Stomachs on legs are proud to present

is possibly my favourite Indonesian dish



It's a complete and healthy meal in one. This one had boiled egg, blanched kangkong and bean sprouts, rice cakes, potato, crispy green beans, tempeh, tofu and a lightly kaffir flavoured peanut sauce. Other Indonesian dishes tend to rely heavily on the presence of tasty sambals to "beef" up the flavour. And while I love sambals, if the sambals on offer are not good your whole meal is jeopardised. Of course you can also add sambal to this.

Here's my five cents attempting to spice up this blog a bit with my not so spicy beige food review.


It's easy to go vegetarian in Chiang Mai, thanks to several veggie-friendly places like Pun Pun and Khun Churn.


Unlike Pun Pun that closes around 6:30pm, Khun Churn is open from breakfast through dinner, and is conveniently located off the popular Nimanhamin Road.


While their dinner offerings are still of great value, most entrees within 60-80 baht range, their best value is the lunch buffet. The price went up from 65 baht two years ago to 80 baht as of today, but is still a good value.


For the price of 80 baht a person, they offer all-you-can-eat buffet featuring a big salad section with three dressings to choose from, a big jar of brown rice, boiled veggies with Thai dips, three-four different kinds of spicy and non-spicy soups, four-five pan-fried entrees, kanom jiin or khao soi, Thai dessert, and all-you-can-drink herbal beverage. You can eat as much as or as little as you want, which is also the great thing about the buffet.


The place is vastly popular with a mix of Thai and non-Thai crowds. Like my friend szephing says, it is indeed a Chiang Mai staple. You can check out some of their dinner entree pictures on szephing's blog. All my pictures here are from lunch buffet.

For a restaurant of this scale, we can't expect everything to be organic,,, as a matter of fact once I inquired where their veggies are coming from sometime ago, they told me it's from talat muang mai, the Chaing Mai's biggest vegetable market, most of them conventionally grown in bulk. But they do sell what they claim to be organically grown oranges, so, at least they are aware of those things.


If you prefer to go vegan, you have to watch out a bit here, because this place is rather มังสะวิรัติ (mang sa wi rat) that eggs are sometimes included in the dish, and not strictly เจ (jae). Indeed you have so many choices and you can always ask the friendly staff if you want to make sure.

You'll be welcomed by this sign.
They only refer to beverage and meat in both Thai and English, but their pictogram also suggests smoking and dogs are not welcomed either... I wonder if the dogs are part of the meat and smoking part of the beverage? Just kidding.


Khun Churn
Soi 17 (they moved from their old location at Soi 7), Nimanhamin Road
Lunch buffet from 11am to 2:30pm
Dinner 5-10pm
Closed every 16th of the month

I’m not too down with mould – the stuff on French cheeses sometimes looks a lot like strains I’ve encountered at the back of fridges or at the bottom of shower curtains. By comparison, the blue streaks in gorgonzola look positively clinical –an astringent shade of mould, like toilet cleaner, blurred at the edges as if with a paint brush. Not festering, wet and splotchy.

I’m quite into fermented beans and some fermented fish products though, so I wouldn’t say I’m against partially decomposed food. I’ve grown to enjoy the whole melted rounds of goat’s cheese that come atop salads in Germany: the same cheese that I used to think tasted like vomit due to the pungency and lingering acidity in the back of the throat.

The taste for super-funky foodstuffs seems to be something that can be cultivated, rather like the moulds themselves. Maybe my taste buds are simply dimming. Maybe at 70 I’ll be eating bowls of candied dried fish sprinkled with fermented natto-beans for breakfast, like cereal.

But I am still challenged by the small cheese shop in the centre of town that specialises in French cheeses, with that sock-like smell that wafts out when you pass the front door, and the multi-coloured, botanical garden of moulds in the window.

When we were in Barcelona in November, I found that Spanish cheeses suit my timid yet adventurous palate very well. There are lots of raw milk and goat’s milk cheeses in Spain, and a lot of interesting textures, from the curd-like pliancy of the breast-shaped Tetilla, to chewy and crumbly aged caciocavallo or manchego. The Cabrales blue cheese is not as intense as some cheese writers make out, its enicillium cabralensis spores cultivated in humid caves.

I had read of one Spanish food commentator’s favourite cheese being Torta di Casar, a ewe’s milk cheese only 7% of which is exported abroad. I bought one from the cheese section of the supermarket under El Corte Ingles for 17 euros. The rind was nut brown and in its centre lichen-like white splotches were starting to form with, even more disturbingly, moist rust-coloured edges. I imagine the centre as being semi-liquid and fetid smelling.

So I did not eat it in Barcelona, instead wrapping it well and carrying it home to Germany in my hand luggage, to share with some friends who I knew enjoyed the whiffier side of life. We thought to serve it with crackers, but worrying that this would be too intense, decided instead to serve it in the manner of a delicious salad we’d eaten at Barcelona’s Bar Mut (picture above).

