Had a realization: as much as I love it, I'm over the spicy. Sure, load up the som tam with chilis--I'll enjoy the heck out of it it without wincing and relish the last tastes I'm going to experience for the next hour or two.
Great, you can pour on enough fish and oyster sauce to make even that palatable (to a Thai).
Fruits get sour salt or spicy sugar.
Meat-cicles are drowned in either painfully sweet or spicy before hitting the grill or fryer, and then they're thrown in a bag with sweet chili, hot chili, sour chili, or sweet hot with a pinch of sour chili sauce ladled on top.
Even deep fried pork belly gets coated with sweet, spicy, or sweet-spicy sauce.
I've only found one, glorious exception: the lady with the AM grill cart next to the Buddhist temple/school grills corn. Usually, this means making a thick paste of palm oil and palm sugar to rub on before grilling--straight white sugar sprinkles afterward--but she grills it straight. And oh, is it fantastic.
Well, come to think of it, there's an odd exemption to the sugar thing: fried breakfast twists. It's the universal fried batter idea, but here in the land where it's impossible to buy coffee or tea without sugar, where you sprinkle sugar on any fruit and most noodles, in soup and over salads, these fresh-fried little donut twists are light and crispy and deep-fried goodness for about half a minute before they cool and start tasting of the grease that's been cooking up deep-fried goodness while soaking up street pollution for all of the past three days.
Bottom line, though, is that it's food that tastes like food, that's not designed to bite back or defend itself or exact revenge, that doesn't have all kinds of crazy additives and enhancers, and when the rest of the morning world comes in "3 in 1" mixes--sugar, creamer, a pinch of coffee--that's close enough. Besides, who doesn't like a little shot of exhaust in the morning?
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