Bangkok, Thailand

Sunday 17 January 2021

It's 6 PM already here in Bangkok and soon comes dinner time. I know what I am going to eat tonight, because the meal is actually the leftover from my lunch --steamed jasmine rice together with stirfried chicken and bitter cucumber and pork rib soup.

Tasty, yes. Thanks to the ready-to-eat food seller at a Thai food stall near my place, I can save time to do something else--meaning more incomes enough to cover my monthly bills.  Although I usually prefer cooking myself, I rely on her goods rather often these days when I am busy with the work or too tired to cook.  Not only does her food taste excellent like home-made dish but its prices she charges are also incredibly low, at around 30-50 baht per menu.

There are about  8-12 menus she cooks each day. All are newly cooked at the small space inside the stall. Thus, any passers-by can see a slim middle-aged woman busy preparing ingredients and cooking them starting in the afternoon. Then almost all the time she continues cooking and taking a short break from time to time to take orders and pack food for the customers.  She, therefore, looks very exhausted at the end of the day, or I should say at the end of the night because her sales usually ends almost around 8-9 o'clock. Fortunately, her business has gone well with many regular customers. 

This hard working lady reminds me of my mother while the taste of her food makes me recall my mom's cooking during my younger years. As I had been a helper in my mom's kitchen since I was little, I knew it was very hard work especially when we talk about cooking a lot of food for sale, not just for a few persons in the same family. Later after cooking, we had to load all the food  up on the cart and wheeled it to the regular spot on the street. Not until around one o'clock after midnight on the following day that my mother went to sleep after starting her work around 2:30 every night. Still, she poured all intention, love and energy into her products--making all menus taste wonderful to those who taste them. And she sold them in low prices, which made me angry often because we  got little or no profit despite working so hard each day. My mother said it was all right as long as we could continue selling our goods and our customers continued buying from us.  

Now it's time to bring my dinner out from the fridge and microwave it. I am going to enjoy every bite of this meal. Bon appetit!

Gigi