There, a smear of melted goat’s cheese (torta di cabra) spread on the plate lurked at the bottom of a refreshing salad of spinach, warmed walnuts, cherry tomatoes and fresh figs, balancing out the pungent cheese perfectly. It was very enjoyable to dig out little bits of hidden cheese with each forkful of leaves.

The improvised home version turned out to be just as good as Bar Mut’s rendition. I highly recommend using this ‘hidden smelly treasure’ salad technique next time you have a ripe cheese you aren’t sure what to do with.

The Torta di Casar was not liquid inside as I had expected, though very soft, so we softened it further under the grill for just a few seconds. The taste was funky enough to make a good counterpoint with the salad, to which we added a honey-lemon dressing and dried figs in place of fresh.

This was not a scary cheese, despite its florid casing: nutty and smooth with a round pungent flavour, almost reminiscent of fish sauce. As everybody finished their salads and began digging into the cheese with spoons and spreading it on crackers, I realised that Torta di Casar is best eaten by itself. Let me rephrase that: it is best eaten by oneself.

Muttering that they should not fill themselves up on cheese before I served the soup, I whisked the last crumbs of cheese away. It's hard to imagine coveting a Vieux Boulogne so, but who knows? As my age ripens, hopefully my hang ups will soften like ewe's milk curds in a warm, dark place.



Good things: tetilla cheese with 'bacalao' cod products and dark beer.

Have you noticed since the global economic crisis how magazines and op-eds in lifestyle sections of web pages and other glossies have begun re-spinning the activities of poor people into the new "it" thing, so staying in is the new going out, hillbilly is the new hipster (note to plaid wearers) and locally brewed beer is the new champagne.

So picnics are the new brunch. Who said? Me.....why spend $50 bucks in NYC or more on a flashy brunch when you can sit in the park in Brooklyn, possibly get arrested for drinking a beer in public and eat hotdogs, broccoli rabe and mozzarella sandwiches, jamaican meat pies and drink organic cola and beer.









The best spot in the park, next to the public loos naturally (or "comfort station" as it was so prudishly named). You can even fall asleep in the sun on the grass, something you can't do at a fancy schmancy restaurant. Other people's children are far less annoying in a park.



Here's our hillbilly/hipster picnic



What comes next I wonder? Will Polish be the new French or Spanish? Polyester the new cotton? Fingers the new cutlery? Poor the new rich? Once again I find myself at the forefront of cutting edge trends. Lucky me.

I like every other English speaking media aware person on the planet am currently obsessed with Mad Men. Yes the story line is good, intriguing, but Hock and I are more obsessed with the props, the wardrobes and the food, and gasp, the glassware.

Mid-century furniture has been hip for sometime now, with eames chairs and the like fetching in the thousands, yet to make a serious come back is 1950s food.

But I'm doing my bit.

I made for the first time in my life today, a proper caesar salad. I ate today for the first time in my life a proper caesar salad and I'm glad to report it was delightful, moorish and easy. In fact it's so satisfyingly simple it's hard to imagine that this was the greatest salad of its time, but like most things its simplicity is key to its greatness.

I found the recipe here at a site simply called "No anchovies in caesar", a single web page with an excerpt and recipe from Julia Child's Kitchen book, which explains why the kerfuffle.

One of my early remembrances of restaurant life was going to Tijuana in 1925 or 1926 with my parents, who were wildly excited that they should finally lunch at Caesar's restaurant. Tijuana, just south of the Mexican border from San Diego, was flourishing then, in the prohibition era. People came down from the Los Angeles area in droves to eat in the restaurants; they drank forbidden beer and cocktails as they toured the bars of the town; they strolled in the flowered patio of Agua Caliente listening to the marimba band, and they gambled wickedly at the casino. Word spread about Tijuana and the good life, and about Caesar Cardini's restaurant, and about Caesar's salad.

My parents, of course, ordered the salad. Caesar himself rolled the big cart up to the table, tossed the romaine in a great wooden bowl, and I wish I could say I remember his every move, but I don't. The only thing I see again clearly is the eggs. I can see him break 2 eggs over that romaine and roll them in, the greens going all creamy as the eggs flowed over them. Two eggs in a salad? Two one-minute coddled eggs? And garlic-flavored croutons, and grated Parmesan cheese? It was a sensation from coast to coast, and there were even rumblings of its success in Europe.

How could a mere salad cause such emotion? But, one remembers, that was way back in 1924, when Caesar Cardini invented it, and it was only in the early twenties that refrigerated transcontinental transportation came into being. Before then, when produce was out of season in the rest of the country, there was no greenery to be had. Before then, too, salads were considered rather exotic, definitely foreign, probably Bolshevist, and, anyway, food only for sissies.

I transported all the ingredients to the table and made it a la Julia's instructions. Hock reprimanded my poor salad tossing technique. I nearly forgot to take a photo. We nearly licked our plates clean.