​Durian season is almost upon us and I am ready.  I am one of very few foreigners in Thailand that has loves durian.  This affection was not immediate for when I first arrived in Thailand I found the smell of durian both overwhelming and repugnant.  I can place a specific time when I began enjoying durian but I know I have loved it at least the last 5 years.  

I recently had a chance to tour a Durian Farm in Isaan.  You can view the tour below:

The Smell

It's quite strange, durian smells quite bad ( I used to compare it to the smell of dog poop) but now that I like it I love the smell.  But the smell has not changed, it is still banned in public places such as hotels, trains, even taxis. So just my perception changed..  I love durian! 

The Fruit

There are three main varieties of durian, Monthong, Chanee and Kanyao.  They all have there own distinctive smell and flavor.  My personal favorite is the monthong, which admittedly is of mild flavor.  The monthong seems to be quite popular with Thais as well.  I will be honest though, I still can't tell them apart! 

The Season

Durian starts being harvested in April and continues through August.  There are seasonal variation due to the area within Thailand that the durian is grown and the variety of durian.  Currently, there are durian on the streets but not monthong yet. I'll be waiting for it in May. ​

​Eating Roti on the streets of Bangkok can be a warm tasty treat.  Roti is a fried flat bread that is often served with many different fillings.  The various roti vendors have different optional fillings such as fresh eggs, nutella, peanut butter, sugary condensed milk, and various syrups.  My favorite is banana and egg, topped with condensed milk and a bit of sugar.   

The Roti vendors are simple carts that crop up all over Thailand.  So I recommend that you try one while walking off a great spicy Thai meal.

​Thai hotpot dinners can be found many places on the street and in restaurants throughout Thailand. All you really need is a electric hotpot with variable temperature that will fit on your dinner table. With the right pot, Thai Suki is a quick and easy meal to make at home too. Basically, Thai Suki is a just a pot of boiling water that the right mix of herbs, vegetables and meats.  
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The hot pot base is made real easy because there are herb sets that contain lemongrass, ginger, lime, chilli and kaffir lime leaves.  This spice set is really the base for several Thai soups, like tum zaap and tum yum. These items are chunked and placed into the pot along with a medium onion, also chunked.  Bring water in pot to boil.  with the exception of the onion these herbs are not for eating but only provide flavor.

There are many types of Thai Suki sauces available in Thailand.  They are all fairly tasty.  I suggest just trying any. I like to add lime and garlic to my sauce before using it for my Suki.

Really any type of tasty meats will do, including pork, chicken, beef and seafood. They should be chopped in bite sized pieces and placed on a plate waiting to be cooked in the pot. I personally like pork and you can easily buy pork thinly sliced just for the hotpot. ​

The most common vegetables used in the hotpots are cabbage, celery, corn on the cob, and various types of mushrooms.  Be creative, any vegetable you enjoy in soups will do.

Place all the meat and vegetables on plates on the table adjacent to the hotpot.  Bring the base discussed above to a boil and add the vegetables and meat based on desire.  Be creative.  The boiling base will cook the meat and vegetables quickly. With chopsticks, remove the cooked items and dip into your sauce.  Be careful for the food is very HOT!  but very delicious.  ​

​Mama noodles are sour/spicy instant noodles found for sale everywhere in Thailand. They can be a quick tasty snack to hold you over until the next meal. BUT they can be quick healthy meal with very little effort. 

Being 'instant noodles', Mama noodles are cooked with very little effort. Just add a cup of boiling water from your kettle, mix in the flavor packets and let stand for a minute or two and they are ready to eat. However, add some chopped fresh vegetables like red onion, tomatoes, carrots, Chinese celery and a half a can of tuna and toss well. Bam! You have a great fresh noodle salad. 

Alternative ingredients: Any leftover meat you may have in your fridge, chopped. Also, most vegetables you like in other salads would also taste great with sour and spiciness of the mama flavor. 

​I finally know what to do with the remaining rice stuck to the bottom of the rice cooker pot after making rice for dinner.  As we all do, you place water in the pot and let the pot stand until the rice loosens from the pot.  I used to throw this rice away, then clean the pot.  Last night, I thought it already looked close to jok so I drained the rice of the excess water.  Added about a cup of water and put the pot back on the burner. Brought it to a boil then simmer. You can also add any leftover rice from the meal you may have. 

