I’m about to lose all credibility as a foodie with the next statement I am about to make but, it’s true, I was never really into Thai food. It’s not that I didn’t like it, I just never got excited over it the way some people seem to wet their pants at the mere mention of it. I mean I liked it when I had it, I’d enjoy it whenever it was around but I didn’t look for it, didn’t crave it, and it wouldn’t have been my first choice of cuisine when choosing a restaurant.

It was only on this trip that I realized that it wasn’t Thai food that I wasn’t into (after all, larb – which I first encountered in Laos as laap or larp – is one of my favorite dishes), it’s the sugar in it. The same way that I’m not a big fan of paksiw or sukiyaki or spare ribs in barbecue sauce. I don’t like sweet savory food. I like my food salty, sour, or even spicy, but not sweet. Although, as I said, I can and will eat it and enjoy it, but it’s not something I would look for or want to eat everyday.

And Thai food has a lot of sugar in it. White sugar, palm sugar… But because Thai food is almost always prepared fresh and cooked on the spot, it’s very easy to have the sugar omitted. One simply has to ask. Of course, being quite lazy and more than a little bit slow, I only started asking them to hold the sugar the other day but, since then, glory hallelujah! Now I see the light!

Today, I took a break from malling and went walking down Charoen Nakhon Rd., the main road that leads to our friend, Jimmy,’s apartment where we are staying, to explore the street food. I stopped at the first mom-n-pop operation and had this:

Tom yum goong and pork fried rice. (I brought the leftover crispy pork I had from another night and had them add it to the pork fried rice. A most excellent idea, if I might say.)

This is probably only the second time I’ve ordered tom yum goong in Thailand. The first time was yesterday at lunch. And, yes, I finished all of that.

Afterwards, I went in search of dessert and Thai iced coffee. While I don’t like my savory food to be sweet, dessert is an altogether different story. To say that I have a sweet tooth is an understatement. Jimmy’s refrigerator is now full of an assortment of cookies, egg tarts, and Thai desserts that I intend to consume (and share, of course) before I leave for Manila tomorrow.

I walked past the 150 baht massage place. Past the two other mom-n-pops I had tried before. Past the soi going to the Hotel Ibis. There were food stalls everywhere. I went on in search of coffee. I wanted freshly prepared coffee with condensed milk but no one seemed to be selling it. Someone pointed to a shop across the street but I couldn’t be bothered to cross the road.

They also sell these at some BTS stations.

Then I chanced upon a lady selling fried bananas. I had a bag of those yesterday by the BTS and they were absolutely delicious. I had to have them again. It’s amazing how many fried bananas 10 baht can buy.

I walked back to where some guys were churning hot milk. It looked so good, I went against my better lactose intolerant judgement and bought a bottle of cold milk to have with the bananas. It turned out to be sweetened milk but it was still good.

One of the guys at the milk stand could speak English and I found out that the churning milk was actually soy milk. I interviewed him as far as his English would let me, then left the stall with a bag of green tea milk (25 baht), a milk dessert with jelly (15 baht), and bread cubes with a pandan-flavored dipping sauce (15 baht) and a tea-flavored dipping sauce (15 baht).

Interesting flavors. I find the bread thing a bit weird but I liked the tea-flavored dipping sauce (on the left) better than the pandan one.

Now that we’re about to leave, I wish I had more time to eat.