"The Cooking Altar": Indo Adventures

5 Hours until my flight home from Thailand, and I need something to do.

Today on my viewer stats the viewers in Thailand and other countries were MORE than the US (because P' Lee kindly posted the link to the Akha Ama Facebook page). You should “like” Akha Ama.

Listen to one of my favorite Thai Song while you read by clicking on the link. Its calming me down.

Also here is the link to the BEST bagel recipe ever. I have only made them 4 times in unpredictable temperatures and humidity, but each time they turned out perfectly. Try it, just do exactly what they say and you will melt when you eat them.

Make them! You won't regret it

So my companion (in this context this word means more than a friend, more than a caretaker, more than a partner in crime but everything I could ever want/need in someone who I take on the world with), Emma (also a blogger-she is entertaining, I think you will enjoy it) and I went “bai tiou” ("out" in Thai) to Indonesia for 2 weeks. 

Emma and I during some down time

All of the lodge volunteers at "The Cooking Altar"

If nothing else, we learned how to cook... some of the most amazing secrets I could ever learn! And one of the most gorgeous kitchens I have ever seen. I refered to it in the title as “The Cooking Altar” which is not my own creation of a name… our host told us a recent WWOOF-er called it that. But it is perfect. The stove faces outward, and the chef/cooker stands on a raised platform and does their thing. It is magical… within one hour of seeing it I had started sketching a design for my own kitchen if I ever get the chance to build one.

We were WWOOFing technically, volunteering in exchange for room and board on a usually farm-oriented operation. But lucky for us we were at a guesthouse, Lodges Ekologica where we mostly helped to cook, clean, and tend to guests.

So, I would like to share with you our 

Top epic food Inventions:
*Note: Some key ingredients supplied by southeast Asian food world*

1) Leftover rice with a little bit of coconut milk and coconut sugar (like a rice pudding!)


2) Water boiled down with Coconut sugar to make syrup (we ate on crepes)


3) Iced leftover Tea with passion fruit, lime and coconut sugar


4) Thai style green papaya salad shreds with apple, green bean, tomatoes, garlic and shallots pounded with lime, coconut sugar and vinegar


5) Mashed sweet potatoes with balsamic vinegar/coconut sugar glaze


6) Coffee with chocolate milk


7) Kalua/Rum soaked guava slices with soda water and lime and a sugar cane stirrer

8) Thai fruit sangria
 (made in Thailand)

9) Almost Carbonara (saved by Jocean) with rocket and corn

10
) Yogurt, lime, honey and cilantro dip served with fried cassava (Yucca)


11) Herb butter, smashed in the croc with basil, garlic and salt


12) Coconut milk pesto


13) Deep fried breadfruit/flour balls

!

14) Tempeh deep fried with garlic/shallot/Sambal/KatchupMayonaise

#whoneedsrealsugar?

#SEasia

Happy cooking and see you in the USA!

Louic fries some Tempeh

Tempe. Delicious! but hard to find like this in the US 

Herb Butter by Jan in action 

We also visited the Jakarta Zoo and made friends with the hippo keeper who let Emma have a real live up-close hippo-encounter. I feel lucky to have been with her on this special day.

Akha Ama: Mother of Akha Coffee!

I was on Thai TV! Check out This PBS episode at 9:00 to see the segment about Akha Ama and 10:00 to see me helping out :D
** Many of these photos were taken by Pi Pakee, now studying in bangkok. Kawb Khun Kha!

      Akha Ama Coffee: A Socially Empowered Enterprise. A taste, a space, a community, a family. I spent January as an intern here researching the elements of success of a social enterprise. This one actively counters the profit disparities between farmers and coffee shop owners in the global coffee market, by creating a business with a smaller profit margin in order to actively pay coffee growers more than commodity buyers. I worked in the café for 3 weeks learning the finalities behind the art of pulling the perfect shot of espresso, pouring a cup of drip coffee with maximal flavor, and stayed for one week in the village where the coffee is grown, helping to harvest the beans. The perfect shot of espresso should be evenly sour and bitter and sweet, and the sweetness should linger in the aftertaste… My memories of Akha Ama are all sweet, and I hope the aftertaste lasts a lifetime!

