Best Christmas meal ever?

If you really love food, your best meal ever is always (hopefully) your next meal. The cooks have been planning to make this Sunday's True Thai Christmas party the best ever. I am not cooking, but I am planning and I asked the cooks to reinvent a famous Thai dish, Pla Bo-Ran. Translated it means Ancient Fish, but the cooks came up with a fish dish that is very fresh tasting. Crispy Tilapia filet garnished with Thai chilis, lemongrass, cashews, shallots, thinly sliced garlic, mint and kafir lime leaves served with a special sauce made from hand-squeezed tamarind juice, palm sugar, salt and fish sauce. Not just fresh tasting, but nutty, crunchy and tasty too!

It's a "lost" recipe. I don't know why it's called Ancient Fish, but if you put that name into Google you mostly get pictures like this one:

Our Ancient Fish looks much better than this!

We know that most of you will be with your families this Christmas, but you can try Ancient Fish now if you like. It's not on the menu yet, but that doesn't mean you can't order it. Whether you ask for Ancient Fish or Pla Bo-Ran, the wait staff will hook you up with what will surely be our Catfish Salad's biggest menu rival for the affections of True Thai fish dish lovers.

The cooks have been fine-tuning the Pla Bo-Ran for a week now, and each time I've had it, it was better than the time before. I am very confident that this Christmas, I'll be eating my best Christmas meal ever. This Sunday would have been Ped's 39th birthday, and in honor of the occasion I predict no food will stick to any wok, the rice will be perfect, and each dish will turn out exactly as planned.

It's a private party for True Thai staff and Ped's family, but if you have no place to go this Christmas, you're welcome to spend it with us. You can email an R.S.V.P to me any time before Saturday morning, or stop by the restaurant in person this week. True Thai has a very big family, and there's always room for more.

True Thai will be closed December 24 & 25

True Thai will be closed December 24 and 25 as we do every year so our employees can spend time with their families.

Picture courtesy of Thai-blogs.com

We will be open regular hours this Friday, the 23rd, and Monday, the 26th. As usual, we will not be serving any Swedish meatballs or ham in the buffet this week or any other week.

Please have a very Merry Christmas! Drive safely and enjoy your holidays.

The best Christmas concert I ever saw

Not too long after I moved to America, a friend and I went to Lexington, Kentucky, one weekend looking for a surplus store. We parked our car and immediately got lost. While walking around we found ourselves walking past a long, long line outside Rupp Arena. We started asking people in the line where the surplus store was. No one knew but one guy suddenly turned to me and offered me a pair of tickets, saying, “here’s tickets for the concert. I have to go home, it’s an emergency.”

My friend tried to take the tickets but this guy would only hand them to me. In retrospect, I suspect he thought the concert would "blow my mind." Well, it did. "Back in the day" Anna looked like this. Needless to say, I had no idea who or what Pink Floyd was. The guy I was with made a big deal about the tickets, laughing and saying “you have no idea who this is or what's going on inside.” It was true that I didn’t know what I was in for, but I knew from the lines and the size of the arena that this was the biggest and easily the strangest crowd I had ever been in. 

Most shocking to me, even more so than being in the fifth row for a Pink Floyd concert, was the guy standing next to me. He was smoking marijuana throughout the entire concert! Being from Thailand I knew what marijuana was, but I didn’t know how openly it was smoked at Pink Floyd concerts.

I don’t remember the concert very well because the whole time I was watching I could not stop thinking about marijuana, especially because the guy next to me kept offering me some even though I wasn’t old enough to drink. For years afterwards I didn’t go to rock concerts because I thought I would get arrested and deported!

It was the loudest concert I’ve ever been to. It was also (inflation adjusted) the most expensive ticket I’ve ever used. I remember it as being a $100 ticket which, for a fifth row seat in 1987, sounds about right (further internet research confirms that it was the most expensive concert ticket of 1987). All I remember is that $100 was more than I made in a week working half-time as a lab assistant at the University of Kentucky.

It wasn’t until a few years ago when I told a friend about this concert that I finally realized what a big deal it was. How big a deal? The picture (below) is from the show I saw! In fact, Wikipedia has a long article about this tour, including a list of all the songs they played!  The concert was in early November of 1987, so it wasn’t really a Christmas concert, but I think of it as my best Christmas concert ever because it had the best Christmas lights I’ve ever seen. 

We never did find the surplus store.

Not a Christmas post

No, definitely not a Christmas post, but this made me laugh — a lot! I bet there is a very funny story behind that sign.

Yes, if a crew of hungry construction workers came in for lunch and all hit the buffet hard . . . then maybe we might lose some money. But even if they came in every day True Thai's buffet closes at 2 pm. Also, most construction workers only get half an hour for lunch so I think our bottom line is safe so long as we don't put any river prawn or scallops in the buffet!