Stomachs on legs are proud to present

So when you go to Shake Shack and stand in line for 30 mins to an hour and finally order your order hamburger, shroom burger, and frozen custard.... and before the staff hand you over the vibrating electronic device that "shakes" when your order is ready....ummmm.......you might want to try doing a little shake yourself a la Homer Simpson. If for instance, you wiggle yourself and your fat continues to wobble say five to ten seconds after you've stopped exerting yourself......well you might want to rethink your lunch choice, just saying...you know...for your health and vitality.



I'm not being mean, just honest, really.

If your wobbles are minor to non-existent, if say you are a Japanese tourist, go for it. Get the lot, guzzle down a shake burger, fries and custard. Why not try a shake shack shake too while your at it. I'm sure the shakes are great.

If however, your not quite hideously obese but could stand to loose a few squishy bits, as in my case, and if you promise to atone big time, then my advice is skip the fries, (they're just fried potatoes you know, you can live without them) order a 'shroom burger and share a small tub of frozen custard. Hock's shake burger is just a burger in my view, but the 'shroom burger was crispy mushroomy, cheesy and good. The frozen custard was dense and delicious. Follow with brisk walks all over NYC.

Oh Yes, mushrooms.

I've been eating a lot of those too.
I've also been eating a lot of bamboo shoots.
'Tis a rainy season!

Hoo mok het (mushroom steamed in bamboo leaves with condiments) and neem het (mushroom sausage... sticky rice is mixed in and cooked in banana leaves as well):
I brought muu deang (red pork) from the city.
I try to bring one protein dish when I drive out to the farm.

Kaeng het (mushroom soup) and lots of lots of steamed bamboo shoots (and of course, lots of lots of sticky rice):

Yam het, young banana bud salad with canned mackerel in tomato sauce (another protein food I tend to bring from the city), chargrilled peegaa (very funky giant pod that grows on trees) and home-made banana chips:

This is the peegaa tree:
Very funky.
I don't know yet what it is exactly, probably one of the Inga species...

Other than the protein stuff I brought, they are all from the woods and around the house (oh, and except cooking oil and condiments such as salt, nampla and gapi).

Once you start eating really local, pretty soon you'd realize you keep eating the same thing again and again and again, like we eat mushrooms and mushrooms and bamboos and mushrooms and bamboos and mushrooms during the rainy season.

Why not? It kind of makes it simple. Not much of "what to eat today" dilemma one tends to get in the city with too many choices.

A lot of people don't realise this but Thailand too is in the clutches of a obesity and diabetes epidemic, well Bangkok is anyway. Which doesn't surprise me in the least given what appears to be a national obsession with the types of sweets and junk food normally reserved in the "West" for pimply teen-aged mall rat white trash, you know the kind of food that Brittney is seen eating at most of her late night gas station runs...except worse. The other day I had to reorder an ice coffee after the woman at the counter added sweetened condensed milk to it, even the untampered ice coffee was sweet enough to give me headache.

Anyway, it seems that it was only a matter of time that Thais turned health conscious so I was rather heartened to find a new vendor on Sukhumvit Soi 11 today in amongst what is normally just a street full of processed sausage stick vendors. I headed down there today to get a chicken noodle fix and right next door was a new vendor with a glass case full of different mushroom varieties. He had a queue. People were lining up for his healthful, meatless mushroom broth or kaeng hed, so I decided to give it a whirl

It was damn good, spicy, bitter, sour and mushroomy





As modern Thai cooking takes yet another turn for the better, bring on the health crisis I say

Mushroom Soup Vendor
Outside of the Ambassador Hotel (usually)
Sukhumvit Soi 11
Bangkok

Location: Lecture Theatre at Australian National University

Event: Annual Australian Anthropology Society Conference

Lecture: Keynote Address "Beyond Economic and Ecological Standardization" or informally known as "Anna and the Matsutake Mushroom - A Love Story"

