sauce (I used 1 tbsp each Tobanjiang and a really hot Korean BBQ sauce)
1/4 cup sake
3 big cloves garlic finely chopped
3 tbsp finely chopped fresh ginger or that pre-prepared 'oroshi' ginger paste that comes in pottles
1 tbsp oil

Sauté the garlic and ginger in the oil, taking care not to burn, until they start to give off a good aroma.

Add everything else and mix around for one or two more minutes on the heat.

Kabocha+Shishitou Stir fry
The following ingredients are for one person, so just multiply to feed more.

A small handful of kabocha or butternut squash segments (skin still on), roughly 8mm thin
A small handful of thin sliced pork bits
4-5 shishitougarashi (substitute with green bell pepper in bite size pieces or pimientos de padron)
1 onion sliced in strips/ribbons (basically in half and then thin, vertical slices).
sesame oil & olive oil
2 tbsp spicy chinese cooking sauce (above)

Heat a tablespoon of sesame oil and saute the pumpkin segments, making sure to flip over, until cooked through. Add the green peppers and give them a stir.
New learnings from having made the dish a couple of times: Take the pumpkin and peppers out of the pan.
Add a spoon of olive or other oil plus the onion and pork, and cook until the onion is soft. Put the pumpkin & peppers back in and add two tablespoons of the Spicy Chinese Sauce-base (be careful with this, if you add too much it will just taste overpoweringly like soy sauce), toss to coat and sauté for 30 seconds to a minute, check whether you need to add a bit more sauce or maybe some shichimi spice or chilli flakes, and then serve piping hot.

There aren't many things that can make brown rice taste this good.

One thing I never got round to eating in Japan was 'dry curry'. I've been wanting to try this particular recipe for a while, partly because the topping of a melting hot-water soaked 'onsen' (hotspring) egg looked so appealing in the book. We didn't really nail the egg - the white should be just barely congealed. Here are some interesting tips on cooking onsen tamago. I guess if you lay the room-temperature egg in just-boiled still water just as your rice starts cooking in a different pot, you might time it perfectly. Another error I would address regarding the photo above, is the rice. I think it looks nicer if you spread the rice a bit wider so you can see it in a ring of white around the outside. And the parsley should be chopped more über-finely too.

Mince on rice, what could be wrong with that mate. My father used to specialise in spag-bol when I was a kid, and I'm just coming back round to the comfort-power of mince.

Wafuu (japanese style) Dry Curry from '15-min Easy Delicious Okazu'.
(Serves 2)

Enough warm white short grain rice to satisfy.
150 g mince (I used a pork-beef mix)
An onion and a small carrot diced finely.
A capsicum (red or green pepper) peeled roughly and diced finely.
2 tsp hot curry powder
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp soy
1 tbsp sake
1 tbsp butter
2 very soft 'onsen' eggs
Finely chopped parsley

Cook the chopped onion in the butter gently until softened. Add the other veges and when these too are softened, turn the heat up and add the mince. When the mince has started to get clumpy, add the curry powder, sugar, soy and sake and stir fry until most of the liquid has evaporated. Check the seasonings - you might want to add a touch more curry powder. Top your warm rice with the curry-mince, sprinkle with chopped parsley and then scoop those eggs in a puddle on top.

On the Sukhumvit Soi, next to Emporium, Sukhumvit Soi 24 I think it is, there is a izakaya which is not particularly tasty but exceedingly cheap. It's on the right hand side of the Soi, near the beginning of the street and on the 3rd floor of an extremely eccentric building...If you climb the odd staircase and pass by the Hong Kong-style hotpot joint you'll know you're on the right track.....follow the potato heads



Inside you'll find a large booze selection and laminated menu with usual izakaya suspects....



great wall adornments and decor....


and games where you can gamble on the size of your portion...play the "beef game", roll the dice and let fate decide if you get above or below the standard portion...fun times


The food photos below attest more to the skill of Hock and his N95 than the actual quality of the food





For example this sushi roll is far nastier than it looks


Of course the main indulgence here is not the cripsy rice cakes, but the lashings of cheap sake and beer to be had alongside. Food is really rather incidental here.






