what i'm eating

most great chefs will tell you you don't need much to make a decent meal -- fresh ingredients, a good knife and a heat source should be sufficient. in principle i agree, but in my experience, a comfortable environment is key to cooking. that doesn't have to mean a fancy, expensive environment. but one you feel happy working in, since, at its best, cooking is a creative endeavor. a real kitchen was one of my priorities when we were looking for a new place. having just left our old, hot, cramped little kitchen in favor of a modern one with counter space and a real oven, i have to say it makes all the difference.


for our first meal in our new apartment, i asked john what he was in the mood for and he mentioned mango salad with avocado. this is one of my favorite salads to make. it's colorful, the flavors are a little surprising together (especially here in thailand, where we eat lots of mangoes but rarely eat avocado), and it tastes and smells really good. serve this salad at any dinner party and i guarantee people will be raving about it!

but how do you build a meal around just one dish? there are different schools of thought on this, but i really like it when the different pieces of my meal compliment each other in one way or another. i wouldn't serve korean bulgogi with paella, for example, as they have few flavor elements in common, both have very aggressive (and very different) flavors and they're both heavy. too confusing! it's hard to enjoy either of them.

the mango salad john wanted me to make has strong citrus, onion and cilantro flavors in it. while i don't want to outright copy them in the rest of the meal, i want to connect them. one flavor that works well with the ones i already have is cumin. i don't know why it is, but cumin is really yummy with avocado and citrus flavors, and you see this combination in lots of mexican dishes. since i have some chicken in the fridge i don't want to waste, i'll marinate it in a mixture of lime juice, soy sauce, garlic, cumin and bit of sugar. really just a bit for its meat tenderizing properties, the mangoes are enough sweet for a meal! so if you want to try this as a vegetarian recipe, ditch the sugar.

although i'm hating carbs lately for their fat creating properties, i just can't deprive myself when i'm making a home cooked meal! we love rice here in asia, but i'm going to mix it up a bit by adding a little saffron. the saffron and the cumin will make this meal... assertive. no boring flavors here!

mango salad
1 ripe mango, cubed
1/2 ripe avocado, cubed
1 cup cherry or grape tomatoes, cut in half
2 tablespoons red onion, cut into long strips (the amount varies with the strength of the onion. no one likes a shy salad but it's no fun when the onions are burning your mouth, either)
1/2 bunch cilantro, roughly chopped
juice of 1/2 a lime
salt to taste

toss the mango, avocado, tomatoes, onion and cilantro with lime juice. add salt to taste. cover and refrigerate for an hour. this can be eaten immediately, but it tastes better once the flavors have had a chance to mix.

cumin chicken
2 whole chicken breasts, sliced in half as though you were butterflying them except that you will actually split them into two thinner breasts

marinade
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 white wine (you can skip this entirely)
1 tablespoon sugar
2 cloves garlic, crushed
juice of 1/2 of a lime
1/2 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon ground cumin

mix marinade together in a plastic bag. add chicken, seal the bag, squish it up to make sure all the meat is covered and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, preferably 4.

grill chicken over coals, bake in the oven or cook in a pan (the chicken breasts are thin, so get the pan really hot and cook for just a couple of minutes per side).

saffron rice
add a little salt and few threads of saffron to your rice while it's cooking, whether you make it on the stove or in a rice cooker.

what i'm reading

Welcome to the Working Week, Paul Vlitos

Letter writing has become, for most of us, a relic of a bygone age. With blogs and Facebook and the consequent broadcasting of one's private life, journal writing is probably in decline as well (is there anything we won't share anymore?). So too, I thought, had the novel or short story told through letters or journal entries, such as Alice Walker's The Color Purple or Alice Munro's A Wilderness Station.

But, literature adapts to the times. Instead of journal entries and letters, the contemporary epistolatory story writer has email. Welcome to the Working Week is a story about a guy trying to find himself after breaking up with his girlfriend, and it's told through a series of email conversations he has with his friends and family.

Clever, for sure. And at times pretty funny, too. But the problem with emails is that... they're just not letters. They are generally typed up and send off without much thought and they are augmented by text messages, instant chat and even real, live conversation. Read through a recent email conversation you've had with a friend. Is there a story there? Probably not.

Emails with recaps of whole evenings/weddings/weekends with the family (necessary to move the plot along since the reader would otherwise have no idea what happened outside of cyberworld) are hardly the norm. So Welcome to The Working Week feels forced and contrived.

On Friday at 12:30 Barney replied:

Well, you were on the table to demonstrate your Jagger dance. You'd just got everyone's attention when you went over and took all the drinsk with you. That was when you managed to whack Laura in the contact lens. So we were all looking for it and I thought you were too, but it turned out that you were looking for the slice of lemon peel you 'slipped' on, in order to prove you weren't drunk.

You were certainly claiming to be able to speak Japanese last night. You went off to find the management at one point in order to tell them we wanted another hour, and claimed you would negotiate a discount with your master of the language. Bit odd since the people at the desk weren't actually Japanese.

