Thai Lunch with Ellie and Paul

My first day back in Thailand (overview post HERE), my friends Ellie and Paul and I took a short walk out the door of the Royal River Hotel and down the lane to a small cafe recommended by Friends of Thailand leader and dear pal Carolyn Nickels-Cox. It’s an open-air place with six or eight tables, turquoise-blue walls, and a beverage-making set-up with the fixings for fruit smoothies, sodas, lemonade, and an espresso machine. We ordered three dishes with rice, and each of them was fantastic. Except for the espresso machine and a few electronic devices, we could have been Peace Corps volunteers taking a lunch break back in 1977. Recipes will follow down the road, but for today, just feast your eyes.

I love tom yum, one of Thailand’s simple, brilliant soups. I must have enjoyed it a dozen times during my short journey, and I could never get tired of it. Lemongrass and galanga, wild lime leaves, fresh chilies, roasted chili paste (nahm prik pao), fish sauce, and a squeeze of lime juice — a line up of sharp, bright flavors, essentially Thai. This tom yum featured shrimp, fresh straw mushrooms, green onions and cilantro leaves. Here it’s often served as a Western-style first course, sans rice, but in Thailand it comes to the table as one of the ‘with-rice’ dishes: Perfection.

I had been longing for this dish, moo paht bai graprao, pork stir-fried with holy basil. In the West it’s very seldom made with ‘bai graprao’, or holy basil, as that herb is delicate and not widely available. Asian basil (bai horapah) is usually substituted and while it’s delicious, nothing tastes as marvelous as holy basil. Upcountry it’s usually made with hand-chopped meat, but even with sliced pork, it was so very good.

Nobody has to be persuaded to “Eat Your Vegetables!” when the vegetables come to the table from a Thai kitchen. This is pahk boong fai daeng, water spinach stir-fried with garlic. This hollow-stemmed vegetable is beloved throughout Asia. The Taiwanese name is kong shing tsai, which can be translated as ‘empty heart’, referring to the hollow stems of each delicate stalk.

These three dishes with lots of rice made us all so happy and satisfied. Some things in Thailand have changed, and many have remained the same. I took this photo of my personal serving of tom yum in order to show you the fresh straw mushrooms, cut in half and imbued with the tart fiery deliciousness of this soup. Just an ordinary little lunch, with good friends, at the local joint around the corner, back in Thailand. So delicious.

Taiwan Lunch at Ao Ba : Greenleaf Restaurant

Ao Ba : One of my favorite restaurants where we enjoy old-school Taiwanese dishes every year

5-Spice Boiled Peanuts, waiting on the table along with a pot of jasmine tea

Soft spring rolls with curried chicken-napa cabbage-bean sprout filling

Pork belly, stewed in soy sauce with ginger and rock sugar, topped with fresh cilantro

Taiwanese omelet with minced preserved radish: sa-poh nung

Stewed pork belly simmered with pickled bamboo shoots

SO delicious, and welcome in this porky meal, is this plate of 'kong shing tsai', or 'ong choy', also known as water spinach, and in Thailand as pahk boong. Whatever you call it, you can know it on sight by the fact that this vegetable has hollow stems, giving it the poetic name "empty heart" vegetable in the mix. So many names, but one word: delicious.

A seasonal specialty, this is finely shredded bamboo shoots, stir-fried with garlic and delivering a most pleasing crunch along with lovely flavor

Another old-time Taiwanese favorite, this is coarsely chopped pork, freshly steamed with sliced salty duck egg yolks on top. Amazing texture, tangy plush flavor that lasts all the way through the sauce. They warned us it took 15 minutes for this one, as they steam it up to order. We said we'd wait, and clearly, we didn't wait hungry; this came toward the end of the meal.

Fried rice with minced preserved radish, topped with egg. So very tasty and stands on its own. A meal, not just rice-to-go-with-the-with-rice dishes. Must learn to make this...

Watermelon, mango, papaya, orange sections, one maraschino cherry, and one carven tomato wedge. Beautiful cool sweet ending to our lunchtime feast at Greenleaf Taipei.

After such a memorable feast, a stroll makes sense, and so we walked back along the lane to Nanking East Road, passing the original location of Greenleaf, where we enjoyed many fine meals. Note the logo above the red wall, of a green leaf on white background. Ao Ba or Greenleaf refers to the beautiful island of Taiwan, which is shaped like a green leaf floating in the blue sea.