What We Ate

Many of the posts I wrote during our round the world journey included descriptions and pictures of meals we had, but these were often of special restaurants or unusual foods.

I took a lot more food photos, especially in Asia, and now that we are home and missing some of the things that were available to us there, I thought I’d record (and reminisce) a bit more about the food we ate (and miss) and some of the gluten free restaurants we found in unlikely places.

The thing we miss the most, without question is the tropical fruits we feasted on daily. We tried many fruits: mangosteens, rambutan, dragon fruit, longans, papaya, passionfruit, pineapple, many varieties of banana, sweet little oranges with green skins, and mangoes, which we ate virtually every day in some form or another and miss the most.

The mangoes were always silken textured, with complex, intense flavors  that imported mangoes never have.

In one of our fancier meals, at the French restaurant in Hanoi on our last night, I even had mango spring rolls!

We ate fresh fruit in various ways, sometimes on the picnics we had while driving around in Thailand, even when we had to eat in the car due to heat and bugs.

We also drank fruit in smoothies, which we also had almost daily, as they were so refreshing in the heat we experienced day in and day out.

Here we are waiting for our smoothies at a small stand in this woman’s garage in Chiang Mai. We had been walking for about half and hour in 40C heat and this little place appeared like an oasis to us at that moment.

In Vietnam, we were introduced to a different way to  consume fruit: the smoothie bowl.

Part smoothie, part fresh fruit, often with some kind of topping of seeds, nuts, and coconut, these were both beautiful and tasty.

The one pictured here was in Cambodia, in a café that donated proceeds to Apopo, a worldwide organisation that trains animals, particularly rats to detect land mines in war torn countries.

Another thing I especially loved were the salads in both Vietnam and Thailand. Spicy rice noodles, green mango, green papaya–all filled with fresh vegetables, often served slightly warm in tangy, delicious dressings. By far the best and most unusual one I ate though, was a banana flower salad, high in the hills above Tam Coc in Pu Luong, Vietnam, sitting on an outdoor terrace overlooking rice fields and villages below. The salad was shredded banana flowers, carrots, bean sprouts, cucumber and other vegetables and it was absolutely delicious!

We ate in few upscale restaurants, notably in Hoi An where we ate at The Spice Route, in Hanoi, where we dined at the Blue Butterfly the first night and Madam Hien the last, and in Siem Reap, where we ate twice at Olive.

But most of our meals were in more humble establishments, like the café in Hanoi that served only Bún chả, a broth with greens, noodles and pork, served with fried spring rolls on the side that were being cooked on the sidewalk outside the cafe. This meal, which was incredibly filling, cost about $4.00 for both of us.

In Sukhothai, as I wrote in the post The Walking Buddha, we had our cheapest and most humble meal of the entire trip, eating noodle soup at a picnic table in a garage. We also ate in the amusingly named restaurant Poo, where we had deep fried whole fish for the first time.

We also ate a lot of ice cream, once after a meal on the beach in Koh Phangan, but mostly in specialty ice cream shops, like the ones we found in Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, including one that called Coco-Mango that served only mango ice cream!

In every city we tried to find dedicated gluten free restaurants or cafes and succeeded in Singapore, where there were two—Tiann and Whole Earth, both of which offered delicious food on site and some tasty things like granola, cookies and bread to take with us.

Surprisingly, we also found a gluten free café in Hoi An called Good Eats that served fantastic breakfast items, which were especially welcome after I had glutened myself a couple of days earlier eating cinnamon ice cream sprinkled with cookie crumbs ☹.

Similarly, we found a dedicated GF café in Hanoi, where the food was great and the take away bread and muffins even better. I also purchased some GF pancake batter there and we enjoyed pancakes several times in Vietnam and Thailand as a result.

Finally, we found the amusingly titled Happy Allergy Bakery in Chiang Mai that served amazing food (as I detailed in my post Elephants, Insects and Reptiles) including some mouth-wateringly good sweet potato fries. The soft white bread I took away from there lasted me for the rest of the journey through Thailand.

We also found a few places that, while not entirely GF, had well marked menus and offered a good number of tasty GF dishes. One of these was in Siem Reap–a restaurant we noticed while walking around that advertised GF pasta. I went in intending to order pasta but then saw that they also offered GF buckwheat galettes (the owner was a Belgian ex-pat) so I ordered one of those instead, and it was great!

While we waited for taxis and ferries in Koh Samui, we spent some time in Indigo cafe, which had a really nice offering of GF desserts and pastries, which were rich and delicious.

But by far the best place we found for a variety of GF offerings was in Chiang Rai—a tiny hole in the wall restaurant called Barab with about 5 tables run by a Thai woman who spoke perfect English, totally understood gluten free, and provided a menu of abut 25 items, only 4 or 5 of which I couldn’t eat.

Everything was prepared with care using the freshest ingredients, tasted fantastic and was incredibly inexpensive. It was so great that we ate there 3 of the 5 nights we spent in that city.

Finally, it is well known that rice comes with almost every meal in Asia, and I was amused by the creative ways some restaurants chose to serve this most humble of dishes.

All in all, our food journey in Asia was rich and varied, almost always delicious and occasionally outstanding. It was a new experience for us eating out every single night, but there were so many different types of foods to try, such a variety of places to eat and it was all so astonishingly inexpensive (by European and American standards) that it really didn’t get tiresome and provided us with a number of new culinary experiences.