We’ve been home a couple weeks now which I suppose means I should get around to finishing up writing my blog entries about the trip. And what better place to start than with Thanksgiving?

Right after we got back from our trip to Vietnam, we headed out to Ban Rai, a pastoral town northeast of Bangkok in the Uthai Thani region of Thailand. My dad has something of an agricultural empire out there growing mostly pineapples and sugar cane by the ton. The plan was to head out there and chill out for a couple days, including Thanksgiving day. I took this opportunity to see what kind of Western-style holiday meal I could create from the goodies to be found at the local markets.

But first…

we took a tour of the farm and showed the folks around beautiful Ban Rai.

baby pineapple!

two of my dad’s newest ventures: a lime orchard and…

dragon fruit! I never knew what a dragon fruit tree looked like…

Thursday morning Pop, Chris and I head out to the Ban Rai fresh market in downtown. It’s pretty hopping and fuller than I remembered it. I stroll past the deep fried hot dog vendor and past the vat of live frogs and straight to a veggie stand where I got all the greens I needed for the evening.

I got that giant bundle of lemongrass I’m holding, plus several bunches of basil and a big knob of galanga — all for 20 baht, about 60 cents.

I visited the chicken vendor and picked up the biggest bird they had — no turkeys here, but this would do. Plus it was almost certainly free-range and local. We probably saw it crossing the road the day before. The thing about buying chickens in the country is that they’re going to come with a lot more… bits… than a city slicker like me is used to. I knew the feet would be there and the head, while a little unnerving, was not unexpected. But what really freaked me out? Lungs. Lungs! Of course, I know chickens have lungs, but I never thought about that before that day.

Anyway, back at the market: I got a big Thai pumpkin and some fruit, meanwhile Chris was chatting up the khanom krok vendor and trying to eat the fresh hot delicacies without setting his mouth on fire.

We spent the day visiting scenic spot around town, swimming, reading, lounging. Oh, and I did a fair bit of cooking. As did Chris.

Now, the challenging part about cooking Thanksgiving dinner in Ban Rai is that there is no oven and only two burners in the house. Plus, since my dad doesn’t cook, there’s a dearth of cookware. But we were prepared.We bought a grill at Tesco — actually 2 — and procured charcoal from a local. While we were musing about what to use for kindling, Pop’s farm manager handed us a dried out coconut husk. Brilliant — it made for mad efficient fire starter.

The grills we got were Thai style which is to say that they were designed for short super hot blasts on the grill, not for smoking a whole chicken. So we had to do some… modifications. This is what it looked like in the end:

Chris monitors the grills

It all wound up taking a lot longer than we’d planned — the chicken was on the grill for, oh, about four hours in all. But it worked!

My idea for the dinner was to combine the traditional dishes on the Thanksgiving table with the local flavors of Thailand. Sure, it was possible for me to make candied yams with marshmallow fluff, but wouldn’t it be more fun to do it Thai style?

So here’s what we wound up with:

kaprow (holy basil) deviled eggs for a starter

roasted Thai pumpkin

brown rice stuffing with green “mountain apples” and cashews

The main event: the bird stuffed with lemon grass and galanga. it’s ugly from being manhandled by crappy tongs, but that didn’t keep it from extreme deliciousness.

and here’s the whole table, which also shows the “green beans” which were really cut up yard-long beans.

Everything turned out well, but the real star was the chicken which, after being closed up in the grill with all that lemon grass and galanga for hours was buttery tender and infused though with the flavorful herbs. Yum!

I have no picture of dessert, but it was a galanga-spiced Thai pumpkin pudding with a sago (AKA tapioca) and coconut pudding topping. Pretty tasty, too.

The sad part of the meal was that Pop wasn’t feeling well so he couldn’t join us for the meal. But it turned out to be fine because we just got to have the whole meal over again two days later when he was feeling better! Hooray for Thanksgiving day leftovers.