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Gee, we always thought Mickey was a mouse.
We've left Bangkok and are now in the southern part of the Philippines, enjoying some fine home cooking and eating lots of gorgeous seafood. Expect more Bangkok stories, a bit of Manila, and some fish tales when we return next week.
In the meantime - Happy Chinese New Year! Xin Nian Kuai Le!
Stick to Bangkok's main streets and this bustling city can begin to look like any other Asia. But venture beyond its shopping malls and office towers, slip down its sois (alleys), and you'll find it has a character very much its own. Small communities and tiny neighborhoods continue on as they long have and traditions - culinary traditions especially - survive.
Every year, in the leadup to Chinese New Year, the residents of Bangkok's Nang Leong neighborhood (near the Turf Club) gear up to produce kanom tien and kanom kaeng, steamed bean paste-filled dumplings. The treats are produced by only two 'workshops' in front of the neighborhood's hundred-plus-year-old wooden cinema, a beautiful old wooden building unfortunately no longer in use.
The dumplings are wrapped in banana leaves. In the shade of the cinema's eaves, four women sit in row cleaning the leaves, which are then carried into the cinema, now empty and stripped of its seats, where a man uses a hand-operated press to cut them into circles.
Outside, pre-soaked soy beans are stirred in woks over a wood fire for at least two hours, until they break down and turn into a smooth, sticky mass. It's hard work; the beans must be kept moving or they will stick to the wok and burn. One batch of beans, destined for kanom tien, is sweetened with cane sugar; the other, for kanom kaeng, is salted.
When the beans are finished the now-sticky mass is carried to another old wooden building perpendicular to the cinema, where a corps of women transforms it into hundreds of little balls that will fill the dumplings.
Then it's back outside, where another group of pastry makers finishes making the dumplings.
First the wrapper, made from dough which has been mixed inside the house with a huge old mixer, is flattened into a circle. A bean paste ball goes in the middle, then the dough is sealed over the ball. The finished ball is dropped into an oil bath to keep it from getting sticky.
Then it's wrapped in two layers of banana leaves. The wrapped dumplings are transported en masse to huge steamers set up behind a fence, to the side of the cinema.
The kanom are made by the thousands in the seven days leading up to Chinese New Year, and sold only on the first two days - a tradition that goes back as long as the neighborhood has been in existence, since the days of King Rama V.
Even in Bangkok, some things stand the test of time.
