The Bishop and I

More about Anna and my family today. If you've visited my Flickr page, you may have seen my baby picture. In it I am wearing a dress made by my sister Wipa. At that time she had been a Catholic novice for six years, and six years after that picture was taken she became Sister Emile.

It was because of my sister's involvement in the Catholic church that I ended up living in Bishop Lawrence Thienchai Samanchit's household my last two years of high school. Bishop Samanchit was the second Bishop of Chanthaburi, my province not having become a diocese in its own right until 1965. Unless you read Thai, the best way to learn more about the history of Catholics in Thailand is from Wikipedia.

In addition to attending school, each day I was required by the Bishop to do three things: attend 5:30 a.m. Latin mass, study French, and make chili sauce for the Bishop. (Only the 5:30 a.m. mass was in Latin, the other masses were held in Thai.)

Bishop Samanchit gave me the choice of studying Latin or French, so I chose French. To this day my French is not nearly as good as my chili sauce!

Chili sauce is quite simple to make. Chop up some prikki-nu hot chili peppers, add garlic, lime and fish sauce. If for some reason I was detained and unable to make the Bishop's chili sauce, word would always get back to me that he had noticed that the chili sauce was not Anna's! This sounds like an exaggeration but when I last saw the Bishop ten years ago his first words to me were to ask about my chili sauce. In Thailand we take our spicy condiments very seriously. And yes, Anna's special chili sauce for the Bishop is in our condiment tray at True Thai!

Bishop Samanchit retired this spring. I know of the new bishop, Silvio Siripong Charatsri, because I went to the school he graduated from. My cousin Peter Surin Prasomphol, now known as Monsignor Peter, is still active in the church. My sister was very active in her order until her death in 1997. Sister Emile was very beloved and over 3,000 people turned out for her funeral service.

The patio is open!

I finally got a chance to look at the pictures we took of the new patio. This is my favorite.




But I have to admit I like this one too!



I think it might be too warm for most Minnesotans to want to sit outside this week, but I am Thai and this weather reminds me of home. I was a little bit surprised to discover that the wait staff also enjoys getting to spend time outdoors!

A Catholic entrepreneur in the land of Buddhists

No, Thai people do not dress like this. Not now, not ever. This is a traditional Vietnamese outfit. Why is Anna wearing Vietnamese clothing? To honor my dad, Thanom Prasomphol. I will explain.

My dad and mom's families walked from Vietnam to Thailand in the 1890s to escape religious persecution. At that time there were only 20,000 Catholics in all of Thailand but the Royal government had treated them well since before the time of King Mongkut when their population began to grow due to refugees from neighboring countries. Thai Buddhists are very tolerant, even of Western religions, and Catholic missionaries had been treated respectfully since the first Portuguese missionary, Antonio de Paiva, came ashore in 1544.

Thanom Prasomphol was born on Christmas Eve, 1912, the son of Vietnamese refugees. Our family history suggests he was born in Thailand, but my dad always told me he wasn't sure where he was born.

Every little girl thinks her dad is a very important person but as I grew older I came to realize that my dad really was an important man, and not just in our province. He owned the first indoor market in Chanthaburi, or what we would call a shopping mall today. He owned a slaughterhouse, a movie theater and had real estate investments throughout the region. Our farm was mostly land inherited from my mother's family, but all of my father's businesses were ones he had started himself.

Oh Anna, you are thinking, you must be rich! Not at all! I was the second youngest of twelve children. It is also important to remember that in Thailand employers still take care of their employees. Western style capitalism is more common in Thailand now, but my father, Thanom Prasomphol, was "old skool." Family came first but employees also had to be well taken care of.

My dad was truly larger than life. He wore his hair normally but most Thai people who still remember my dad remember him as the Don King of Muay Thai boxing!

Some people are surprised to learn that as a Public Health Nurse I visit my clients in their homes — no matter how run down or "crime-ridden" the neighborhood. Oh Anna, they say, you are so small and [fill in the blank] neighborhood is very dangerous!

People are so funny. Ever since I was eight years old I would go to the Muay Thai boxing matches which were traditionally attended by men only. I would help my mom with the food concession, selling Pad Thai, curry, beef jerky, and mangoes and sweet sticky rice to the boxing fans. Our customers were sometimes drunk, often loud, and...well, they acted like men out on the town without their wives!

But they respected Thanom Prasomphol and they treated my mom and me with respect. Still, little Anna learned many new words from Muay Thai fans!