(makeshift food lighting enhancements)

Which was confirmed when I woke up on Sunday morning after a night at the Potato and remember that I had gotten drunk enough and so enamoured with the sake enough to have purchased their signature potato sake set. I recall making statements along the lines of "this sake set speaks to something deep inside my soul"

My sister once enquired loudly at a family get together whether it would be possible for us all to do something together aside from eat.

Dead silence....stunned looks...finally someone ventured....."like what?"

We've always eaten together, a lot, it's what we do. I like it but I can't attest to this latest and unlikely sociological study on the linkages between family meals and reduced drug and alcohol use.

"Want to bond with your broody teenagers? Try eating dinner with them five times a week. A poll has found this keeps them off drugs and alcohol - and the teens also enjoy it.

The survey reaffirmed previous studies that found teenagers who ate dinner as a family five or more times a week were less likely to use drugs, smoke, or drink alcohol than peers who ate with their families twice a week or less."

Another duff study, I reckon, like the whole wine and heart disease study, which is largely unsubstantiated due to the fact that wine drinkers tend to belong to higher socio-economic groups and thus lead healthier lives...

I don't believe that children that eat with their parents more are less likely to use drugs, they're probably just less likely to get really out of it just before dinner

When we go out to the Kushitei izakaya in Duesseldorf, I always get a nantoka-itame (something-or-other stirfry) from the special menu. They usually have a really yummy one made from veges and pork with chopped spicy 'zasai' pickles, which are the slightly milder but still hot Japanese version of Sichuanese zha cai, crunchy pickled mustard stem.

Itameru is the Japanese verb, which the Japanese wikipedia page likens to sautéing. However, the origins of '炒め物' (stir-fried dishes) in Japan, are obviously Chinese, and according to oh-so reliable wikipedia on their Japanese cuisine page, these "mock-Chinese stirfries" (?) have been a staple in Japanese homes and canteens since the '50s.

Somehow when I think of the western version of the Chinese stirfry, I think of a very hot, very energetic frying method with plenty of oil. Clearly in China there are many different ways to fry and braise food in a pan, and the Japanese itameru method derives from the slower end of that scale, which might be why the web page compares it to sautéing.

However apparently elements of a good French sauté are that the food is not crowded into the pan, without absorbing the fat or stewing in its own juices, and at no cost must moisture steam or stew the food.
On the other hand making itamemono usually does involve a big mess of food and flavours, and although the end result is usually not mushy, it is quite common to pour a little stock or sweetened soy sauce in at the end to braise/coat the food, and to jumble/marinate the flavours together a little more.

When I think of a nice itameta dish I think of a casual, homey dish, at least 2 ingredients cut up in in small pieces, still a bit crunchy and not too oily, flavoursome with an ingredient like garlic chives or small pieces of pork, or sesame seeds, or sugar and soy. And of course, perfect with rice.

The following dish is quite mild so I recommend to serve it with some really good kimchi cabbage and crunchy kimchi cucumbers. To really get your pan-asian (con)fusion going on.

肉にら炒め
Nikunira-Itame (meat & chinese chives stirfry)
(adapted from the cookbook '15分ラクうまおかず by Shufunotomo (housewife's friend) press)

150 g thinly sliced pork (as you would use for shabushabu or such)
One packet of Nira (chinese garlic chives) (about 30g?), cut into 4 cm lengths (substitute with bärlauch if unavailable)
Half a smallish bag of moyashi/bean sprouts
25 g carrot, peeled and cut into 4 cm long, 3 mm thin juliennes

A [salt, pepper, 2 tsp flour, 1 tsp olive oil]
2 tbsp sesame oil
1/3 tsp organic vege stock powder or kombu kelp stock powder
1 tsp oyster sauce
2 tsp soy sauce

Roughly chop the pork into 4-5 cm lengths and mix it with A using your hands.



Heat the frying pan, warm the sesame oil and stir fry the pork at a high heat. When it begins to colour, add the carrots. You might like to move the pork to one side of the pan and move that side of the pan off the heat, so that the carrots can absorb the juices and cook, but the pork doesn't get overcooked. When the carrots begin to soften add the beansprouts and nira/chinese garlic chives and stir fry it all about.

When it all seems pretty much cooked to your preference, add the soup stock, oyster sauce and soy, turn off the heat and mix it all about until well coated, then add salt & pepper to taste. Serve with hot rice and plenty of funky kimchi.