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Mango season

2020-04-25T07:09:22+07:00

The fruit vendor at the market has five varieties of mango this time of year. Yesterday at the grocery store there were seven varieties on sale. My neighbor's mango tree is an early one; it flowered in December, I've watched from the balcony as the the fruits grew, and I saw them all get picked over the past two weeks.

So it was no surprise to see mango flavors on special at the ice cream shop.

This was a green mango sorbet with fish sauce, dried shrimp, and fried onion.

From the restaurant website, this mango namplawan sundae is "green mango sorbet ice cream with namprawan (Thai style sweet and spicy fruit dipping sauce), fried red onion and crispy shrimp."

I'd call it sweet, savory, a little sour, a little spicy. And a lot of fun to eat.

I wasn't expecting that

2020-04-16T07:08:05+07:00

You've seen, perhaps, the Devil barbecue potato chip in Thailand. I'd had the one in the silver packaging.

There's also a Devil flavor in a red bag. "Let me try this one too," I thought the other day.

I have to say, I wasn't expecting what I found inside. I've eaten a lot of potato chips, in a lot of different places. This was the first time to find not just flavor, but copious amounts of dried chili peppers together with the chips. Red Devil, indeed.

So many developments

2020-04-01T16:33:12+07:00

A lot has happened since my last post about a surprising "Chef's Signature" flavor.

That includes my purchase and careful happy hour tasting session of a Devil barbecue chip, retasting the signature salted egg and trying a new signature roasted chili flavor. I also discovered a "Sun Chips" spicy salted egg flavor. Is that right? Is this really a new flavor? Are there still Sun Chips? I recall that's what these were called 30 years ago. And now Lays has 25^th anniversary flavors. Seaweed gochujang, anyone?

Needless to say, that made for a busy March.

I've been limiting my time at the store, however. In lieu of leisurely afternoons spent in the Chips and Snacks aisle, I've been botanizing, reading, and writing.

Over the past 15 years I've assembled an eclectic (and superb—is there a word that conveys the joint meaning?) grass collection and I added to it this week with some new species and varieties. I found them on a sparsely-populated island in the Andaman Sea. I explored the island for over a week, finding many interesting grasses. Some were growing wild; one formed an oceanfront lawn. The color of unirrigated manilagrass lawns in the Thailand dry season is spectacular, ranging from a dull sandy color, to a neutral yellow, to a bright gold, depending on how the light hits it.

Of course I supply irrigation to the grasses in my collection during the dry season. So what I see at home are green leaves. But it is fun to see the grasses in the wild, too.

I haven't been to the store in a while, so I have great expectations for my next shopping trip. I've probably said this before, but it's an exciting time for potato chip flavors right now.

Kind of a weird deal

2020-02-17T16:15:09+07:00

You saw, perhaps, the serendipitous arrival (or was it discovery?) of two extraordinary new potato chip flavors last month. These were "Chef's Signature" flavors.

I was excited to find another flavor in this line. It is baked cheese with tamarind paste. "That's odd," I thought before trying them, "as I've never had such a dish in Thailand. What kind of flavor is this?"

It appears to be a flavor that no chef wanted to put their signature or photograph to. My tasting notes recorded them being a bit spicier than I would have expected for baked cheese.

"They're really good"

2020-01-20T08:14:08+07:00

I'd been in southern Thailand, doing the things one does there. Botanizing. Boat rides. Train rides. Eating lots of regional food like khua kling. And keeping my eyes open for the next new flavor of potato chips.

I usually see new flavors for the first time in the convenience stores of Bangkok. But last week, in what seems to have been a rapid nationwide release of two stunning new tastes, I found the khua kling curry pizza chips in a general store on Muk Island.

And then, right beside the khua kling, there was another new flavor—saengwa prawn salad. I ate most of both bags. But I did share some, and got immediate feedback. "Wow, they're good. They're really good!"

The golf section of the Business Mirror

2020-01-18T19:06:14+07:00

A friend sent me a link to the Business Mirror's Golf Section and said I should check it out. I did that, and found a picture of myself above a report about Nutranta's Best Practices seminar, where I spoke about a continuous improvement system for turfgrass.

The books I finished reading last year

2020-01-02T12:39:50+07:00

These are the books I finished reading in 2019. And notes about my favorites.

Ten Years in Japan by Joseph Grew. Grew was the US ambassador to Japan from 1932 until the war. I was fascinated by the diplomatic stories in the book, and I was surprised to find how much golf was in the book too. I wrote a blog post about that: A Golfers' Paradise.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
Midnight in Chernobyl by Adam Higginbotham. This was my favorite book of the year.
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford.
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddharta Mukherjee. This was my second favorite book of the year.
Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens.
Hicky's Bengal Gazette: The Untold Story of India's First Newspaper by Andrew Otis.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins. This was my third favorite book of the year.
Quichotte by Salman Rushdie.

In which my trophy collection increases

2019-10-30T17:19:30+07:00

I've been cutting back on the potato chips recently, and doing a bit of running. Last weekend I was up early on Sunday to join a large crowd in Surat Thani province for a 30 km run through the beautiful Khao Sok National Park.

I think everyone knows I don't run for the money or the trophies. Sure, I get medals at pretty much every race, and added a trophy this weekend, but I am running for the scenery and the fitness and the general enjoyment of such activity.

After almost five hours running, I was glad to be back. And then pleasantly surprised to see that I'd finished 9^th among men in the 30 km race.

A map, an intriguing new flavor, and a boat ride

2019-10-12T19:34:58+07:00

I made this map to show some of the places I've traveled to over the past few years. This is a test to see if it displays here.

In other news, when I arrived in Thailand on a recent trip, I found this new flavor of Lay's potato chip. Basil chicken, or pad kra pao gai.

I brought a bag of these to eat on short trip to Ko Kradan, where there is no pier and one disembarks from the longtail boat right onto the beach (or over the side and down the ladder into the water).

A tale of two cities told in three tastes

2019-08-27T12:25:01+07:00

Lay's Thailand continue their periodical release of new potato chip flavors. I was in Bangkok earlier this month and tried the crab curry flavor. I saw the extreme hot chili flavor and didn't bother trying it.

Then I went to Fukuoka and had some beef sushi.