Thailand

Lays Thailand continues to celebrate the flavors of the past 25 years. I’d had both of these before, but I don’t believe I wrote about them. There was the nam phrik phao flavor—something like an open flame chili paste in the translation.

I took a long train ride across 6 degrees of latitude. Bangkok is about 13 degrees north, so I’ll call this a narrow road to the slightly north. When I got to Bangkok, I went straight to the snack aisle.

On the Fourth of July weekend, I might normally have a barbeque. Perhaps some potato chips too. This year I decided to mix up the menu a bit, so I skipped the potato chips and went for snacks with a higher protein content.

The fruit vendor at the market has five varieties of mango this time of year. Yesterday at the grocery store there were seven varieties on sale. My neighbor’s mango tree is an early one; it flowered in December, I’ve watched from the balcony as the the fruits grew, and I saw them all get picked over the past two weeks.

You’ve seen, perhaps, the Devil barbecue potato chip in Thailand. I’d had the one in the silver packaging. There’s also a Devil flavor in a red bag. “Let me try this one too,” I thought the other day.

A lot has happened since my last post about a surprising “Chef’s Signature” flavor. That includes my purchase and careful happy hour tasting session of a Devil barbecue chip, retasting the signature salted egg and trying a new signature roasted chili flavor.

You saw, perhaps, the serendipitous arrival (or was it discovery?) of two extraordinary new potato chip flavors last month. These were “Chef’s Signature” flavors. I was excited to find another flavor in this line.

I’d been in southern Thailand, doing the things one does there. Botanizing. Boat rides. Train rides. Eating lots of regional food like khua kling. And keeping my eyes open for the next new flavor of potato chips.

I’ve been cutting back on the potato chips recently, and doing a bit of running. Last weekend I was up early on Sunday to join a large crowd in Surat Thani province for a 30 km run through the beautiful Khao Sok National Park.

I made this map to show some of the places I’ve traveled to over the past few years. This is a test to see if it displays here. In other news, when I arrived in Thailand on a recent trip, I found this new flavor of Lay’s potato chip.