Thai BBQ

Pui had a day off yesterday, and she ordered Thai Bar-Be-Que delivery. It's pretty cool, as the guy on the motorcycle sidecar pulls up with the bar-be-que pot already blazing hot. For $6, he delivers the pot, a bag of charcoal, about a quarter-bushel of vegetables, lard, sauce, and about a pound of pork, shrimp, and other meats.

Thai bar-be-que is a clever thing: It's a fire pot (charcoal in top half sitting on a slatted floor, with an air-flow chamber underneath) about the size of an average bucket upon which a steel contraption that I liken most to an oversized and flattened orange juice maker... you know: The plastic cone-shaped gizmo that you grind the orange down on top of and then the juice from the orange collects in a trough around the cone.

You place a piece of lard on top of the (much flatter than the orange juicer cone, so we'll call it a) bulge, which is heated by the fire underneath and melts and sizzles downwards. Around and below the lard, you place pieces of meat on the bulge. You fill the trough with water, which is also heated, and the meat drippings enter the water in which you also place vegetables, fish, glass noodles, eggs, whatever.

Then, everybody sits around with chopsticks, and turns the meat, stirs the vegetables, and then serves themselves into a cup in which they put a little bit of everything plus some spicy sauce, and essentially nibble the night away.

My only (in fact every farang's only) problem with Thai bar-be-que is the fact that you are eating hot and spicy food while sitting around a radiating heat source and steaming water in Thailand's 90º heat. I was out the other night to do Thai bar-be-que with the guys from PattayaSecrets.com, and when I got home, I was able to literally wring out my undershirt and make a nice cascading splash in the grass outside.

Still though, once you have found what combination of meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces works for you, it is pretty tasty. Just make sure you have a Thai person to handle the culinary duties while you stay at a distance and handle the gastronomy duties.