Akha Ama Coffee shop in Chiang Mai, Thailand sources coffee beans from the Akha village "Mae Jan Tai" just three hours away in Chiang Rai province.

           You know what I love? I love the distance that comes with being semi-proficient in a language that makes you blissfully ignorant of social and conversational norms and therefore somewhat immune from embarrassment. It's virtually impossible to be self-conscious because it takes so much effort just to put words in the air. Your main priority is just to speak, rather than try to speak well, with wit, humor or wisdom. That’s what my Thai feels like right now. I don’t realize how I sound until after the words are out of my mouth, so the fear of messing up goes away.

  

Me, Pi Jenny (barista) and Pi Wee

            The people here make fun of my clumsiness but love me for my effort, and nag me about little things that I do that are impolite (like hold the coffee tray between my knees or put my foot up on a bench to tie my shoe- totally inappropriate in Thai culture) but understand that I forget. They are people working in a business to create more economic opportunities for the families and friends of their own villages.

            One of the most significant things I learned being a part of this place is the vast difference between the livelihoods and lifestyles of coffee growers and coffee drinkers. And Akha Ama brings them both together. There is one thing I am reminded of… how important it is to understand where your food/drink comes from. But we already knew I cared about that :).

Pi Lee (co-founder)
 after tasting one of my shots of espresso: yuck.

Why is it that we only really feel the momentum and scale of things that are important to us when they are about to be taken away? With 3 days until I head back to the US, I’m having some of those days… the days that put butterflies in your stomach, make you feel like you're tumbling down a hill faster and faster, maybe even make you feel anxious and sweaty, but mostly make your heart ache… when you try to re-create and re-live everything you loved because you are afraid the memory isn’t good enough, when you try to do everything you haven’t done, and when you try to hug everyone you care about extra much because you know they won’t always be there. It’s a rush, it’s a numbness, it’s a little bit of trembling, its warmth and its emptiness all at once. And as I transcend through time and space it will morph and change, and go away… but I want to remember the feeling because it represents the fear of everything that I love slipping away from me.

We made bagels, and they loved them! Pi Wee, Pi Too (other barista) and Pi Im (bake master) 

Making "Drip Drop"

Everyone

Brewing the coffee in the village

The coffee cherries

Right to left: Akha Ama (mother), myself and Pi Gip who I stayed with in the village

The coffee beans after drying in the sun for 1 week

Ready to be picked up and roasted in the city.

2013 Challenge

Fill this out, by the end of January, and share it with someone (ME! csteele1992@gmail.com)

Ten Things, by Paul Baribeau:

Name 10 things you want to do before you die and then go do them:

Name 10 places you really want to be before you die and then go to them:

Name 10 books you want to read before you die and then go read them:

Name 10 songs you want to hear again before you die, get all your friends together and scream them:

...

Think of all the things that are wrong with your life and then fix them:

Think of all the things you love about your life and be thankful you are blessed with them:

Think of all the things that hold you back and realize you don’t need them:

Think of all the mistakes you have made in your life and make sure you never repeat them:

Think of all the reasons why you never want to die and go and tell someone who might have forgotten:

Try to list the endless reasons why it’s good to be alive and then smile for a while about them:

Because right now all we have is time, time, time

You know but someday that time will run out

That’s the only thing we can be absolutely certain about.

Oceans

Oh my goodness I’ve had a LOT of coffee today (for me) and I’m ready to just type about my life! I started my internship with Akha Ama Coffee today and it was AWESOME. I had a hot mocha with latte art in it, quite a few cups of drip coffee and a million sips of trial espresso while Pi Jenny, one of my bosses, was adjusting the grinder to make perfect espresso. Did you know the grinder often needs to be adjusted multiple times per day as the weather changes? Jenny drinks around 10 cups of espresso per day just tasting these different trial runs.

So… Oceans! My last excursion was to the south of Thailand to the coast- beaches, sunsets, sunburns, coral reefs and endless gorgeous rock cliffs and palm trees and shells! So many shells.

