Tuesday Tip: Cockroaches Travel in Packs!

June 17, 2014July 15, 2014 / Melanie / 6 Comments

Cockroaches, Frogs, and Lizards, Oh my!

Yesterday was a bad day. A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Why? I was ambushed. By cockroaches. An “intrusion” of cockroaches. You know how a group of crows is very aptly called a “murder”? A group of cockroaches is called an “intrusion”. Trust me, I looked it up. And intrude on me they did.

This intruder appeared in the bathroom of our 5th floor apartment. How did he get up there?!

We were at our new favorite spot, Doi Coffee, working hard on our latest projects when I felt something tickling the top of my foot. In Thailand, land of many mosquitos, gnats, and flies, I’ve developed “phantom fly syndrome”, which is something I just made up. Essentially it means you just think you feel tickles and itches, even if there’s nothing there. And usually there isn’t anything there, so scratching every itch or slapping at every tickle makes you look like a crazy person. Trust me, Kevin told me so. In an effort to look as sane as possible, I indefatigably ignored the tickle until it was clear it was not in my head.

Finally, I relented and looked down at my foot, and was utterly horrified at what I saw! Not one, but two (TWO!) cockroaches were trying to climb up my leg! The horror! I screamed, I jumped, I hollered, I nearly knocked over my bar stool. Shockingly, I don’t know the word for cockroach in Thai, so I couldn’t convey what had happened to the ladies in the cafe. They just stared at me with these “check out this foreign nutcase” looks on their faces. (I’ve grown used to that look, you know, being somewhat of a klutz.)

I decided that this intrusion of cockroaches was a sign that it was time to head out, so Kevin and I packed up our things, paid, and went on our merry little way. On the way out the coffee shop doors, another cockroach made its debut! This one seemed to be running towards me with a mission on its mind (“ATTAAAACK THE FOREIGNER!” perhaps?), and I deftly hopped over it and escaped into the great outdoors. Once we were outside, yet another cockroach scurried across our path, completing the superfecta (a trifecta, but with four) of cockroaches.

We’re still not sure what was behind this intrusion into our daily life. Could the cockroaches know something we don’t? Is another earthquake headed our way? Do they sense a drop in barometric pressure and an impending thunderstorm? Only time will tell. In the meantime, we’re doing our best to live with all of these creepy crawlers in peace since they’re part of daily life here. Just a couple weeks ago, we were having dinner outside at Magical Garden Cafe and a frog landed on Kevin’s arm! Several days ago, a lizard fell from a coffee shop overhang and landed in Kevin’s hair! And after we first moved into our apartment, Kevin was pinched by a cicada he tried to kill. It has been a wild ride. We’ll keep you posted as the wild ride continues. Safe travels, friends!

We want to hear from you!

What is the strangest creepy crawler encounter you’ve had on your travels?

Tuesday Taste: Rice Cooker Banana Cake

June 10, 2014July 15, 2014 / Melanie / 3 Comments

Rice Cooker Banana Cake

What do you do when you’re an avid baker trapped in an apartment with no oven? Improvise! While it’s probably possible to throw some cake batter on the hot sidewalk outside to bake a cake, I decided to go with a slightly more sanitary alternative and try to bake in our rice cooker. And what do you know, it actually worked out.

Our 10-cup Rice Cooker

Friends and family know I’m obsessed with baking. It is my own little form of meditation, and our tiny kitchen back home was full of cooking tools, baking pans and fun doodads. Our kitchen here in Chiang Mai is sparsely stocked – we don’t have an oven, a mixer, measuring spoons, or even a full-sized measuring cup! Using some creative math and a lot of google searches, here’s the recipe I used for Rice Cooker Banana Cake. (Original recipe was sourced from this blog.)