My dad died at age 80 on Christmas Eve, his birthday. I was in America and had to say goodbye to him over the phone. I called to wish him a happy birthday in the morning and he died that evening. My mom held the phone for him. He could not speak but my mom told me he was smiling as he listened. My mom believed that my dad had wanted to hear my voice again before he passed away.

The Vietnamese costume I'm wearing in this picture is just like the one I wore for my dad in third grade when I won second place in a school wide costume competition. Today I wear it in honor of my father, Thanom Prasomphol. I cannot call him in heaven, but I think they get the Internet there.

Happy Father's Day, dad.

Living with the Dean

After graduating from Kentucky College of Business, I went to Berea College. If you drive south from Lexington through the rolling hills and pastureland of Kentucky, you will come to Berea, a small town that is home to Berea College which was voted the #1 college in America by Newsweek magazine in the late '80s. Wikipedia has more to say about Berea College:

Berea College is distinctive among post-secondary institutions for providing low-cost education to students from low-income families and for having been the first college in the Southern United States to be coeducational and racially integrated. Berea College charges no tuition; every admitted student is provided the equivalent of a four-year, full-tuition scholarship. Berea offers undergraduate academic programs in 28 different fields. Berea College has a full-participation work-study program where students are required to work at least 10 hours per week in campus and service jobs in over 130 departments. Berea's primary service region is Southern Appalachia, but students come from all states in the United States and more than 60 other countries. Approximately one in three students represents an ethnic minority.

Now that I am older I better appreciate what a unique and wonderful place Berea was. It was founded by an abolitionist in 1855 and was "notorious" for admitting black and female students even before the Civil War. This proud tradition was interrupted by Jim Crow laws, but the college established the Lincoln Institute to educate black students when in 1904 the state denied them permission to educate black and white students in the same classrooms. Black students were not allowed to attend Berea College again until the laws were changed in 1950.

My work-study "assignment" was to serve as a financial records clerk for the college. During the school year I lived in an all-girl dormitory. My roommate was named Tutu. You may have heard of her father, Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. I got to meet him once when he visited our campus and it was one of the greatest honors of my life.

In the summers when the other students went home and the dorms were closed I lived in the home of the Dean of Labor and Student Life. While this was not all that long ago, as recently as the '80s many Americans knew little about foreign food other than "French" fries, pizza and bratwurst. I introduced the Dean's family to fried rice. They introduced me to grits, telling me that Jimmy Carter ate them every day and so should I. They never got me to love grits but despite this we got along well. Because I lived with the Dean I got to visit the College President's home often and he too became a fan of my fried rice.

I graduated from Berea with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree. In a later post I will tell you more about what I did with my BSBA.

Aunt Lam's sweet sticky rice, my Mom's mangoes

Supreme Sweet Sticky Rice with Mangoes

Great-great-grandmother Mai was not the only one of my relatives to be famous in the Chanthaburi region for her food. Aunt Lam's sweet sticky rice was also legendary.

My mother's family were Suktukwans. In Thai, Suktukwan means "happiness every day" and the family name was a blessing bestowed upon an ancestor for his years of service as a confidant to Rama V, known to the Thai as พระปิยมหาราช, The Great Beloved King. You may know Rama V better as Prince Chulalongkorn, the oldest of King Mongkut's children to be tutored by Anna Leonowens for whom I am named.

But I am trying to tell you about my mom and her best friend, Aunt Lam. My mom's name was Yiem and she and Lam were famous even before they became great cooks because they were the first two women to ever get their hair permed in Chanthaburi.

Chanthaburi is a peaceful province located far from the warlike Burmese near Thailand's border with our sister nation, Cambodia. Aunt Lam was known throughout our region for her desserts. Everyone came to Chanthaburi to shop, party, relax and to eat well, and a visit to Aunt Lam's dessert shop was part of the experience.

All day while I was in school Aunt Lam would make desserts. Then at 5 p.m. she would open the doors to her shop and by 8 p.m. all her desserts would be sold. When Little Anna was asked to help at the shop she would have to work her way through the crowds to get in to help her Aunt Lam.

Of all of Aunt Lam's desserts the most popular was her famous sticky rice served with my mom's mangoes. People sometimes think I am joking but when my mom would drive up with her mangoes just before the shop opened the waiting customers would cheer because that meant there would be sticky rice with mangoes.

