Scampering Lunches and Fresh Coconut Milk

So… Will we regret starting out in Thailand? The food, even before we head to the south and the north, is phenomenal, and Z is asking ominous questions about Cambodian cuisine.

He is developing an addiction to Tom Yam soup, made here with coconut milk fresh from the tree, which brings the flavour much closer to the dairy than the heavy candied coconut sweetness you get with packaged products, and experience at restaurants closer to home.

The lemongrass and ginger are infinitely fresher, and fresh kaffir lime much more of an accent than the oily, heavy aged variety. Thai basil and mint wraps it all up far more elegantly than the metallic lemon overdose of fresh coriander you get in the UK.

And then of course there’s the vegetables, from tiny bitter aubergines and sweet morning glory to succulent tiny squashes, carrots, cabbage and string beans.

The chilli round here is pretty subtle, a backnote that builds to a slow and warming burn, although Z seems to have a knack for taking off the roof of his mouth with tiny, scarlet birds-eyes.

I’d been looking forward to trying som tam, a green papaya salad with a sour, slightly sweet and fairly spicy dressing, and given that the restaurants in Bang Bao are on stilts over the sea off the pier, and keep their crustacea alive with fresh salt water, blue crab seemed a natural choice.

So… It arrived, its carapace atop the salad, its quarters, limbs and claws distributed throughout, succulent orange roe just visible on the inner shell.

I pick up a limb. Every single joint goes into spasm, a frenzied galvanic can-can, clearly some primeval reflex attempting to drag its dismemembered body to some nonexistent cover to regroup.

Now, I’m not what you’d call squeamish.

I will blithely chow down on living oysters, having previously tortured them with vinegar and shallots. I will happily eat raw meat and seafood, slices of mackerel off the bone.

But the vigour of this reaction — plus, I guess, the fact that I was expecting it to be cooked — made me scream like a girl.

And, yes, obviously, it was utterly delicious. Phenomenally sweet, juicy flesh sucked straight from the shell; rich, buttery neon-orange roe.

For Z, the day my lunch tried to run off the plate is one of the highlights of his holiday.