Som tam & gai yang

a plate of som tam & gai yang

One thing I think we all know about eating healthy is that we have to eat a lot of vegetables. Most of us will instantly think of salads, consisting of lettuce, big chunks of onion and a few slices of tomato and cucumber, no dressing. Boring as a math lesson and about as packed with flavor as a cardboard box left out in the rain. The Thais don't really eat salads as we do, and often times it can be a bit hard to find meals with a lot of vegetables if you want to avoid filling your stomach with carbohydrates. The solution is som tam. This great dish made out of shredded unripe papaya, maybe some carrots, maybe even mango or cucumber, pounded in a pestle and mortar with sugar, fish sauce, peanuts, tomatoes and lots of chilies and garlic cloves. Something I really love is the long beans that is most often added, which together with the peanuts gives the dish some crunchiness and a nice consistency.  There is dozens of different kinds of som tam, some with fermented crab, some with dried shrimps, some even deep fried, but for the beginner the standard one is a good place to start. This is what many Thai women - known for their great looks - have at any chance they get, and some of them have as many as 10 chilies in! This is extremely spicy and I normally go for about 4-5 which is still quite potent. If you want to avoid the spicyness all together, then ask for "mai phet", not spicy.  To increase the health factor ask for "mai waan" (not sweet) as they sometimes tend to make it overly sweet and thereby miss some of the healthy potential. Spot your som tam dealer by a glass display case full of vegetables and a pestle and mortar.

Another thing most of us know already is that chicken is a superb way of getting more protein, without all the bad stuff. Here in Thailand chicken is very often fried, and even though its absolutely delicious, I don't think, I have to give any further explanation to why we need to avoid it, to get the physic we're after. Fortunately a lot of the chicken you see here is not fried, but rather grilled and therefore by far the healthier option of the two. Here its called gai yang and every time you drive by a grill (often made out of an old oil barrel) you will catch the scent of the chicken slowly grilling away over it. This usually gets my saliva running and luckily most places that sell gai yang also have som tam on the menu as the two goes together as burger and fries - healthy burger and fries!