A Family Affair

The one thing that I love about Thailand and the LOS and Gentle People is the closeness and comaradery of the Thai families . Wheither it be at home , the yard , the garden, the rice fields, catching fish or the harvesting of a money crop, and some of these money crops are free for the picking ( I was to learn about one such crop today ), but it takes a lot of work and togetherness to make it a profitable venture. Today I was riding my Honda back from the market and was taking a short cut thru the trees , when something started to fall on my head and all around , I heard laughter and looked up to see a Thai man high up in a tamarinnd tree shaking it with all his might , just as I passed under (he didn't see me coming or did he ?) I stopped to see what the heck was happening and was greeted by the whole family with a friendly Wai and also a" Sawadee Kop" , "how are you " , "where you live ?", "how long you stay Thailand"?We pick tamarinnd for to sell, you like to eat?, We sell to a restaurant in Kanchanaburi. After struggling to answer the questions and taking a cuuple pictures, I bid them good-by and went home to take dinner to Ciejay and share my story with her. She then told me that there are two kinds of tamarinnd trees , one is sweet and the other is bitter . the sweet one they sell for you to eat shelled and coated with either sugar or peppered sugar also they use the sweet kind to make lots of different kinds of Thai desserts , the bitter one they take out of the shell (brown and dry) and remove the seeds and squeeze it into balls the size of softballs , they put this ball in a plastic bag and it will last for a whole year . Now the bitter tamarinnd is used by the restaurant to add to soups and to make tum yum and all shorts of cooked dishes . My son ,who is a chef in America said that they had to order from an Asian market , and that it was very expensive, but he said you can not prepare an authentic Thai dish without it. With all that said , today I got to see a family working together for their lively hood , I also learned about the tamarinnd tree and the different kinds and uses of this pod I had seen all over the road on the way to the market and back home for a few weeks out of the year , without really knowing what I was seeing. You know every day is a new experience and I learn something new every day, here in this paradise called Thailand , and I only hope I'm around for a long time to experience and learn all I can about this place called, LOS and it's Gentle People. Malcolm

Have you ever eaten sweet tamarinnd ?, I have ,I like it , but it sticks to my plastic teeth, ha ha