A Tuba in Thammarat: More street food!


		A quest: tom yam cow hoof.	Destination: my standby haunt for the past year, the food cart across the street.

Proteins: par-grilled chicken on the left, pork chops on the right, and in the middle, crabs that need to be tied up or they'll crawl off.


	When a vendor meets a vendor--on the left, a guy selling grilled eggs, and on the right, a lady with skewered green mangosteen.	The grilled eggs are on skewers over a wok full of coals in the front part of the basket, sauces and seasonings in the rear.	The mangosteens are skewered and stacked.


	A year ago, this would've sent me for a loop. Now it's just good dinner. Or breakfast.		From what I can gather, they start stewing a vat of whatnots on Friday and renew the contents through Sunday, then use the stock as all-purpose broth until the next Friday.

The grill/fry-rice station. From stage left: the grill with a pile of porkchop. The three buckets are actually clay pots--imagine thick-walled terracotta--that are the local edition of the Weber grill on the side patio. Depending on the order, pots go straight on the coals, or woks go on top.


	From the working end of things, the whatnots pot in the front right, followed by the two grills. The big pot next to the two-flame burner table is the all-purpose-stockpot.	All the stock for tom yam comes from here--shrimp, beef, hoof, whatnots, crab, chicken, any tom yam--as does tom saab (tom yam without complex ingredients and more spice), gaang jeut (literally: bland soup), gaang soom (extra sour curry soup with with spice levels you don't really appreciate until the next day), for flashing pans, lubing up dry sautees, helping out fried rice, anything and everything.	Bottom line, it's the inherent flavor under every dish, like the water at a pasta shop or the strains of yeast at a sourdough bakery.	Small problem, though: it's also where you rinse the pots. So you finish an extra spicy tom saab and have an order for gaang jeut: better rinse the tom saab out, using the multi-purpose stock, dump the rinse back into the vat, and start on your gaang jeut.	The styrofoam stage left: cold storage of all fresh proteins.

Here it is: a table 10" tall with 4 legs that generally hold up, the plastic oval plate, ice, glass, and water; napkins and toothpicks (don't hesitate to wipe down the silverware and plates), a dish of finger veggies (cabbage, green beans, water sprouts, and holy basil) and a little plastic bowl for the cow toe soup (which has flaming briquettes in the middle). All on an eroding plastic mat on the sidewalk.