Surprise on a Spike or a Mouthwatering Trip to the Basque Country

I'm sure no one would be able to object if I say the Basque Country is the motherland of Spanish culinary gurus. This unique creative community is situated on the Northern coast of Spain, sharing a frontier with France. The Basques are known for their own (completely incomprehensible) language, stone-throwing sport, delicious white Txacoli wine and extraordinary culinary skills, particularly expressed in a mind-blowing variety of "pintxos".
"Pintxo" (can be translated as a "spike" from Spanish) is a typical small snack served in bars, an immense variety of ingredients, normally served on top of a piece of baguette (and fastened all together with a spike). Nowadays one can try the typical ones almost everywhere in Spain, but it will be nothing compared to Euskadi*, where in no bar you will be able to find the same ‘set’ of pintxos, where they come in all (un)imaginable forms and ingredient combinations. Here is just a tiny bit of the "reportage" on the symbol of Basque culinary creativity:

some pintxos found exploring Bilbao old town, among them, smoked tuna with cherry&mango sauce

3 in 1: 2 small pintxos mounted on top of the bigger one. Neat! 

 ‘Irrintzi’ bar with great pintxos and a bit of Japanese flare in Bilbao 

However, the first prize, undoubtedly goes to a Donosti** bar ”Zeruko”, whose chefs managed to bring the creation of pintxos up to a level of art.

Each pintxo is an eye-candy, each of them a surprise, being it the ham-flavoured jelly balls with the egg gently exploding in your mouth, gold-plated artichokes with warm foie gras, or freshly smoked codfish with some effervescent salad… in a flask.

Each single one is promised to be a discovery. 

The star of the menu – “Bob Limón”, chef’s desert looking quite like a fried egg with bread (thus should be eaten the same way: dipping the bread in the ‘yolk’!), while it’s in fact a delicious mixture of cream, jelly-like jam, berry toffee, cold spongy sweet ‘bread’ and, to top it all, special Chinese flowers, that provoke mild tingling and refresh your mouth. Exceptional indeed.

 * Basque Country in the Basque language
** Basque name for San Sebastian

Thailand: Good Luck for You. - Day 14 (Back to Bangkok)

We are back to Bangkok’s chaos. Gosh, I missed it!

People praying at a shrine right among skyscrapers

  The plan for the first half of the   day was to take a closer look a Bangkok’s parallel world: its business and commercial center which has nothing to do with the old town, except for omnipresent street food vendors.

Sounds weird but the most exciting part the day turned out to be our ‘excursion’ to an Asian mall. Food courts we found in the malls were not less outrageously unfamiliar as the street food markets with an incredible amount of food with nondescript names and showcases with plastified dishes, even soups!
I ventured on some green tea cake with red bean filling: tasted good beyond any expectations!

toffee makers

Japanese sweets

Many deserts looked quite hideous, like, for example, ice-cones with colored syrops and corn (!). The ones what really caught my attention were matcha desserts, made of green tea powder. Matcha smoothies, matcha puddings and matcha frozen yogurts seemed very popular with stalls over the place offering this green-tea based sweet with jelly, black pearls or sweet red beans.
Asians and Europeans do indeed have very different ideas about what is tasty…

Thailand: Good Luck for You. - Day 3 (Chiang Mai)

We didn’t expect it that we wouldn’t want to leave Bangkok’s hustle & bustle. However, before afternoon we were already heading for Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. Chiang Mai didn’t impress us much at fist sight. Not even at the second, actually.  However, if you imagine the concentration of Catholic cathedrals and churches in Rome, it’ll be easy for you to imagine the amount of  Buddhist temples in a quite smaller Chiang Mai.

Trying to calm the hunger after the trip and temple-watching, we set out for some culinary tourism. I was glad to prove it for myself that Thai food is delicious even in the streets. (Although I wouldn’t venture trying stuff from some of the food stalls!) Rice, which is delicious by itself, comes in all imaginable combinations, with pork, chicken, shrimps, veggies, cashew nuts, egg or soy sprouts.  These are just a few examples. The same goes for noodles!

There are several types of curries which are added to practically everything in variable quantities (from a lot to a whole freaking lot!). So, those are red (the spiciest one only for those with a very strong stomach!), green – (not spicy at all) and medium spicy yellow and panang curries (prepared by adding some coconut milk). Finally, when in Thailand, you are sure you to taste at least some of the innumerable stir fries with tamarind or oyster sauce (more commonly, the latter is substituted with fish-guts sauce. Good thing I didn’t know it when I was trying this stuff! But that’s a story for another post…)

I finally got myself the famous ‘som tam’, papaya salad. Desperately trying to figure out which of the mix was in fact papaya, I realized those were light green acid stripes instead of juicy orange pieces I was used to. Acid and really spicy it still tasted great!

Panang curry chicken & green papaya salad

After the meal, I decided to give a try to a typical Thai dessert ‘khao niao mamuang’, or plainly, sweet sticky rice (cooked in…surprise! coconut milk) with mango.

Banana samosa or banana fritters immediately became our favorites available anywhere, from the shabbiest street or to the fanciest restaurant. However, the most curious dessert I saw in Thailand was pyramid- or block-shaped banana leaf wrapped treats. Those are a kind of dumplings prepared by wrapping glutinous rice, usually cooked in coconut milk with palm sugar, in banana leaves and tied with a string. They say, the wrapping adds a special fresh flavor to the rice. I won’t judge the taste but just limit myself to saying that to a European palate, it tasted pretty bland and I’m not a huge jelly fan. Worth trying for an experience though.

Sticky rice with mango

Goog good good!                                                                                                                                                                                 (taking a closer a look at the poster... does the happy child really look like some kind of a little pigtailed 'ladyboy'???)

One of Thailand's best - ripe dragon fruit!

Trying to find the famous night market, we bumped into an old guy from Tasmania, who amazed us by saying he’d been leaving in Chiang Mai for 7 months already (I couldn’t take my eyes off his dirty feet in worn-out shoes with flapping soles, which seemed like he didn’t take off throughout all those months).

I later saw him again on the grass leaning peacefully against the town wall and couldn´t stop asking myself, can this really be better than Tasmania??

Anyway, following his indications we found the Night market, to get in some local feel and finding it difficult to push our way through the endless lines of merchant booths to the point that we almost got late to the night performance at Khum Kaew Kanthoke Palace.

Besides, magical Loi Kratong holiday celebrated at the beginning of December (I still feel sooooo bad we couldn’t get to see it!), Kanthoke Dinner & Dance is one of the famous Chiang Mai experiences.

Its name stems from the name of a low table, ‘kanthoke’ in Thai: during the dinner and performance you’re practically sitting on the floor. In a few words, you get to try some of typical Northern Thai dishes, while seeing a story with traditional Lanna (northern Thai) music and a series of folk dances in traditional costumes of different regions. One cannot but be amazed by the inborn grace of those petite women dancers: only when they passed by I realized that some of them were not older than 13-15 years, which wasn’t so obvious with heavy make up…