While simmering, I placed a half table spoon of pork powder, a splash of soy sauce, and some leftover browned ground pork (really, any chopped meat) from the fridge and simmer until thickened.  When thickened I threw in a half a medium sized red onion, simmered only for another minute or two just get the onion to sweat a little.  Placed in covered container in the fridge for the morning. Finished! 

In the morning, take out of fridge, place in bowl and microwave on high for 1 to 2 minutes.  Add vinegar and/or chilli to taste.  Ready to eat!  

​In my travels in Isan I found that moot daeng kai is considered quite a delicacy.  Moot Daeng are fairly large red ants that live in the leaves of trees and also their bite is quite painful.  This makes the process of collecting the ant eggs very interesting.  

The locals place a net at the end of a long bamboo pole and walk through jungle looking for the moot daeng nests.  The nests are scooped up from high in the trees and placed in a basket. The basket is full of ants, ant eggs and leaves of the trees. Once there is a healthy supply of ants and eggs in the basket they are placed in a bucket with water. To separate the ants from the eggs, the leaves and branches are pulled out of the mix, bringing a healthy amount of ants with them.  Then a string is dangled in the water and the ants hold on to the string and are removed from the bucket.  This takes a bit of effort and the person removing the ants are bitten and it hurts.  But the effort is rewarded with a sizable amount of delicious ant eggs ready to be cooked in various ways.  

I have two different dishes with moot daeng, Larb Moot Daeng and boiled and salted.  Both were delicious! 

​I developed this post to help Travelers coming to Thailand enjoy the fantastic food here. To help foreigners order a tasty and pleasurable Thai food on the streets of Thailand, I developed the list below of the most common and tasty foods found on the streets and in the small restaurants found all over Thailand.  In each description, I have given the English equivalent of the Thai word for each food and a brief description. 

As I advised in an earlier post, I would suggest any visiting Westerner not used to eating spicy foods to use one of the following two phrases (based upon your preference) when ordering food on the streets:

• "my pet", meaning "not spicy, and
• "pet nit noy", meaning "a little bit spicy".

Keep in mind that the street vendors all are all different, they differ in the spices they use in each of the dishes as well as differ in quality.  As a foreigner, the hardest part about identifying the right vendor is that their signs are mostly in Thai. Generally, you have to look at the foods in the cart and inspect the food being prepared and try to identify. The best way to pick a restaurant is to go to ones that are packed with Thai people, they always know the best tasting food. I recommend that you use the information below and be bold and try as much as you can in the time you are in Thailand! 

Common street food - The savory foods below can be found nearly everywhere on the street.    

• Somtum Thai (shredded and pounded papaya with fish sauce, chillies, garlic, palm sugar, lime juice, dried shrimps and peanuts - a halved tomato or two and a few chopped green beans. However, there are a number of varieties of som tum)
• Meat on a stick (ping) is as common as somtum, being found everywhere on the streets of Thailand. Many types meats can found depending on the vendor, including pork (moo ping), chicken (gai ping), beef (neua ping). There are many varieties. Pick the sticks that look interesting and try. Most of the ‘meat’ sticks are served with a tasty and spicy sauce.
• Satay is another type of meat stick, very tasty but not as many spices.
• Khao mun gai (chicken and rice) - you can ask for 'sai lued' or jellied chicken blood
• Padthai (fried noodles with sprouts and prawn) 
• Hoi tod (crispy eggy mussel or oyster pancakes)
• Khao kha moo (meltingly tender braised pork leg with gravy)
• Jok moo (rice porridge with pork and raw to medium cooked egg)
• Gai yaang (grilled chicken served with a sweet and spicy sauce)
• Trio of gai yaang, som tom and khao niew (grilled chicken with spicy papaya salad and sticky rice)
• Kaew Moo Yan (grilled pork neck served with nam jim jaew sauce which is a tamerine larb mixture of flavors)

​Rice - there are three main ways to order rice in Thailand:

• Khao soi (steamed rice) - served everywhere. The tastiest rice is jasmine type rice but it is hard to tell what type of rice a street restaurant is serving. 
• Khao niew (sticky rice) - mostly served in small plastic bags and really should be eaten with your fingers. 
• Khao pad (fried rice) - fried rice can be prepared with a variety of meats such as pork (moo), chicken (gai), and prawn (goon) and a variety of flavors such as tum yum and green curry (gang keaw yan). Example: Tum yum khao pad goon 

Yum dishes - spicy salads with a dressing made mainly of lime juice, fish sauce, sugar and of course, chillies and served with rice. 

