Vegetarian festival in Bangkok's Chinatown

For 51 weeks per year, it's not easy to be a serious vegetarian in Thailand. Most so-called salads are actually plates of ground pork or calamari in a spicy chili-lime sauce. Ask for something vegetarian or jay and it often still comes full of fish sauce,  sometimes with chunks of meat. But for nine days in each fall, keeping vegetarian can be surprisingly easy.

The Kin Jay Vegetarian Festival is a time of spiritual cleansing for Chinese-Thai Buddhists in September or October. There are ten rules for purification during the festival, among them no alcohol, no sex, and no meat.  To help folks take meat out of their diets, vendors around the city create vegetarian and some vegan dishes and alert passersby with yellow flags.

In Bangkok, the biggest celebration of Kin Jay takes place is the Chinatown street fair. Dozens of stalls line Yaowarat Road, all selling vegetarian treats.

I spent a giddy three hours in Chinatown with my coworkers on Saturday, most of the time spent snacking and strolling. All the dishes were under 100 baht/$3, and the eye candy almost equaled the real candy.

 
Our snacks tended to disappear pretty quickly, but I snagged a few shots.

Freshly pressed sugar cane juice, which is amazingly light and drinkable:

Marinated mushrooms over chewy rice-flour cups:

Spiced rice with beans, carrots, and cooked gingko biloba, all steamed in taro leaves:

One of my favorite dishes was a vegan soup from a vendor that normally sells the same broth with about five types of pork:

With something this warm and filling, you'd never miss the meat. The tofu, mushrooms, wide rice noodles, and fried dough soak up the aromatic broth, and the cilantro adds a refreshing kick. It also helped that this was one of only two places where we sat down.

The other was a little dessert stand where I learned something important. Apparently, bird phlegm counts as vegetarian.  Made from rock sugar, water, and the hardened saliva of a swallow, bird's nest soup is pretty innocuous, as long as you don't think about what you're eating, which is this:

My Malaysian coworker Celina swears that it does wonders for your skin. "It's like drinking collagen," as she described it. Drinking collagen didn't sound particularly appealing to me either, but Celina has gorgeous skin so I gave it a go. Mine had some cooked gingko at the bottom, so it can make me smart too.

At base level, it's a lot like other syrupy desserts here. The texture of the re-softened spit strings was the worst part, but after a few minutes I got to chatting and barely noticed that I had finished the bowl.

I'm pretty sure that my skin looked brighter on Sunday.

Until next time, peace, from a giant dancing soy bean oil mascot:

In Thailand, isn't it just called 'pad'?

Pad Thai (Thai-style stir-fried noodles) is a classic for a reason. It's the perfect crave-able dish for days that are too hot for a spicy curry or pork dish. You can find the meal at tons of street stalls around the city. Good clues that a vendor serves pad Thai are a basket of bean sprouts and a wok.

I bought my inaugural pad Thai in Thailand for 25 baht/83 cents from a vendor with little plastic tables outside Chatuchak Weekend Market. Every table has condiments so you can have yours just the way you like it: salty, spicy, fishy, nutty, etc.

Clockwise from top left: Fish sauce, dried chilies, chili sauce with vinegar, crushed peanuts

The stand next door had set up tables of lovely fresh veggies.

If I had a complaint about the dish, it would be that no one puts enough egg in pad Thai. Fried egg soaks up the sauce and adds a little saltiness without extra fish sauce--which is delicious, but can overwhelm the other flavors. 

I found the solution at Tang-O, a kitschy roadside cafe a few doors down from my apartment.

Not enough egg? Just wrap the whole thing in a warm, fluffy egg blanket. That's right, I found a pad Thai omelet.

A bonus of this dish is that you feel a little bit like you're opening a present when you eat it. It's the same type of joy I get at slicing into a molten-chocolate cake or biting into a Poptart. There's a little gooey goodness inside.

Apparently you can find this at street stalls too, but Tang-O's version was expertly crafted (65 baht/$2.16). The omelet was light and surprisingly not greasy, and the noodles had extra sauce to balance the spongy egg.