Yes we do but ice cream is one Western food that is very popular in Thailand. ไอศกรีม, or i-tim, comes in different flavors in Thailand than it does at True Thai. Phuket Magazine lists these favorite Thai flavors:Millet, corn, basil seeds, red beans, black beans boiled with syrup, and laht chong, a bright green noodle flavoured and coloured with pandanus leaves, are some of the favourites.Let me know if any of these sound good to you and we'll see if we can get Sebastian Joe's to mix up a tub or two of True Thai i-tim!
And yes, I do remember the first time I had ice cream. I was in third grade at Hui Pai Our Lady of Fatima boarding school and the nuns told us to line up. This did not make us happy because usually when we had to line up they would give us either a vaccination shot or a malaria pill because that was what happened whenever we had to form a line.
Big surprise! Instead of a shot or pill we got soft serve vanilla or chocolate ice cream. None of us had ever had ice cream but we all knew what it was from having seen Doris Day movies. I think I picked vanilla because I had learned from other third grade girls that chocolate would make your skin darker. These were the same third grade girls who told me that playing basketball would make me taller.
It was the very first cold dessert I had ever had. It was weird but I finished it because it was the most interesting food I had ever encountered. I cannot say that I remember liking it, but it did fascinate me. It was U.S. government surplus ice cream left over from the Vietnam War. There was a U.S. military base just twenty minutes from my school or I probably wouldn't have gotten to try ice cream until I was much older.
[The picture above on the right is Gordon Ramsay's Pineapple soufflé with Thai curry ice cream.]
