Saturday. While waking up in the late morning, I drained and rinsed the pinto beans, put them into a crockpot, and filled it to the top with water. With the crockpot covered on high heat, I made a pot of chai masala and started working on organizing the 1500+ pictures of my students I've been taking over the last three weeks. After a couple hours I stirred the beans and found they were still hard - no worries, mate, good food takes time.
Frijoles de olla is one of the simplest and yet most satisfying contributions to world cuisine, and preparing them in the crockpot is pretty much no-fail. However, past experience has shown that if you’re lazy about scraping beans off the sides of the pot during the occasional stir, they will eventually stick and char a little, especially on the high setting. But not to worry - even while drinking beer and getting lost in the virtual world, your senses will remind you that it's time to stir. Beans are attention-starved little bitches sometimes: hey, smell me; hey, listen to me bubbling and farting away; hey, where's the chips 'n' salsa? Stirring the beans about once an hour will ensure a smoother consistency and more even cooking.
When the beans got mostly tender, after about 5 hours, I added three generous pinches of salt and ½ tablespoon of ground roasted cumin. I mashed some of the beans and let it simmer for another hour. Time for a taste: the bean juice was almost salty enough, but the beans themselves not nearly so. I added another 2 large pinches of salt, then mashed away. As I stirred, the smell of the beans was making my mouth water, so I decided to go out for dinner and shopping; while I was gone I left the lid off the crock so the beans would thicken up.
First stop was Carrefour, the megamart about a 20-minute walk from my house. They tend to have good prices on supermarket items such as sugar, chips, vodka, and boxed juice. Before the surgery, when I could still ride the motorcycle, I preferred to buy my fresh meat and vegetables from the local markets, but now that I’m on foot even the closest fresh market is difficult to get to.
Behind Carrefour’s parking lot, on Fridays and Saturdays a vibrant night market jams the back streets. In addition to six blocks of stalls selling shoes, clothing, toys, and electronics, there are two blocks of food stalls. Sadly, I found that the “turtle egg” vendor (see Part II) had already left or simply wasn’t there. But I still found plenty to eat: a small bag of fried chicken rinds (like pork rinds but made with chicken skin) to be dipped in namprik num (a spicy eggplant dip); spicy sausage salad; grilled pork with sticky rice; an ice-cold can of Leo beer, which rapidly warmed to spit-temperature as I tried to drink it down; and a novel presentation of the classic Thai soup known as gaeng juet or dtom juet (“plain soup”).
I’ve been coming to this market once or twice a month since I moved to the neighborhood last June. As well as I think I know all that it has to offer, I still manage to discover new dishes there. The “plain soup” is one of the few Thai food items that don’t scorch a delicate foreigner’s mouth with spice; Thais love it because it so successfully compliments rich and spicy curries. It’s one of the dishes I like to prepare alongside panang curry for my show-off menu. Usually it features chunks of soft egg-tofu or small meatballs, sometimes mushrooms and bean thread noodles, almost always a combination of carrot and cabbage. I had never before seen the version I found this night. In addition to the expected carrots and cabbage, this soup had strips of blade-cut pork with a crowning jewel: a whole small cabbage head hollowed out and filled with seasoned ground pork.
When I got back home two hours after leaving, the beans had cooked to the perfect consistency for my taste, that is thick and creamy. I turned off the heat, slapped the lid back on, had a couple cocktails and went to bed ready to dream of the next steps….
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