Speaker: Anna Tsing

We, the audience were informed of the hetrogenity of global neoliberal capitalism as demonstrated by the matsutake mushroom. Following in the footsteps of other food writer/ historians/ journalists (Michael Pollan, Theodore Bestor - Global Sushi Guy - and the guy who wrote about oysters as proxy for a story of ecological collapse) Tsing instead used the mushroom to speak of global economic processes, tracing the burgeoning global trade of the matsutake from ethnic Southeast Asia foragers (Laos, Cambodian, Hmong) in the pine forests of Oregon to the market places of Japan. The mushroom trade in this case symbolised a whole lot of things from an opportunity for social outcasts to maintain community ties, a resistance to the homogenising tendencies of global trade and state forest regulation. The mushroom was variously described as resisting, reshaping, symbolising etc. The terms "mushroom as actor" was thrown in at one point.

Most in the audience sat spellbound by this somewhat famous American academic, except for of course the rebellious geeks up the back. When one raised their hand and commented "yeah but its just a mushroom" quiet gaffaws, tinged with academic superiority broke out. A friend whispered to me "mushrooms aren't actors....people are". Of course she was right. The apparent fetishism of this mushroom was only worsened when this slide was projected...... well as, you may have guessed several snide remarks ensued



Of course being anthropologists, the crowd blossomed with whispers about the phallic like qualities of this mushroom that was apparently "penetrating the global markets".....

"Mushroom as porn actor" was my childish contribution...you see we learn a lot at university.

I often think food tastes better standing up.

Not sure if the term 立ち食い (Tachigui or standing eating) applies when you are eating at home, I think it is more about fast food, noodle shops on the street and so on. Will have to ask my friend Mami who I know is also a fan of the occasional standing-in-the-kitchen-with-a-glass-of-wine meal.

Here is Great Snack For Eating Standing Up #1 (please do contribute your own)

Shiitake mushrooms grilled in the oven with a few drops of balsamico. Eat while still very hot with a little squirt of Kyupi Japanese mayo while gazing out the window.

Warning: eating standing up is supposedly not good for obtaining full nutrition from food, according to a macrobiotic chef
I once took cooking classes from. But I still like it.

As some of you know, my supermarket has a problem with suffocating mushrooms in styrofoam and clingwrap.... Now it seems that not only are they content to mistreat mushrooms they are also anti-semitic

Today I found this clearly racist mushroom labelling...."jew's ear" ???? WTF



It's a black cloud mushroom in my books.....

As the similarly named Jew fish has been plagued in controversy in the States ( wiki reports that in 2001 the American Fisheries Society renamed the jewfish (Epinephelus itajara) the goliath grouper out of concern for the potential offensiveness of the name). I feel that something should be done about this mushroom too....if I was Jewish I would definitely say something, I would go up to the manager dangle the mushroom by my ear and angrily demand to know if the mushroom in any way resembled my ear....

The other day at my Thai lesson the teacher told me that I am a sa-nee-plai-jaa-wak.

She didn't know how to explain it so she pointed at her dictionary

it said

"an attractive woman due to her fine culinary arts"

I'd like to think I'm attractive for more than just my cooking, but I'll take any compliment that's on offer.

I think it's telling that the Thai language has a specific word for such an attractiveness

Anyway, so later that day I went home and as if to prove her point I made really yummy mushroom gyoza.


Mushroom Gyoza

Packet of little flour dumpling wrappers

Mushrooms - you can use any you like but I use
dried shitake 2 (soaked in hot water and then squeezed out and thinly sliced)
dried black ear fungus mushrooms (same as above)
fresh shitake thinly sliced
oyster mushrooms thinly sliced

shredded cabbage
minced garlic 1 - 2 cloves
minced ginger good table spoon
4 garlic chives chopped
beansprouts

oil for frying
season with a couple of chugs of oyster sauce
or soy sauce or both
and/ or shaoxing wine
sesame oil

fry until done and then cool




put a teaspoon in the middle of the dumpling and fold over, seal edges with a lightly beaten egg mixture

you can keep them in the fridge, covered with a moistened paper towel or cook straight away