First we spent a week in a fishing village on the west coast of the tail of Thailand. Everyone who lives there is Muslim and subsides mostly off of seafood! YUM! Too bad we learned all about how fishing in the seas+climate change= no more fish in about 20 years. Unfortunately I am not inspired to fix this problem, I feel it is out of our control and I hope other people are inspired to deal with it. Some of my favorite moments here included visiting a mudflat (area where the tide has gone out and lots of sea life hangs out until it comes back in) where I saw a few starfish, armies of crabs, had hermit crabs walk over my feet, and live sand dollars. 
Looking back over my journal I was also perpetually seasick, but luckily that doesn’t stand out much in retrospect: “For some odd reason here I am also chronically nauseous- I don’t really know why but I think it has something to do with feeling at the mercy of the waves, tide and universe. Today we snorkeled through the dugong grasses, and that set me up for a tipsy day. There is nothing quite like floating, limbs splayed, on a bobbing chop of water that is moving under you, listening to yourself breath loudly through your snorkel and staring at a whole nother world below you. At times I felt like a vacuum cleaner or something odd like that, chugging and propelling myself along the surface of the water using my super strong fins”.

I also really enjoyed snorkeling: “Snorkeling was actually a dream- even though I was feeling rocked and nauseous everything was way too real, it just pulled you right in! Colors I had never seen before and fish I only thought could be drawn in animation (Nemo is REAL!) and seas of coral. It was like being in a personal museum or aquarium forever. I had three favorite moments. The first was actually being in the middle of a school of blue/yellow/silver fish and one swam up to me and just stared me in the face. They were all around me and I felt like I was a part of them. The second was seeing three completely different schools of fish all close together and at the same time. The fish and formations were different, but they were still organized in very much the same way. Finally, there was one species of fish that would have individuals of 3-4 other fish follow it around, and it was so cool to see them all in a row”. Who knew fish could be so cool?

Next we traveled to a group of islands out in the ocean where we kayaked, camped and snorkeled for a whole nother week. This time held many of the same experiences, including sleeping outside every night and watching a hermit crab change shells! “Eli and Lily found a hermit crab that is too big for its shell. They went to find it a bigger shell while I babysat. We could tell that it had feelings because it was notably flustered and anxty about its shell, self conscious even, because it couldn’t shrink away when we picked it up. Then the most amazing thing happened: Erin presented it with a bigger shell she had found. It straddled it for a second, feeling it with its antennae and then actually crawled out of its old shell and backed into the bigger one, which looked a little bit too bit (with growing room). It adhered itself to the shell and started walking. It looked like the skinny kid on the football team clunking around in too big pads with its helmet falling off. Everyone laughed and cheered”.

Our view every day!!

The restaurant that my family owned that I hung out at every day...

The beach

The mudflat I spoke of, that is a crab army!

The village from the mudflat

Nightly sunsets

The view from the restaurant

Incase you throughout pineapples grow on trees... they don't.

Tapping a rubber tree

My Ma making us dinner! All local!

The boat we took everywhere

Making Rotti, a deliciously fried Muslim dessert/food

Rotti in action

And Rotti ready to eat: condensed milk makes everything better.

My beloved instructor, Pi Tik!

Our celebration night, my Ma and host grandson

Me and Daniel with our Ma's

My awesome Pi's!

More of the family

Yes, the water is really that blue!

Swimming!

The beach where we camped

Our Thai class "goodbye Cassie" picture

Setting off lanterns, a Chiang Mai tradition for a yearly festival

Our campsite

The things I never want to forget about FORESTS:

The thing about going away for two and a half weeks is: where to start to tell the story? Even journaling while we were on expedition I felt overwhelmed by the amount of detail from day to day that I wanted to put on paper. Ultimately what I found was that it was the sensations, little moments that I wanted to bottle up so that I could open them again at free will and be transported back to the amazing places and be in the company of the amazing families that I have been with for the past few weeks.

In short, in two groups, our study abroad program hiked between 5 rural villages in the North of Thailand and stayed with families in each one. Some were closer to the city and others were farther away, but all rely on the forestland to farm rice and feed themselves. They are almost entirely self-sustainable, growing all of their own vegetables, and of course: rice. There is barely electricity, and in some villages barely any vehicles to travel there and away, because they rarely need to. This land and forest is home to the Karen people, a population of villages who truly value and cherish the gifts of the forests and live in respect to preserving it forever.

