Snacks.
In addition to loving their semi-official “meal time,” Thais LOVE to snack. This is awesome, because I do too! The range in snack foods is broad (comparable to the spectrum of snack foods in the US), with a few small differences:
1) Many more “home-made” snacks are available, mainly via street merchants. Many of these involve coconut in some form, though you can find nuts, small meat skewers, or funky dried worms or crickets (both pictured to left) if you’re patient. Snacks in jelly form are also very popular (some delicious, some kind of unsettling if you’re not used to the texture).
2) Portion sizes. Snacks are sold in normal-serving-sized packages. Shouldn’t be a novel concept, but I digress. This unique packaging (2 oreos in a container vs. 6…or 24) emphasizes that junk food is exactly that – not exactly the greatest fuel for our body, and a treat.
3) Fruit is much more widely accepted both as a snack, and a dessert. For example one-half of a papaya = MAYBE one bag of chips. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, fruit is everywhere. It’s fresh, chilled, and chopped into snackable, bite-sized pieces by a lovely, smiling man in a straw hat.
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- All contain coconut. Brown is like pudding, green is like layered Jell-o, the yellow is a mixture of donut-like balls soaked in coconut milk and an egg/bean/coconut sugar creation.
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- Spiced-up shoestring potato chips.
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- Fresh papaya from our friendly neighborhood fruit merchant.
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- Sliced green mango.
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- I can’t even name them all.