(Photo by Lauren Lulu Taylor)
I am losing a step. Actually, I believe the technical term is “becoming an idiot”. To be honest (“At least you’re being honest!” says my friend Chris, champion of dad jokes), … wait a minute, I forget what I was going to say. Maybe it will come back to me later.
It comes slowly, and then all at once. I have always had a problem with double-booking appointments, or forgetting appointments completely if they have not been written down in my real brain, the calendar on my phone. Now I find myself triple-booking, even after checking my calendar the first time around. I will tell myself that I have to buy kimchi after seeing it displayed at a corner of the supermarket (it’s too sweet at that corner), only to get distracted by a cheese display and promptly forget what it is I was intending to buy in the first place. Don’t even get me started on words; “thingamajig” and “whatshisface” are common nouns to me, nowadays.
I was alarmed initially, but I am beginning to accept it. After all, once it happens, I won’t remember why I was so alarmed in the first place. I’ve had two grandparents with dementia, on both sides of the family. My hope is to become one of those women who wears flamboyantly eccentric clothes, gets lost in the woods once in a while, and is mostly tolerated by those around her. The more likely truth is that I will join my grandparents’ ranks, forgetting all other (half) languages that I was once able to speak, a stranger in a foreign land once again. I remember visiting my grandmother Jeannette in Chiang Rai on one of the last trips we would see her: “Qui est ce gosse?” she asked her helper, who of course thought she was speaking gibberish. She was speaking of my son. “Pud mai loo luang,” the helper said, feeding her her lunch. This, I know, is my future in Thailand.
Thai noodles have, for a while now, been similarly lacking in the upstairs department. I am speaking, of course, about peanuts. They used to be scattered all over all sorts of noodles, both fried and soup varieties, with peanut powder also provided in the condiments trays along with all the other essentials for noodles, like fish sauce, pickled peppers, and chili powder.
Today, you only see peanut powder (maybe) for tom yum noodles served with minced pork meatballs. Peanuts have been démodé for a while now, relegated to canisters on supermarket shelves and boiled in their shells hawked by intersection vendors, not even served on Thai airplanes on domestic flights. This is a result of many factors, like the increasing number of people who are violently allergic to them. I also thought that maybe Thailand, after embracing peanuts wholeheartedly after the Portuguese brought them in the 1600s, had fallen out of love with them, having witnessed countless restaurants abroad slather peanut sauce willy-nilly over every dish on their menus in a bid to make them “Thai” (and to use up extra satay sauce), when actually (this is my last comma I promise), spicy peanut sauce is Malay.
Today, you don’t see peanuts on noodles that often; you see them on green papaya salads, in massaman curries and in the occasional chili dip. But the reason isn’t because Thais don’t love peanuts anymore. It’s because peanuts and Thais were a bad romance — “une mauvaise romance,” if you will — and for years, peanuts had been deemed “dirty” and prime agents for spreading mold by the government. Yes, peanuts fought the law, and the law indeed won. This reputation has clung to them even now, when even my husband, who won’t pay more than 50 baht for a haircut, will only buy his favorite snack of boiled peanuts at Emporium of all places, at 3 times the price of a vendor on the street.
Maybe it’s time to bring peanuts back. When boiled, they are great with rice against the depredations of a spicy curry, delicious foils when roasted in spicy yum salads, and yes, lovely as a light scattering of powder over a bowl of spicy chicken and bitter melon noodles. They are solid antidotes to chili and integral in providing crunch, aromatic in hot sauces and sweet in chili dips. They are a great protein and filling when you are hangry and have forgotten to eat. For once, peanuts are a case when being nutty is a good thing.
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