I have a client coming to visit me this evening to discuss some work, I asked if he would like to come over for dinner and he agreed, he then sent an email warning me that he does not eat eggs, fish or meat.

I told Nuth we were expecting a visitor for dinner this evening and explained the food limitations and she went off scratching here head. Now she has disappeared to the market, she has been gone about two hours, I have no idea what the poor girls is going to find to cook that’s tasty without any meat, egg or fish!

Then again she is an excellent cook so I am quite sure she will figure out something that’s good!

Consider this another lead up post to the one I plan to make about Nuth’s family who I met for the first time a few days ago.

Just to set the scene for the coming entry I thought I would give you all a glimpse of what I was offered for breakfast the morning after I arrived….

Yep, it’s a bowl of fried cockroach, what made it even more sickening is I saw them being cooked… alive…

A few days ago Nuth decided she was going to cook each day instead of us going out to a restaurant every evening. Her argument was that in a couple of months she will be too far pregnant to be sitting on the back of my bike and zooming off to eat. Personally I am suspicious that this event occurred shortly after I had built the kitchen.

Nuth always told me that she cannot cook, her exact words were ‘If I cook I eat alone’ meaning nobody else can stand her cooking. So it was with some trepidation that I awaited my first home cooked meal. I’ll let you decide what you think it looks like, check out the picture below.

As you can see, this ain’t the average pile of spaghetti on a plate kinda home cooked meal, this is a full on multi-dish culinary extravaganza. On that table are dishes from Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, I’m being spoiled rotten!

Well here is my long promised blog entry about the food on the island. If you like Chinese food you can always find something you recognise on a menu, the original inhabitants of the island were mostly Chinese and it shows in the food. But the names are the only thing the dishes have in common with their counterparts found on your local take away menu.

There are also, obviously, strong Thai influences here, so you can find the usual Thai dishes here as well, the curries, spicy salads and tasty soups. And most restaurants serve a range of ‘farang’ food, so you can get a pretty decent English breakfast if that’s your thing.

Here is a picture of one of my favourite dishes from one of my favourite restaurants on the island. It’s just sweet and sour seafood with a plate of fried rice with seafood, but check it out, the presentation is astounding. It tastes delicious as well as looks good and costs £1.30!

A more traditional thing would be a Thai curry, they come in two basic varieties and each have two ways to cook them, you can have green or red curry and it can either be done in a bowl like soup or it can be fried so it looks something more like the curries you see down at your local curry house. Green curry shown below (not fried).

Before I came here I thought Thai food was going to be spicy, and to some degree it is, although I have never asked to have my food made with less chilli like a lot of the westerners do. I can only presume they tame the dishes down when they see a non-Thai person order, as I know I can’t eat the hottest food myself.

In summary, the food here is delicious, everything is cooked fresh when you order, the seafood is superb as most of the small restaurants in my area are owned by the families of fishermen, so it’s from boat to table if you eat at the right time of day. It’s also very cheap, on average a dish will cost around 60 Baht, that’s about 80 pence, some things like rice and noodles are much cheaper.

Another good way to eat is from one of the night markets and the numerous food stalls that you can find there. I’ll do a proper blog about that at some time.