Spicy Desserts

You may recall in a recent post, I was discussing El Nido, Philippines. In that post, Not My Idea of Paradise, I talked about the villains in various movies who wanted to get away to a tropical paradise. But they never do. Instead, they get their just desserts. That seems wholly unfair. Desserts are good, why should the bad guys get good stuff?

However, in this case, those outlaws and evildoers are not getting the pleasant kinds of desserts. They are getting just ones. And desserts are not nearly so sweet when they are just. At least, that's how I'm taking it. Also, they aren't even getting any kinds of desserts. We pronounce the phrase as "just desserts", but it is actually spelled "just deserts." Like the bad guys are receiving very arid landscapes. You might be wondering how terrain without rain relates to the proper punishment being doled out to those who wrong others. It comes from a now archaic meaning of the word desert, which means deserve, but as a noun. So the villains are getting just what they deserve.

I suppose the heroes could also get just deserts, but we tend to only focus on the justness of the desserts served to the bad guys. But what does this have to do with anything? I'll get to that now.

Wat Thinnakorn Nimit (I'll get to it in a nimute, get it?)

In Thailand, you can buy lots of desserts. A particular favorite of ours is mango with sticky rice. But today, we bought a new one, and it wasn't super sweet, nor all that just. It's spicy. We are getting our spicy desserts. We bought some krang krong. Specifically, we got krang krong grob, which is crispy krang krong. But what is it? It's dough that is deep-fried and then coated in some sweet dessert like sauce. Except the sweet dessert like sauce includes chili. Because, you know, Thailand. So after the first piece for each of us, Alrica generously declared that I could have the rest of it myself. Isn't she sweet? Like a dessert should be?

Krong Krang

We are staying in Nonthaburi, Thailand. And we are having a very nice time. The food is amazing, and a regular meal costs about two dollars. If you splurge you could find meals for five dollars. If you go into Bangkok to some of the high end tourist areas you can find meals for ten dollars. But locally, we are generally in the two dollar per meal territory.

Check out the sheet on our bed. Making a knockoff product by knocking off the r.

Mostly this week we have been getting a lot of work done. But we did enjoy a couple of outings. On Wednesday, we walked to the open air market and the Nonthaburi Pier. It was interesting. At the point we entered the market, all the stalls were selling vegetables. Only vegetables! No fruit for you. Well, wait, there is one exception: Limes. There are limes in the vegetable stalls, but only limes. I suspect it is because these are limes that are used like you would use a vegetable when you cook.

No shortage of chili peppers

But as we walked through the market and got to other sections, now there were all stalls selling fruits, but no vegetables. (And no limes. At least not that type of lime.) And in another part of the market we found stalls selling only flowers, no fruit, no vegetables. There is no overlap between these sort of stalls. If you sell fruit, don't you dare put a vegetable or a flower on your stall! That would just confuse the whole works. I should clarify. These are fruits and vegetables not as a botanist would define them, but as a chef would. Like tomatoes and chili peppers, those are both fruits in the botanical definition. But you only found them in the vegetable section. By the way, if you wonder why I don't know if there were limes in the fruit section, well, just because something is green doesn't mean it's a lime. For example, tangerines.

Orange on the inside, green on the outside

Walking back from the market, we stopped at the Wat Thinnakorn Nimit, pictured above. The word Wat means temple. And the cool thin(g) about this wat is how thin it is. Maybe that's why it's called Thinnakorn. Like a skinny unicorn. Probably not, because the th in Thai is pronounced like an aspirated t rather than the th sound of English. So this would sound more like Teenakohrn in Thai.

The people of Pompeii may feel uneasy, but what a delicious way to go!

I have a question. Check out the picture above. I took this at a Dairy Queen here in Nonthaburi. Dairy Queen is very famous for its blizzards. But now they have moved into other natural disasters. Here they are advertising volcanoes. Is that a DQ Thailand thing? Or is that happening in other countries too?

Check this out. We stopped at a 7-11. First, you have to understand, 7-11 is a big deal in Southeast Asia. It is somehow central to the whole structure of society. And you can get so many more things at a 7-11 around here than you can at home. But along with our purchase, we got these adorable stamps.

I'm familiar with Hello Kitty. Not so much with Butterbear.

I looked it up online. It is some sort of promotional thing here in Thailand. You can use your stamps almost like cash. My three stamps are each worth 1 baht meaning, if I hold on to them I could have a discount of about 10 US cents on my next 7-11 purchase. But the big thing to do for the Thai is to collect lots of them. There are apparently books you can get where you paste your stamps and if you get enough of them, you can turn them for merchandise. You could get a Butterbear Rice Cooker or a set of Hello Kitty Tupperware. I imagine I am just going to forget I own them and they will be thrown away at some point.

I know I shouldn't do that. Because if I do, poor Hello Kitty and Butterbear aren't getting fair treatment. Or dare I say, they aren't getting their just deserts. Or their spicy desserts.