Wai Kru

Posted on by Kim Beeman

We’ve all been a little under the weather this week. I brought home a nasty cough from school and thoughtfully spread it around. Mid-week, when I was still feeling quite hazy, I attended my first wai kru ceremony. (I was also–unbeknownst to me until I arrived at the assembly hall!–the special guest speaker. I’m grateful to my second grade teacher, Mrs. Mallory, for giving me some good anecdotes to work from.) I don’t know how traditional our ceremony was–there was a special commendation for the best PowerPoint explaining the symbolism behind the flowers used in wai kru–but I enjoyed it. You can see my lovely flowers below.

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We have a plant

Posted on by Dan Visel

It’s a lotus that I found down the street and it’s starting to bloom:

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The plant also has fish living in its pot: they are two guppies of uncertain variety, named by the baby, confusingly, Harriet and Mister Pendleton. They are shy and my phone is not very good at photographing them; also, fish being what they are, and the baby’s fish-caring skills being what they are, they may not be long for this world. But rest assured that they are there.

Our gac

Posted on by Dan Visel

We bought a gac the other day. Here’s what it looked like:

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(You can also use this opportunity to learn the Thai names of the week and their colors from Harriet’s table.)

Gac is a smaller variety of jackfruit (some details here) more commonly found in Vietnam. I’d been looking for one since trying gac juice at the Bang Nam Pheung floating market in Samut Prakan, which we thoughtfully failed to get any pictures of, so you’ll have to imagine how wonderful it was. But gac juice was really nice. So when I saw a gac for sale next to the shoe repair guy, I bought one. It’s kind of squishy, like a slightly deflated football that got a cactus with child.

When you cut it open it looks like this:

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It’s an extremely dramatic fruit inside! Unfortunately it doesn’t really live up to that in taste: it’s kind of bland, a little like a softball, and the seeds that I cut open actively taste bad. The gac juice we had must have been heavily sweetened. It’s possible that this one isn’t ripe; certainly I wouldn’t know. Right now I am soaking the flesh and seeds with some rice to make xôi gấc, though who knows how that will turn out.