The book also employs another very contemporary habit of storytelling (thanks Seinfeld!). It talks about nothing, albeit in an entertaining way. For sure, there is a bit of a plot in there -- guy gets dumped by girlfriend, disastrously tries to win her back, then moves on. But the main character doesn't really change from start to finish. He and his friends just keep sending out those clever emails. And, like reading one of those email threads someone forwards you, it's just not that interesting after a while.

the new apartment...

rocks. it is such a great place! big, sunny, nicely furnished. our bedroom has huge floor to ceiling windows, and it's big enough that we fit our extra couch in, so now we have a little reading corner. and we have a gigantic wrap around balcony (will post pictures once it's organized enough to take any) and it has a comfortable, homey feeling that's difficult to pin to one attribute or another.

today was move-in day. we suffered a bit this morning as we invited a bunch of friends out to join us for our last night in chinatown and ended up at a cabaret, karaoke, and an all night snooker hall till 4 a.m. it was one of those mistakes you only realize clearly once you can't turn back.

fortunately, our maid and her family came and helped us today. buie has been working with us for about a year, and in that time we've built a really nice relationship with her. since i work from home, we spend a lot of time together. with all the traveling john does, i think i see her more than him.

this morning she brought her husband, two of her grown kids and one of their friends to move us. after a hot, tiring day, we all sat down and had a late lunch together and talked and laughed and had such a nice, comfortable time. i also saw a different side of buie -- the mom/boss side. usually she's deferential but in front of her kids, she's much more in charge.

coming from america, it's very strange to have a maid. back home i had cleaners, but they were just there to clean and usually were the ones giving me orders (such as, do not be here when i am cleaning, or please make sure to sort your laundry for me). buie takes care of us. she asks me every day what i want for lunch. she picks our dirty clothes up off the floor. she brings me special treats when i'm sick. this week she brought us some home-made isan satol, which is a really yummy, alchoholic rice-based beverage, just because john was asking her about it and mentioned that he'd love to try it (it is so good! like a rice wine cooler).

we could view this woman as our servant or employee, but frankly (for us at least) it's tough to see another human being solely in that manner. most americans can't jibe with the master/servant mentality. anyway, it's especially tough with buie, since she's really become our friend and part of our family.

the old apartment

here are a few pictures of the old apartment. new ones to be posted once we move in tomorrow!

first, the cistern. see, i was not joking. you can see the coconut shell, too. and that's also in the middle of our shower (i say that generously, as it's really a room with a toilet, showerhead and cistern all rolled into one).


and our tiny kitchen. this kitchen was a hell of a lot nicer than most we saw.



one of the bedrooms.


one of the many landings.



and our "energy center."

moving...

so, life has not been all that interesting lately. mostly bogged down with work and book proposals and the like. good stuff but nothing to write home about.

we are moving out of our chinatown shophouse, however, which may or may not be exciting news (depending on what else is going on in your life). we've been living here for about a year, in the chinatown district of bangkok. in many ways it is an amazing and wonderful place to live. lots of great food, very convenient, and wonderful neighbors. but it's also very loud and dirty, and our shophouse, although cool in many ways, is dark and not so modern. one of our toilets doesn't evne have a flusher. no joke. you have to scoop water from a clay cistern with a coconut shell.

and so, we've found a great new apartment in ploenchit, which is a very central part of the city. the new place is really wonderful. gigantic, 3 bedroom/3 bath with a wrap around balcony and lots of sunlight. oh, and a real western kitchen, which is a considerable step up from our closet like, leaky, two burner, cold water room in the old place.

packing has not been so fun, but we are spoiled and lucky to have someone who helps out around the house. she keeps asking me why i have so much stuff!

expanding the scope

i started this blog about a month ago to focus on wedding planning. but since then i've realized that my life is full of lots of other things. maybe not so interesting to the rest of the world, but hey, i like talking about them. ;-)
and so, i'm expanding the scope of the blog, and working on a new name. i'll be blogging about:

• living overseas
• being a reporter
• books i'm reading
• a book i might be working on (more to come soon)
  
• yummy food
• and, of course, wedding planning

yeah, it's a small target audience...

themes and places

my friend megan tells me every wedding has a theme these days. she had a creative, fitting theme in mind for her commitment ceremony. secretly, i thought themes were silly. just another outlet for women to expend obsessive energy. but then we were talking about our wedding last night, and considering adding some sort of asian theme to it. not like tacky chinese food takeout containers and all that. something elegant. anyway, i remembered a lovely shop in paris with a chinoiserie theme, Laduree.

unfortunately i could not find any pictures of the interior, but will post when i do (also they have great mail order items and the most amazing macaroons i've ever had).
i think the theme, with bits of bamboo and celadon green, will go great with the venue i am hoping for, the gamble mansion in boston:
what makes the chinoiserie style so interesting is, it's not really quite "chinese" despite how the word is translated. really it's about old europe's perception of all things asian; a romanticization and a misinterpretation. it's how i thought asia looked before i got here. still, despite it's controversial roots, it's a beautiful design theme.

a bit of the conversation, or, why women plan weddings

ME: honey, how many guests do you want to have at the wedding?
FH: i don't know. not too many. between 100 and 200.
ME: well, depending on how big your guest list is, here's are some possible places in boston.
FH: that's so boring, isn't it? let's have a guerilla wedding. we can invite all our friends to a crazy location and get married before the security guards kick us out.
ME: any preferences on food?
FH: yeah. good food, for sure. and lots of food. but i hate wedding cakes. we should have some banana bread. it's important that our wedding be classy and elegant, but simple and casual at the same time.
ME: music?
FH: do you think we can find a rock cover band, like the kind that used to play on the jersey shore when i was in high school? and we have to have the chicken dance.
ME: what do you want to wear to your wedding?
FH: something nice. either a suit or a tux.
ME: what about decorations, how do you want the place to look?
FH: i guess everyone has flowers at weddings these days. we don't need them, right?

making some decisions

tuesday was a holiday here in thailand, so we took i took it as a free day and slept in, went to the mall to buy books, sat around at a cafe reading, ate sushi and ice cream and drank a bottle and a half of wine when we got home. during/between all that we finally had a real conversation about our wedding. yay! lots of stuff is still up in the air, but we made some concrete decisions:

• live band
• full open bar
• possible asian theme wedding
• in boston

still lots of open issues. for example, where we're doing this thing. neither of us is really keen on a hotel wedding, but is it possible to find a venue in downtown boston that's big enough but isn't a hotel?