Holy Mango!

This past weekend I got to experience a few local sites, including the local market. On Saturday my boss and good friend, Ms. B, had a few of the other teachers and me over to her house for dinner. Upon request, she taught me how to cook a typical Thai dinner-Massaman curry! This included an ingredient-buying trip to one of the local markets, which was quite a sight to behold. The market exists inside a large, roofed structure, and there are a tremendous amount of stalls all jammed together where people sell just about everything you could imagine, and all of it fresh. 

As I walked through the market, my senses were overwhelmed, and my eyes feasted on the variety of items and people there: butchers hauling around large hunks of meat and then deftly chopping them up into more manageable pieces with intimidating knives; bowls containing enormous, perfectly rounded mounds of dark, rich spice pastes; a machine that noisily produced fresh coconut milk on the spot from pieces of coconut shell that were fed into it; fruits galore from surrounding farms (mangos, mangosteen, durian, bananas, rambutan, rose apples, watermelon, papaya, and more that I don’t know the names of in English); and fresh vegetables, including morning glory greens, which we also had at dinner cooked with my new favorite kind of sausage—goon chiung, a delectable sweet sausage. I could have easily spent the entire afternoon there just looking. I felt shiny-new, like a toddler, both because I felt in awe of everything I looked at, and because Ms. B kept showing me off to all the stall owners, who were clearly pretty curious about a “farang” (Western foreigner) visiting the market.

At the market, I realized another large difference between Thailand and the US: the availability of fresh and local-made products, i.e. things that are not pre-packaged. Example: coconut milk for our Massaman curry. We got this from the market, freshly pressed and handed to us in a bag, hot, fresh, and naturally separated into fatty and watery layers. Woa! I had never seen coconut milk anywhere but in a can. Same goes for spices—it took me a minute to realize what I was looking at when we were buying our Massaman curry paste; I had never seen great mounds of spice pastes before, only spices in little plastic bottles or tear-the-top-off packages.

However, while on one hand I can go to the market and buy stuff that I would only find pre-packaged on the shelves of a grocery store in the US, on the other everything that people buy from street vendors comes excessively bagged: each piece of food or bit of condiment is bagged, and then all of it is put in another bag. So much plastic! I’ve been getting odd looks from people if I buy something and then try to get them to put it into my tote bag. It seems that the concept of re-usable bags (and water bottles) has not been adopted here yet. Or maybe it’s just my 5 years at UVM that’s made me sensitive to all this.

Anyway, speaking of markets and fresh food, mangos are in season in Thailand, and they are cheap and delicious. I got four large, ripe mangos from the market for 80 baht ($2.50—take that, PriceChopper!). I have mangos for breakfast, a mango in the afternoon if the mood strikes, and even mangos with sticky rice from a street vendor for dinner (see picture). Holy mango!