Ingredients

Note: All “cup” measurements below were made using a rice cooker cup, which is smaller than a normal measuring cup! I used creative estimation with a bottle of water to find that a normal measuring cup is 1.4 times larger than our rice cooker cup, and scaled the original recipe accordingly, yielding the ingredient amounts below. I also estimated the quantities of baking powder and soda since I don’t have a teaspoon, and things turned out just fine!

3 eggs
3/4 rice cooker cups of sugar
110g butter (it’s best to just buy some new butter and try to eyeball this quantity based on how large the manufacture says your butter is. Most butter here comes in 220g sticks, so I just used a half stick.)
1.8 rice cooker cups of flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 rice cooker cup of mashed bananas
Pinch of salt

Directions

Step 1: Gather your ingredients. Plain ‘ol all purpose flour can be tough to track down in Chiang Mai. Rice flour and cake flour were easy to find, but I had to go to the Rimping Supermarket to find all purpose flour. Rimping is an upscale market in Chiang Mai that specializes in imported goods. They also sell goldfish crackers! And decent imported beer! And all sorts of cheeses! Heaven.

Have you ever heard of these brands? Me neither!

Butter! This stick is 227 grams, so I used slightly less than half of it.

Step 2: Stir the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together in a large bowl. Set aside.

This may or may not be 3/4 tsp. I eyeballed it, and everything turned out ok!

Flour, Baking Powder, Baking Soda, & Salt

Step 3: In another large bowl, beat the eggs until frothy. I wish I had a mixer for this.

Market Fresh Eggs

Step 4: Combine sugar and butter in a pot on the stovetop and cook on medium heat until melted together. Let the butter and sugar cool for a bit, then pour it slowly into the beaten eggs while whisking the eggs (to keep them from being cooked by the hot butter-sugar mixture!).

Combine sugar…

…and butter

Cook, stirring often, until melted and combined.

Step 5: Mash up enough bananas to fill 1 rice cooker cup. For me, this was 4 small bananas. Hopefully you have better kitchen supplies than I did – I mashed my bananas in a coffee mug. So sad.

These old bananas are sweet like candy!

Mash those bananas!

Step 6: Stir the bananas into the egg mixture until well combined. Then add the flour mixture and stir until combined.

Banana Cake Batter! I had more than a few spoonfuls…

Step 7: Grease your rice cooker, then pour in the batter.

The batter, before baking

Step 8: If your rice cooker has a “cake” mode, use that. If not, you can use the “cook” setting. Rumor has it you can even use an old school single-button rice cooker (see original recipe for more info). My cake baked for 35 minutes in our 10-cup rice cooker on “cake” mode and came out perfectly. In the original recipe, it took 1 hour in a 5.5 cup rice cooker on “cook” mode. What you should do is start checking it every 5-10 minutes once you start to smell the cake. It’s done when you can insert a toothpick (or knife) in the center and it comes out clean.

Banana Cake is baked!

Step 9: Immediately remove the insert from your rice cooker. Let cool for about 5 minutes, then use the rice cooker spatula to loosen the cake around the edges. Flip the cake out onto a plate, then use a second plate to flip the cake upright.

Look at that delicious crust on the bottom.

We cut the cake and ate it warm. What a treat!

We Want To Hear From You!

Have you cooked or baked anything in a rice cooker? This is my first attempt at making anything but rice in a rice cooker, and now I’m hooked. If you have any rice cooker tips or recipes to share, please leave us a comment!

A Typical Day in Chiang Mai

May 23, 2014July 15, 2014 / Melanie / 6 Comments

What do you do all day when you’re unemployed, have zero commute, rarely cook your own lunch or dinner, and don’t even have to clean your own apartment? In Seattle, we filled our time with 40-hour-per-week jobs, gardening, cleaning, cooking, running, and home maintenance. While we miss some of those activities (especially gardening and running at Greenlake), it’s nice to have so much time on our hands here in Chiang Mai. Some of our family and friends have been curious what we with ourselves all day. Here’s how we choose to spend our time:

Wake up naturally (we’ve nixed the alarm clock) and have breakfast.