Country Curry Fear Factor Style

In my first year of living in England, the Accommodation Office assigned me to an apartment with 5 other Thai postgraduate students. I thought it was rather odd, considering that the whole point of studying abroad is to be exposed to a wider spectrum of culture. Well perhaps the Accommodation Office presumed that we Asians like to stick with our own kind. Or perhaps they wanted to protect me from the wilder side of university life.

Do not get me wrong, I loved my Thai housemates. The assortments of Thai food they used to cook were lovely. Of course not all Thai people like spicy food. Only Fai, whose mother is a Cantonese (there are Thai people who are of Chinese descent, mainly Teochew e.g. Thaksin), loved really spicy food. She used to get shipments of yummy ingredients from her mother. She used to cook one type of Thai southern curry which I found vaguely similar to our Penang Assam Laksa. It was so spicy, fishy and extremely pungent when mixed with bamboo shoots. Each time she cooks that dish, she would always offer me a portion of it. Both of us dug in while everyone else complained about the smell in the kitchen.

Since then, I came across that curry once in Phuket when we were experimenting with the Thai written menu. The one I had in this lovely seafood restaurant in Phuket was SO spicy. I do not think I have ever eaten anything that was so spicy that I just could not eat it! People who know me would know about my high spicy tolerance level. In fact I do not know anyone who could eat anything more spicy than I, except for Sig.Ot. Each mouthful of the curry was followed by huge gulps of water plus the cool condiments that were served with that curry dish; cucumbers, long beans etc.

This time round in Samui, I ordered Country Curry with fish. It tastes vaguely similar to the one Fai used to cook, but a tad too sweet to my liking. That was not the bad bit. There was no fish to be found in the curry except for unidentified bits of stuff inside the curry. I swear I have never ever seen anything like that.

Item A

It was not fish stomach, because it was chewy and very “flowery” in appearance. Reminds me of sotong that have been carved to bloom when cooked, but much more complicated patterns.

Item B

This is the bit I could not get over with. They were a bunch of bubbles, like oversized pearls stuck together. Sig.Ot thought that they may have been the insides of the lungs of something, because of those bubbles. I reminded him that this was supposed to be a fish dish and fish don’t have lungs!

Left (Item B) Right (Item A)

Sig.Ot ate those stuff, and I could not bring myself to eat them. They looked way too gross (some may disagree due to the horseshoe tick eggs!). In the end, I did bring myself to try the bubbles. Sig.Ot described the texture to be similar with the horsecrab eggs; chewy. We decided that the bunch of bubbles were perhaps the eggs of a giant fish. Must be one hell of a fish because they taste nothing like my favourite salmon roe, and I doubt these eggs, if they are indeed eggs, will ever feature in a fine dining menu.