The One-Clove Garlic, Baily & Baily’s Legs Eleven, and Other Coming-Out-of-Kansas Encounters

You know you are not in Kansas (or Manila) when you peel a garlic and realize the whole bulb is an entire clove. I had to bite it to make sure it was garlic and not some premature onion or a kind of onion, so I had to suffer with this stinging garlic taste in my mouth for the rest of the day. Yes, it is garlic. Afraid the whole thing might not last if I store it, I decided to use it all. Surprisingly, it is not as strong as a clove of ordinary garlic. I am stupefied by a lot of the ingredients I encounter. In a good way.

My housemate Mai bought a bag of dried chillis to pound and grind. It was in a harmless bag, unlabeled, so I began my dutiful task of chopping them. We tasted it, and it was not so spicy. So we put about a tablespoon into the tom yum Mai made and after a few minutes in the simmering broth you could smell the chilli come to life as though we put in the entire bag. The soup was really spicy. Mai whose tolerance for spice is much higher than mine couldn’t muster it. We ended up watering down the soup, adding coconut milk to it and putting in more chicken. The spice became a little more bearable but the tom yum, you could tell from Mai’s face, was a disaster.