Thai Food, Cell Phones, and Intentional Relationships

Before I continue my previous post, I need to interrupt my train of thought with a food post.  After all, I am on vacation..so bear with me.

I love Thai food.  I really do.  Unfortunately, I live in Vancouver where most of the Thai restaurants are owned by guys named Ming Chen from Hong Kong.  Furthermore, the restaurants are decorated with the obligatory Thai elephants, gaudy gold trimmings, incessant incense and other Buddhist temple paraphernalia.  In Singapore, the mecca for all South East Asian cuisine, everything is stripped down to what is important–the women…just kidding.  Its the food.  While there are ridiculously decorated restaurants here, that is because the owners have bad taste not because they are trying to distract you from the bad taste in your mouth.  In Singapore (Thailand is only a $50 bus ride away), the Thai food is quite delicious and authentic.

With every visit, I always go dine at one particular Thai restaurant called, Patara Fine Thai Cuisine.  My grandparents and I always come here because it is right across the street from their place and its wheel chair accessible for my G-pa.  Despite the convenience factor and that fact that this restaurant is ridiculously overpriced, it is the straight goods bolstered with attentive service and a refined ambiance.

This place is so high end that even the toothpicks come in these little envelopes (see above picture).  Personally, I rather have the cheaper prices and they can just keep their little brown envelopes.  O, well…

This meal is the first meal my grandparents and I are having together this year.  They always over order because they like to try a bit of everything and their eyes are bigger than their stomachs.  I must apologize ahead of time for the photos of the food.  All the dishes look half eaten because they are.  My grandparents go nuts when the food comes and they reach for the food before I can whip out my phone.

Grandparents getting ready to order!

For appetizers, we started with a pomelo salad.  A pomelo is kinda like a grapefruit and it belongs in the citrus family.  However, unlike its brother grapefruit and cousin orange, the pulp is quite firm and you are able to separate each of the pulp into little kernels.  This dish is awesome.  So refreshing, yet spicy and super flavourful.

Fresh Pomelo Salad

In order to put together this dish, the chefs take fresh pomelo and toss it with fresh chillis, lime, and a sweet dressing.  It is then garnished with grilled butter prawns and freshly ground peanuts. With every bite, the little kernels of pulp burst in your mouth.  Your taste buds are hit with savoury, sour, and then has a sweet and spicy finish.  If you are lucky, sometimes you get a bit of the peanut and the crunchy nuttiness compliments the soft and juicy pomelo.  It is light and refreshing, yet powerfully flavourful.  I could eat 50 plates of this.  This is a rare Thai treat and not found in most Thai restaurants.

Another appetizer we ordered is the Egg Nets with seasoned ground pork.  If you are bored and want to experiment at home, I found a recipe you can try:  http://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipe/235/Thai-style-pork-and-prawns-in-eggnet

A Pretty Egg Net Dish

I doubt this dish is considered traditional Thai food, but it seems to be a common appetizer dish for Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese restaurants.  I prefer the Thai version because it is spicer and it is usually accompanied by some sort of relish.  Usually the tell-tale sign of a good egg net dish is the egg net itself.  I have had really greasy and chunky nets that don’t really look like nets but more like an omelette with holes in it.  On the other hand, this dish is very light, delicate and very net-like.  The net itself is just egg, with a bit of flour (to make it a bit firmer) and seasoned with salt and pepper.

Inside the net is a whole Thai basil leaf and they hug a concoction of ground pork seasoned with chives, spring onions, garlic, chilli, pickled radishes, and crazy goodness.  All this is delicately wrapped together and surround this small bowl (see above).  Inside this bowl is a relish of pickled sweet and sour radishes and carrots.  I ate about 30 little bowls of this…so good with everything.  I kept on asking for another small bowl (it’s free!) until they started giving me dirty Thai looks. 😦

We also ordered fishcakes but I couldn’t take a photo of it because the G-parents ate it before I could get my phone out :(.

For the main dishes we ordered the green curry beef.  They use digit meat (I don’t think this is the correct term for it but I know what its called in Chinese and I once read this translation on the packaging) that has been slow cooked for hours until the tendon and the surrounding meat is fall-apart tender.

Thai Green Beef Curry

This curry was fragrant and you could smell the Thai basil and coconut milk right away.  The name “green” curry derives from the color of the dish. Other Thai curry dishes are identified solely by their colors, such as yellow and red curry. Green curries tend to be as hot as red curries, however, green curries, regardless of heat, have a definite and desired sweetness that is not usually associated with red curries.

The main ingredients for the sauce consist of coconut milk, green curry paste, eggplant (aubergine), pea aubergine, sugar, fish sauce, kaffir lime leaves, andThai basil leaves. The consistency of its sauce varies with the amount of coconut milk used. Green curry paste is made by pounding in a mortar green chillies,shallots, garlic, galangal, kaffir lime peel, roasted coriander and cumin seeds, white peppercorns, shrimp paste and salt. The paste is briefly fried in split coconut cream, then coconut milk, meat or fish, and vegetables added along with a pinch of palm sugar. Finally, kaffir lime leaves, phrik chi fa (“sky-pointing chilies”, large mild chilies) and Thai basil are added just at the end of cooking for fragrance.