11/2/12 Huay Ton Ko, the first village: “I’m having a moment, and I need to write about it! All week I have wondered: does my MooGah (host mom) like me? I have mistakenly done a lot of rude things and she always scrunches up her face when I talk to her like she can’t understand. I just came over to the kitchen to look in an watch her cook, and in a rush she came over and hugged me. She has never initiated anything before- conversation, instruction, anything, but we just had a moment of understanding. I’m sitting here in the doorway where she sits and suddenly feel so connected to her. Even though we are socialized differently and behave differently and have different ways of acknowledging people, we are the same at the very center. Being in the village has been such a rejuvenating experience: being with people who care first and foremost about their own health and the health of the land.”

11/6/12 Huay Hee, the second village, writing to Ali about the things I don’t want to forget:

“1) The STARS. They are magnificent, I feel as though we can see every layer of them, and the milky way too! There are patches of sky that ebb and flow, darken and pearl into this milky strip of galaxy. The stars even twinkle here and even burst at times. Every time I look up at the sky, I’m sure my pupils get a little bit wider.

2) Waking up in the mornings. When we wake up, our MooGah has been up or a few hours already (usually since 4:30 am) cooking, so the sweetest smelling wood fire aroma fills the air of the house and coaxes us out of bed. Sometimes it is hard to wake up, and other times it is easier, but I almost always have to pee really bad after not wanting to get up in the middle of the night. So, we duck out from under the mosquito net and step carefully across the precariously placed bamboo floor emerging outside to a beautiful sunrise: the first few rays of day coming over the hill. On the walk down to the bathroom the puppies lick my feet and nibble at my pajama pants and I look out over the small farm below, perfectly rectangular brown raised beds, with grid like patches of green vegetables.

3) Writing by candle light- I love this lifestyle of getting up and going to bed with the sun, but the sun even still sets very early, so we burn a small candle on an upside down bamboo cup for a small bubble of light.

4) Bucket showers- a mix of discipline and relief… most of the time I’m so dirty that I’m eager to dump the ice cold water on my head.”

11/8/12 Nam Hoo: “We don’t stay as long in this village so it is harder to get to know our families, but we still had some cute moments today: My Bpatee (host father) took me to see the farm and a cave nearby that we actually went inside. He is so small and old and has about 10 LONG hairs growing out of his chin that I just want to wax right off. Also when he speaks he just grunts so I can barely understand him. But today he came over and sat with us and told us semi-sentimentally that he has never had daughters before

11/10/12 Huay Nam Mae Hong Son: “This morning we went to the rice paddy fields, its like a small haven of beauty and bounty of food! We cut rice and I cut my pinky with the sharp knife, and my MooGah lovingly rubbed an herbal leaf on it to stop the bleeding.”

11/13/12 Hike to Pakalo: “This was one of the most unbelievable hikes I have ever been on- we started out down a hill, overlooking the rice fields we had been working in the day before which was so fueling for the rest of the day. From here we decended into the jungle, and basically hiked down a river for 7 hours: through the whole thing massive rock walls rose up on either side and stretchy vines hung down. There were rushing waterfalls and technical moments involved. There were also parts where we came upon cairns that were very precariously placed, small works of art to show that some skillful people had walked before us.”

11/14/12 Huay Nam Mae Sa Guud: “By some fortuitous series of events, Emma and I ended up showering behind some lady’s house in her river. This was such an epic way to end the course- with Thailand trickling and spreading all around us, washing our hair and tired pruny feet in the cold water felt so good.”

Also, I am on recovery day 2 of food poisoning: living hell. Nothing makes you less apetized my your favorite Thai food than the memory of it shooting out your mouth and nose. I was basically a human faucet for 7 or 8 hours. I hope my Karma has some healthy times in store!

The piles of rice that have been cut

The "rai": bit of forest that has been burned to use to grow rice. But it will later be left to grow back into forest

The Naksuksa (students) tying rice

Looking out over Huay Ton Ko

One of my homestay houses

Dorraine and our host-niece

My MooGah in Huay Ton Ko

Our family's farm in Huay Hee

Our house in Huay Hee

Looking out over Huay Hee

Making natural dyes in Nam Hoo

Spinning cotton to weave

Daniel, weaving the cotton

Cutting rice in Hua Nam Mae Hong Son

Our family and house in Hua Nam Mae Hong Son