Farmer’s Market Fetch
When you don’t eat added salt, oil, nor sugar, it’s no surprise that “comes with a kitchen” and “close to a farmer’s market” make the top of your search criteria when considering where to stay. Luckily in Chiang Mai, there’s no shortage of great markets to choose from. The one I’ve been frequenting the most during our two-month stay is far from glamorous. The market is mostly just a collection of vendors who post up on blankets outside businesses along the main road into downtown. By 9:30am, when businesses along the street start to open, the farmers and entrepreneurs are all gone, leaving no trace of their presence. If I don’t get out there by 8, I typically miss a few. It’s this kind of mountain-farm-to-sidewalk kitsch that makes Chiang Mai so great.
People here eat very locally, and over the course of the last 50 days or so the fruit and vegetable selection has changed a surprising amount. Jason keeps saying “see this is why we have to stay so long, otherwise you’d never have the opportunity to see the subtle changes.” And he’s right! Take yesterday, I bought a stick for ฿10. Yup. A stick!
The lady sets up her blanket on the street-side of the sidewalk and generally has a varying selection of items, including snap beans that have aged into lima beans over the course of our stay. We take this slow change to indicate these items are more likely to come from a local, small farm than from a distributer. Although, to be honest, they might not be from the same bean plant, but they look the same and I’ve bought one thinking it was the other—more than once. Either way, I like her station.
Here’s the scene: I had just purchased a bunch of beans (on purpose), successfully tossing out ไม่เอา (pronounced “my ouw”) to indicate I didn’t want a plastic bag. As I walked away, proud of completing the entire transaction in Thai, I saw a pile of what looked like sticks on the corner of her blanket. I asked what it was and learned it was ฿10, or roughly 35 cents US. But that wasn’t what I meant, I wanted to know what the heck to do with it. Another tourist’s curiosity joined my quest as we tried to mime “what is it?”—my Thai is quite limited and I sometimes have to resist the urge to speak Spanish to Thai people; it appears my brain files all foreign words in the same “not English” file.
After some accidental physical comedy, we were able to deduce that you’re supposed to chop it and put it in curry. That’s all I needed to know; I handed her the cash and, like a proud puppy, I took my stick home to show Jason.
He was less impressed. It seems that after over 20 years in law enforcement, Jason’s a little more skeptical of the intentions of the people selling his wife sticks. I prefer to work under the assumption that the Thai marketeers are not trying to kill the tourists. If she said to put it in curry, I’m going to believe her.
After trying to cut it, Jason became even more convinced I got got. Laughing he mocked, “No really… If you put sticks out there the tourists will just buy them. They don’t know the difference… plus they seldom come back, so who cares!” Funny today, but yesterday I wasn’t laughing. Just because the criminals in Miami had a “the tourists never show up to court” attitude, doesn’t mean the nice lady at the morning market was similarly evil spirited. But good intentions or not, the knife we had wasn’t going to cut it—literally.
But I wasn’t ready to give up as easily as Jason. Plus the woman made it sound like chopping it was no big deal. In this moment I trusted her more than him and became convinced Jason just didn’t try hard enough 😋. It took some debating, but eventually I convinced him we should put a little in the dinner soup. And he “suddenly” remembered how to slice wood with a cleaver knife—you go with the grain, like you’re trying to get into some Khao Lam (those bamboo sticks filled with sticky rice). Go figure.
So we throw a slice in dinner and forget about it. Meanwhile Lyn, our Lanna Chef School instructor and jungle vegetable expert, texted us back and shared that my stick was Piper interruptum Opiz, a vine-like member of the pepper family that is a common ingredient in Thai cuisine. So, for the record, I was right! Or at least the lady was right, and I was right for having faith in humanity—this time, anyway.
By now dinner was ready and we got to try our little wood chip… and OMG was it flavorful! It made our tongues tingle like great Sichuan pepper and had the complexity of really good long pepper. It didn’t impart much flavor into the soup, but I suspect that’s a dilution issue because there was so much flavor in the wood that Jason and I were fighting for who got to suck on it more.
And wouldn’t you know it, now Jason’s on team stick.
We’ll use it again in tonight’s dish, and while I wait for Jason to slice us some more pieces of stick, I remind myself that while a “healthy” amount of skepticism might keep you from getting got, it also might prevent you from the surprise and delight than an ordinary stick—combined with traditional Thai culture—can bring. So next time, let the lady sell you a stick. It might just awaken your senses in ways you never expected.