You probably didn’t need to know all of that, but in case you were wondering…

Next, the Pièce de résistance is the slow cooked pork belly in brown sugar, coconut juice, and five spice.

Thai Bacon

This is more of a chinese dish (albeit sans coconut juice).  The meat, once again, is slowly cooked for hours.  The meat is so tender in this pork belly dish that you want to make love to the tender fat and meat.  The sauce is to die for and after eating it, you just want to slather yourself in it, bath in it, and massage it into your pores. Okay, maybe not, but you get the idea.  The sauce goes excellent with rice, which is actually bad because you want to eat 99 bowls of rice.

What is a Thai meal without a little Pad Thai.  I like Pad Thai mainly because I’ll eat anything with rice noodles.  That is my go-to-noodle next to anything linguine.  I generally stay away from white carbs, but Pad Thai is not white, its Asian so I am good to go :P.

Pad Thai

The Pad Thai was nothing spectacular, but it was still tasty and I would order it again.  Lastly, we ordered dessert.  By now, i am pretty stuffed.  My grandparents are 90 years old and they don’t eat a lot, so they try to get me to finish everything off….ughhh.

Anyway, we ended with a Thai Dessert called Red Ruby or Momo Tsa Tsa.  I don’t know why they call it that.

Let me break it down for you.  The base, which is the white stuff is actually ice flakes made out of sweetened coconut milk.  This is really good and the flavour is so tropical.  For the toppings, the green and red stuff are water chestnuts covered in a gelatine like jacket.  The texture is very appealing.  With your first bite, you are a hit with a cool, sweet, slightly slimy and jell-oey like outer shell.  Inside this gelatinous shell is the refreshingly crunchy water chestnut.  The water chestnut doesn’t have much of a flavour on its own.  The whole red and green “jewels” are there purely for the texture.  They sit on top of the crown of ice flakes twinkling…beckoning to the diner…”eat me.”  The other toppings are slivers of real coconut meat and the orange stuff is jackfruit.  This is the perfect dessert to end a Thai meal. The creaminess and mild sweetness of the dessert, totally balances out the salty, spicy thai dishes.  It hits the spot without weighing you down.  I could eat buckets of this stuff (as you might have noticed by now, I exaggerate a bit when it  comes to the numbers of food I ate or could actually eat…but you get my idea).  After all this food, I am quite tapped out.

Contrary to the descriptions you just read, during this whole meal I wasn’t just focussed on the food because I was on a mission.  The mission was to be intentionally intimate and openly affectionate with my grandparents.  You might wonder, what’s the big deal?  Well, intimacy and affection are very foreign concepts to my 90-year-old grandparents.  They come from a time where little emotion is shown and affection is scarce.  So what I am seeking is breakthrough in our relationship!

Throughout dinner, I kept on waiting for an opportune time to interject with a hug or an “I love you”.  I waited thru the appetizers, the curry, the pork belly, and growing increasingly anxious by the minute.  Not anxious because I didn’t want to do it, but I wanted to do it so much that I didn’t want to miss the chance.  Finally, I couldn’t wait any longer, so between bites of Pad Thai and curry rice, I got up from my seat and hugged them and told them I loved them.  I told them I really appreciated the fact that I could spend Christmas holidays with them and share some meals with them.  I was kind of clumsy, kind of awkward, and not very eloquent.  On top of all that, the whole restaurant was looking at me and my grandpa almost choked on his tea!

Indeed, it was awkward and they didn’t return the affection, but I think it warmed their hearts.  After my gestures of affection, I noticed that they were more talkative and they ate more than they usually do.  Some of you might think…now what?  After all that, there is not breakthrough!  Ahhh, that is where you are wrong.  I am engaging my grandparents as human beings.  I am pushing them and forcing them out of their comfort zone.  By doing something completely different, I am shifting their paradigm for relationships.

Furthermore, all I had to was look no further than the diners beside us.  I snuck a photo…

In the photo, you can see the dad reading a book; the daughter is on her cellphone, and the mom is playing Fruit Ninja on her iPhone (they were like this until the food came!)  No one said a word to each other through the whole meal!

While, we may not have a lot of time to spend with one another because we are always “thai’d” up or because we might be separated by geographical distances, let us be intentional with the ones who are available to us.  This holiday season, who do you need to be intentional with?  Next time you are out with your family or close friends, don’t just stare into your Pad Thai or play with your iPad Thai…:P, look them in the eye and be intentionally intimate with them.

iPad Thai and Pad Thai? Don't let these things distract you!

So, throughout this trip, I am going to continue engaging grandparents.  I am going to be intentional with them and I am going to discover and share something new with them every day.   I am going to bring some Kingdom culture into their Chinese culture.  I am going to be a paradigm shifter.  I am going to be the Catalyst for intimate and intentional relationships with my entire family.  This is my goal.  I am on a mission.