Big Excitement at the Little Dinner Table

I don't think that food is a very interesting topic for a blog, but there are exceptions:

1. On Wednesday, my benefactor got hold of some "Lanna food." It was a huge bag filled with bright green powder. She cooked it up with some garlic, a little pork, oyster sauce and some bean sauce and dished it into two big plates, two vast green mounds on the table, no rice, "not need with wegable." It was some kind of "plankton" that the hill tribes gather in the jungle, "only at one time in a year." It wasn't bad.

2. On Thursday, we had larb. I looked in the wok and said, oh, good, pork larb, but no. "Not pork," said my benefactor, "is bird." It was some kind of red meat, but a bird, I guessed chicken, maybe duck? "No," she said, "litten bird." I tried to get to the bottom of it and, son of a gun, it was the hill tribes again. Some kind of jungle bird as big as your fist, they must catch them by the hundreds. Here's the twist: they leave in the bones. I think they just grind up the whole d*mn bird, the stuff was liberally sprinkled with white flecks, and not too small either. It was crunchy as hell, not bad actually, although you needed to be careful with the crunch part, either that or lose a filling. Spitting out pieces of bone as big as match heads was fun, good balistics, good distance.