Although my mother has passed away Aunt Lam is still alive. She's almost 90 and in great health. But she did not forget her niece Anna. I had begged her for her sticky rice recipe ever since I was a little girl, but Aunt Lam always said no, this recipe is for my daughters. But time passed and Aunt Lam had to close her shop because all six of her daughters went to college and became bankers and government officials. So in 2002, just before we opened True Thai Restaurant, Aunt Lam gave me her sticky rice recipe to go with my mom's recipe for mangoes and now they are back together again here in Minneapolis.

Happy Flag Day!

Superfruits

Fruit lovers should be sure to read Nancy Ngo's article in the Pioneer Press on superfruits.

When I was growing up we had 200 mangosteen trees and ten pomegranate trees in our fruit orchard in Thailand. We grew the mangosteens as a cash crop but kept the pomegranates for ourselves. Mangosteens paid for my plane ticket to the United States to go to college at Kentucky Business College. I am very fond of mangosteens.

mangosteens

Our farm had 400 acres but a third of the land was for rubber trees. On the rest of our farm we grew fruit and vegetables. In addition to mangosteens and pomegranates, we grew rambutan, durian, mangoes, papayas, and lychee fruit. I would consider all of these to be superfruits except maybe for the durian which the Japanese and Taiwanese would pay high prices for because they were considered to be super-aphrodesiacs!

pomegranate

rambutan

More on the vegetables later. The durian will also get their own post because there is nothing else quite like durian!

A family secret

Anna's Fried Bananas

My great grandmother Mai was a street vendor who sold fried bananas. She was known throughout the region for her fried bananas which were made with a recipe she learned when she was a young girl in the early 1880s. Relatives and neighbors were always asking us for her recipe because they were the very best fried bananas.

Great grandmother Mai was very old when I was growing up but she was still selling fried bananas until well after she turned 100. Sometimes I got to help her after school. I would make bags out of newspapers like they use to serve fish and chips in England. If there were banana leaves I would make containers from them, pinning the leaves together with bamboo slivers.

The bananas were fried in the biggest wok I have ever seen. It could fry one-hundred bananas at a time. My great-great grandfather made the wok for her. It was too large to fit inside a restaurant kitchen but it was just big enough that she could meet the enormous demand for her fried bananas with only the one wok.

Great grandmother Mai always ate one fried banana every day and she lived to be 107. When she died I was holding her left hand and my mom was holding her right hand and together we kept Mai's recipe secret. At the funeral people were still asking for her recipe and when my mother died in 2000 they asked again. I'm sure they will do the same at my funeral but it won't do them any good because it's a family secret!

True Thai vs. Applebees

You may have read about this but Applebee's just won an Xtreme Eating Award from the Center for Science in the Public Interest for their Quesadilla Burger. The Kansas City Star's Steve Rosen described the Quesadilla Burger this way:

Take a bacon cheeseburger and insert it into a quesadilla. What do you get? A "monstrous marriage" of 1,820 calories, 46 grams of saturated fat, and 4,410 mg of sodium.

Omigod! That is more calories than I eat in a day! Here is how Applebee's responded to the award:

"We provide our guests with a range of choices, from those that are better for you to those that are more indulgent, and guests have the option to customize their orders to better meet their individual needs."

Well if you have an individual need to eat an 1,800-calorie fat burger, here is how much True Thai you could have had instead:

1. 1 Thai vegetarian spring roll with dipping sauce (there are usually 2 in an order) [267 calories]
2. 1 bowl of Tom Yum with shrimp (this is less soup than we usually serve) [86 calories]
3. 1 order of chicken fried rice [405 calories]
4. 1 order 7-Vegetable Rainbow Medley [474 calories]
5. 1 order Pad Thai with shrimp [571 calories]

That's 1,803 calories for an appetizer, soup, fried rice and two entrees which all combined have only 7 grams of saturated fat vs. 46 for the Bacon Quesadilla artery-clogger, and 2,689 mg of sodium compared to 4,410 mg for the Applebee's Today Is A Good Day To Die Burger. (Half of our salt came from the soup, by the way. If you have to limit your salt do not order soup!)

And if you ate a cup of plain jasmine white rice instead of fried rice you would save another 177 calories, not to mention a fat gram and 600mg of salt.

I am not speaking as a restaurant owner now, I am speaking as a Public Health Nurse. DO NOT EAT QUESADILLA BURGERS! If the corresponding amount of Thai food would fill a bowl bigger than your head, maybe it's too much burger!