• Yum khai Dow (Spicy fried egg salad and fresh vegetables)
• Yum pla duk fu (Crispy fish cloud with green mango)
• Yum pak leum (mix of fresh vegetables)
• Yum vensen (spicy salad made with glass noodle) 

Larb dishes - similar to yum dishes but a roasted ground rice and a bit of tamarind is added, here is a few:

• Larb Moo (savory mix of cooked ground pork and shallots in a tangy gravy, with ground rice. The gravy is made with lime and fish sauce)
• Nam tok moo (similar to larb moo but grilled pork is used) 
• Larb moo vensen (as above but mixed with glass noodles) 
• Larb pla duk (same as above but with catfish)
• Larb Khai (made with chicken)

Curries - Thai curries are rich in flavor and traditionally very spicy, having a lot of chilies.  Thai curry flavor varies from regions within Thailand.  Most Thai curries contain chilies, garlic, and coconut milk, as well as “blue ginger". All curries are served with steamed rice.

• Gaeng kaew yan (green curry) - Getting its color from green chilies, this can be one of the spiciest. The dish usually contains eggplant and either chicken or pork. 
• Gaeng Phet (red curry) - Getting its intense red color from red chilies, this dish is also very spicy.  This type of curry seems to be the most versatile and found with a variety of meats and vegetables.
• Gaeng Karee (yellow curry) - This curry gets is intense yellow curry mostly comes from the heavy use of tumeric.  it is mostly found on the streets with chicken and seafood (crab).
• Masaman and Penang curries come from outside Thailand but still can be found in many street vendors and the Thais have taken them on and gave their own distinctive flavors from Thai cooking. Both are brownish red in color and are rich in flavor from coconut milk and a host of other spices. 

Soups – Thai soups are incredibly flavorful and found in a huge variety as you travel to various areas throughout Thailand.  Here are just a few:

• Tum zap - clear broth that is both tangy and very spicy - usually served with pork ribs, mushrooms, tomoatoes, red onion 
• Jim jum (Isaan style hotpot - served with heated (usually charcoal) pot with a variety of raw meats, fresh vegetables and raw egg - you place the ingreadients into the pot, let cook and eat. Served with a tangy sauce) 
• Gang Som Cha-am Khai (orange curry soup with prawns and chopped cha-am (local vegetable) and egg fried then chopped into squares and added to the soup) 
• Tum yum (clear broth that is both tangy and very spicy)
• Tum yum goon (similar to the yum um above with added chilly paste in the broth. It can have milk or coconut milk added as well)
• Nam tok (noodle soup flavored with pig or cow blood)

Noodle Soups - The word for noodle soup in Thai is “kuai tiao” and is found with a variety of noodles such as:

• yen ta fo (neon-red glass noodles with tofu), 
• ban mee (thin egg noodles often served with wontons), 
• suki (bean thread noodles, egg, cabbage and seafood or meat) 
• kuai tiao ruea (“boat noodles” in a spiced, blood-enriched broth with offal), 
• Sen lek (thin rice noodle)
• Sen yai (wide rice noodle)
• Wun sen (glass noodle)
• Sen mee (fine round rice noodle)

Noodle soups can be ordered haeng (“dry”) or nam (“wet” with soup broth). Haeng soups are usually served with the broth on the side.

Putting the soup names together with the noodle types is critical in getting what type of soups you want on the street. For example, one of my favorite is "tum yum moo ban mee nam" which is tum yum broth with pork and egg noodle. 

Deserts 
•    Khao niew mamuang (mango sticky rice)
•    Khanom krok (custardy coconut confections) 
•    Kluay kaek (deep-fried bananas in a coconut batter)
•    Nam Kang Sai (coconut milk with a variety of toppings and served with chipped ice)

Tum Zap is a common soup found on the street and in many Thai Restaurants throughout Thailand.  The soup is sour with lime juice and can be quite spicy with chili.  On the street it is often with pork rib and various vegetables.  Quite delicious!