Food and Drink

I can still remember a profound disappointment with an ice cream flavor I chose once, and only once, as a child. We had gone to the grocery store, and I’d seen a new flavor of ice cream—a granola flavor.

It’s fruit season in Thailand. One can get fruit at any time of year, but a check of orchards and markets shows that mango season starts in April; after that come durian and rambutan, and mangosteens mark the end of it.

Swensen’s Ice Cream has a salted watermelon flavor this summer. The salted watermelon ice cream is superb. It pairs especially well with a scoop of coconut milk ice cream.1

The new flavors have been coming so quickly that I just can’t keep up. There was the cheese pizza flavor—I called it the gateway chip—and I’ve been think about it ever since.

Funny how I happened to be in 7-11 again the other day. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw some unfamiliar packaging, and took a closer look to find the details of this new flavor.

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.