Cooking (mis)adventures

For your humorous morning entertainment…..

So my host mom told me yesterday that I was making spaghetti tonight. We’ve been comparing food the last couple of weeks but since we don’t really have one “typical” type of food in America, my go-to answer is to say that a lot of people eat fast food. They also ask what we eat at home, whether my dad cooks, and if I ever cook. Lots of questions made especially difficult when there is a communication barrier! But I think I somehow communicated to them that I could cook pasta. So anyways, I believe that’s how this whole adventure began…..

Today, after dropping my host brother off at English school, was the day for shopping for supplies. We headed to Big C, called a supermarket but really a store where you can get anything- from shoes and toys to beauty products and food. We don’t go here often; we get our fruits, vegetables, and meat at the outdoors market just up the road from our village. But Big C is the place to go for processed food and “American” products like peanut butter, cereal, and pasta.

I figured it wouldn’t be that bad. I mean, how hard is it to cook spaghetti? I emailed my Mom and figured out a pretty simple recipe for spaghetti sauce, salad, and salad dressing. Something we normally eat at home that I could share with my host family and mostly vegetables, so I knew I could definitely find the majority of the ingredients!

But the problems started right away. Since we have longer noodles a fair bit here, I figured I’d mix it up and get some smaller pasta. Try explaining to your host mom (who thinks that spaghetti is only longer pasta) the difference between types of pasta- about as difficult as figuring out all the different types of noodles here! Then basil for the sauce was nowhere to be found, so I was just hoping the sauce would have some sort of taste. I was also looking for vinegar to make a vinegar/oil dressing for the salad. Since that- again- nowhere to be found, I resorted to these packets of what looked like salad dressing (think fast food-type packets) that smelled remotely like what I was looking for. Of course I could not read anything on the packet and my host mom had no idea either, since salad and salad dressing is a foreign concept here. So here we are leaving the store, and I’m half wondering if this is even going to work.

Then we get home and unpack the groceries. While at Big C, my host mom had repeatedly reassured me that she had spaghetti sauce at home. I thought that was a weird item to keep stocked in a Thai home, but just figured I would go with it. So as we’re putting away groceries, my host mom digs into the far corners of the cabinet under the kitchen sink and pulls out: none other than a gigantic bottle of ketchup! That she had intended for me to use as spaghetti sauce, and which clearly was not going to work!  I hadn’t even started cooking yet, and I was already down from spaghetti to pasta with vegetables. American cooking: 1, Kathleen: 0 and it was only 4pm!

In the end, though, it worked out very well. It didn't necessarily taste how I imagined, but it was really yummy. My host mom helped me, which is pretty ironic considering she is a great cook and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I have actually cooked a full meal. I was worried my host family would not like the food since it had neither meat nor chilies, but they, to my surprise, ended up loving it! My host mom is thrilled that she now knows how to cook “American” pasta and my host brother, who avoids most vegetables, even ate the salad! And apparently I am making the same exact thing for my host grandmother tomorrow for lunch!

I think it was maybe the first meal since I’ve been here that did not involve rice of some sort, which was a welcome change! As were the raw vegetables (we eat a lot here, but they’re always cooked). And nothing beats the fresh food in Thailand! Everything you see here came straight from the market this afternoon!

In other news: my host mom thinks I have forgotten to wash my sheets, and told me to remember to wash them tomorrow. Except I didn’t even know I was supposed to be washing my sheets and hadn’t planned on washing them at all…I’ve only been here two weeks! She might have a heart attack if she knew how infrequently I clean my dorm at Wooster!