To cook

put gulp of oil in the bottom of a cold non-stick pan along with a quarter of a cup of water (or enough water to just cover the bottom of the pan and steam the dumpling)

put dumplings in the pan and turn on the heat and cover. As the water evaporates it steams the dumplings, then the left over oil frys them nice and crispy on the bottom

take them out when you hear them sizzling and serve with chinese vinegar, this yummy mustard sauce

Mustard Sauce
1/2 table spoon of djion mustard
water down to a soy sauce like consistency
add a spalsh of rice vinegar
sugar to taste
good number of drops of sesame oil






They are good with beer

Afterwards I had left over filling and egg so I made a mushroom omelette too

Not all food is good, some can make you very sick or even kill you. Globalised trade basically means pooh in the food can have far reaching implications. Mushrooms grow in pooh. In 2000 an estimated 2.1 million people died from diarrhea !!!

Perhaps what the world needs now is not another celebrity chef, but a food safety hero

Introducing food safety's biggest NERD

And his repetoire of food safety covers including:

"Who Left The Food Out: Who, Who Who Who Who"
"Fifty Ways to Eat Your Oysters"
"Don't Get Sicky With It"

Speaking of mushrooms,

They sure do get the shrink wrap treatment here in Cologne too (Enoki and Shiitake being the subjects of most abuse), but aren't these ones in the local Basic
bio supermarkt pretty. Guess if I want yellow mushrooms I should really be waiting for those nice golden chanterelles - pfifferlinge
- to come in season.
And if you pay through the nose for hands-down best organic blush-pink South African oyster mushrooms (below), do all those miles really leave less of an eco footprint?

At my local supermarket in Bangkok, I am presented with the choice between imported expensive products with horrendous food miles or local Thai products suffocating in polystyrene and clingwrap. I usually go with the Thai stuff, but I am constantly shocked by the amount of packaging my Thai supermarket "Villa" (or Willa in Thai) believes is required by a humble lemon. Not that most western products are packaged any better - however I have definitely noticed that Thai people have a penchant for suffocating not only vegetables but most foods in cling wrap. This tends to occur more in upscale places where a general obsessive compulsion to appear "hygienic" and therefore "modern" prevails. (Perhaps a story for another time).

Anyway, it's annoying especially when they do it to mushrooms. The other day I bought some cute Thai grown button mushrooms that were much fresher than their imported counterparts but yet again suffocated in plastic.

I bemoaned this while pulling the mushrooms out of their plastic and pondering my ecological footprint in the various countries I have lived in. As opposed to interpretting it as an environmental crime as I did, Hock instead annouced with a grave face, "it is a crime the way they treat mushrooms in this country".

Crimes against mushrooms aside, I know that the freshest, cheapest and most ecological way for me to acquire my food would be to go to the local fresh market each day but I'll be screwed if I'm going to get up at 5 am and no, unlike most expats we don't have a maid.

One thing that always annoys me about the whole slow food organic whole food wankery (aside from the price and the obvious social justice issues proceeding from that) is that the proponents never seem to understand the full implications of their food politics on the housework demands for women....who the hell do they think will end up having to shop, prepare and cook all this slow food? As much as I care for the wellbeing of my mushrooms, i care more about my time and my career. I know that I could solve this by hiring a cheap maid from the countryside to go to the market for me, but this again is not free from moral considerations. So my ethical dialemma as it stands is that if I continue to purchase clingwrapped mushrooms I inevitably send the market signal that the "modern expat women likes her mushrooms clingwrapped". Which obviously I don't (and no there is no point in complaining to the Thai staff, in case you were wondering. As a general rule Thai staff tend to see it as their job to protect the company and their bosses from the unreasonable demands of unscrupulous customers and tend to be culturally averse to making suggestions to superiors in order to avoid making the devasting mistake of having the boss loose face).

At this point in time I just don't have time to seek out alternatives and this is the annoying thing about slow food or any other eco-political food movement, most ways that you look at it tends to equal one nil the environment versus women's status. I wish it didn't have to be this way but right now in the stakes of Maytel versus mushroom, Maytel wins - sorry mushroom I just don't have the time to care.



Suffocating Mushrooms in a Nature Setting