Favorite Snack: the Entire Country of Thailand

beautiful photos of a Miang Kham vendor,above, from Eating Asia

The Story of Miang Kham

We spent about 4 months in Thailand one year, in and out of Bangkok, and that is where we learned how to eat. Anytime of day and everywhere you look, you can find something delicious at every turn, skies the limit of smells and flavors.

See serious food specialists set up in alleyways by day, serving one dish, maybe khao moo, a fat pork leg roasted and braised overnight in sweet soy, served over rice with pickled mustard greens, open-air food courts with different "restaurants" inside delineated only by the color of their plastic chairs in the early evenings, where whole fish are pan-fried and topped with sour green mango and chilies, markets with every imaginable mix of homemade curry paste in the morning. The top floor of shopping malls are filled with food vendors of all sorts, the 7-11 near our guesthouse was filled with Chinese buns and Thai snacks we'd never seen before. At night after the shops were closed, sometimes not until 10pm, tables and stalls would set up, with one shining lamp and the night eating would begin. We ended up spending time in the most unlikely places.

This is one of the snacks I loved to find on the street but the truth is, we probably spent longer than we had planned in Bangkok because of it...we could get it in a little box at the 7-11. We'd eat this in bed and laugh at how good it was. Ridiculously good.

photos of my little take-home treat.

It's called Miang Kham and I'm always happy when they have it in the takeout fridge at my favorite Thai restaurant in Sunnyside, Sripraphai, just like our little addiction in Bangkok: little piles of betel leaves, bits of peanuts, lime, onion, galangal or ginger, toasted coconut and glued together with a sweet sticky sauce of tamarind and nam-pla, DIY, you just wrap it up like a delicious version of paan.
Read a better account of it here on of my favorite blogs, Eating Asia...his photos capture perfectly the joys and triumphs of eating in Asia and he's right: I am a "food-addicted farang who loves miang"!