I also need to admit that True Thai has never spent any money to find out the exact calory counts for our dishes. With 80 items on the menu that many lab tests would bankrupt us, but these calorielab.com charts should be fairly close.

Holy Basil!

Basil is in many, many Thai dishes but that is not why there is basil in so many of True Thai's entrees.

My mom grew her own basil in our garden and she put it in almost everything which is why True Thai uses basil in so many of our our entrees. It's kind of funny but the more I think about it the more I realize that True Thai is really just Anna's Mom's Thai!
Basil is excellent in stir fry dishes because it imparts a wonderfully intense flavor to everything you pair it with. That's what a chef would say, but a cook like my mom would just say that basil is good for you. A lab researcher (which is what I used to be a long time ago) would tell you basil is good for you because it is an excellent source of Vitamin K, as well as being rich in iron, calcium, Vitamins A and C, potassium, manganese and magnesium.

There are four nations that make heavy use of basil in their cooking: Italy, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand. Needless to say I like Italian, Lao and Vietnamese cuisine a lot!

Another curry post

The other day when I wrote about curries I didn't mention my personal favorite, Choo Chee Seafood Curry (#35 on True Thai's menu). Choo Chee curry is always made with seafood in Thailand so you can't have Choo Chee Curry with beef or pork — only with seafood!


Despite being seafood only, Choo Chee curry is not really a different kind of curry. It's made with coconut milk and red chili peppers so it's really just a specific kind of red curry. True Thai has many different kinds of red curries:

• F. Red Curry with Kabocha Squash
• 30. Red Curry
• 34. Pineapple Curry
  
• 35. Choo Chee Curry
• 36. Grilled Seafood Curry
  

Earlier I told you how little Anna had to mash, mash, mash the chili peppers whenever my mom made curry for us. I did not tell you about how we also made our own coconut milk. No, you do not milk the coconut! I will admit however that once when I explained this process to a friend from Wisconsin, she told me that making coconut milk sounds a lot like making butter!

Coconut milk is not the liquid inside of the coconut. That is coconut juice and it is a very popular drink in Asia. Coconut-connections.com explains how to make coconut milk:

Coconut milk is made by squeezing the grated flesh of a coconut with some hot water resulting in a rich white liquid that looks very much like cow's milk.

That is a very short description of a very long process. Little Anna's job was to grind and shred and squeeze and squeeze the coconut until my mom would finally approve of my work. She would then let the coconut milk stand until the "coconut cream" separated and rose to the top, just as cream rises to the top of whole milk. Coconut milk's top layer is very fatty just like dairy cream, and it was that coconut cream that my mom would use to make curry with.

If you have ever ordered True Thai's Lemon Chicken Soup to go and then let it sit in the refrigerator, I'm sure you have noticed how the coconut cream separates and rises to the top. (Shake the container vigorously before heating and serving!)

While all of True Thai's recipes (except one) are top, top secret, I will share with you a link to Sucheela's blog, in my tiny kitchen, and her recipe for Choo Chee Gung (shrimp curry). I found this blog last night and while it's not really about Thai cooking Sucheela is Thai and we Thai can't help but talk about our food now and then.

True Thai loves new grads!

So very many groups coming to True Thai for a dinner celebration lately! Parties of up to 30 grads, friends and family but thanks to the new expansion we have met this challenge, even when we haven't gotten a call in advance (always appreciated). I'm glad to say that our wait staff and kitchen crew have stepped up and helped make each celebration a success!

When I graduated from Berea College I didn't have a big party but I remember how much the support of my friends meant to me. If you thought I looked young in that picture of me with my first car, take a look at me standing next to my friend Sue!

Sue taught me how to type, something I've tried to avoid doing ever since. You can see another graduation picture of me at my Flickr account in the personal photos set.

We don't take pictures of our customers but we do notice that you seem to take a lot of pictures of each other. Feel free to email me if you'd like to share a picture from your special celebration at True Thai. I will post all of them to Flickr and maybe even some to this blog!

Later I will post a picture of me at my very first job. I hope that's a part of the graduation process that all our celebrating guests will get to enjoy as well despite these "interesting" times we are living in.

As for life after graduation, first you gain weight, then you gain your fortune, then you pay someone to help you lose weight! And, if you're lucky, the people you pay to help watch your fortune won't help you to lose it as well. More on these topics in subsequent posts but now more than ever it is clear to me that June is graduation month in Minnesota!