Sunday, July 12, 2015
Friday, July 10, 2015
Dark Meat
At the end of this month, our borderland Chinese folk will celebrate finishing planting, and give offerings to spirits of the land and ancestors – particularly chicken. Some prefer black meat chicken, reputed to help one look good, be healthy and attractive. So today we took 18 dark chickens up to the mountains to sell.
First we had to catch them. Ours are real free-range chickens, with diet well supplemented by insects and grasses, so they really do provide very healthy meat. The price should be much higher than it is (just above the price for regular chicken), but organics aren’t a big thing here. We’ve lots of fresh food, don’t have factory farms, and most locals use much, much less in the way of packaged food than do Western city folk. Our selection of breakfast cereals and snack foods is way less than at the supermarkets most English-speakers rely on. I’ve been wanting to find applesauce recently, and have looked everywhere; none to be found. We used to have it, but it was expensive. Now we have only apples – plenty of them. Only one place in ChiangRai makes anything decent with them though (Suan Chalern just this side of MaeSuay). One might expect the Chinese who export apples to make applesauce, as it will keep longer than apples, but no… There’s rumor of some epidemic disease current among our pigs these days, and the Thai food at restaurants hardly competes in taste with that of Thai restaurants in so many other countries, but still, we get by.
To catch the chickens we use the tallest aluminum ladder I could get; I hold it while Muay climbs. She’ll have scoped out which chickens are roosting where first. Some like to go high in the trees, others like our veranda. Anyway, both of us will have a flashlight. Muay grabs a rooster or hen without chicks by the legs, and passes it down to me. I take it over to a cage (either steel wire or bamboo – we use both). Sometimes nasty ants bite us – I keep the grass mowed well enough that leeches and scorpions haven’t been a problem.
Were Muay to kill and gut a chicken the price would rise B30 (a dollar is not B34). Live chickens, however, do not require refrigeration! So we put the 18 in one of the round bamboo chicken baskets, put that in the backseat of the car, and headed up to the hills. We sold an old boss of hers three for B370, and she told me that when she worked there she got B1500 a month. Her first job paid only B200/mo. but most of that was in rice (lots of rice – 45 kilos!)… the most her father ever made was under B1000 a month. I spent more on car fuel than I got for the three, and the other twelve went to her mother, meaning I expect nothing back, but that’s OK, I got some interesting photos. I hope readers will enjoy them! And don’t forget to propitiate local spirits and your ancestors. (I wonder if those more businesslike Chinese on the eastern seaboard neglected to do that, leading to current economic turmoil!)
First we had to catch them. Ours are real free-range chickens, with diet well supplemented by insects and grasses, so they really do provide very healthy meat. The price should be much higher than it is (just above the price for regular chicken), but organics aren’t a big thing here. We’ve lots of fresh food, don’t have factory farms, and most locals use much, much less in the way of packaged food than do Western city folk. Our selection of breakfast cereals and snack foods is way less than at the supermarkets most English-speakers rely on. I’ve been wanting to find applesauce recently, and have looked everywhere; none to be found. We used to have it, but it was expensive. Now we have only apples – plenty of them. Only one place in ChiangRai makes anything decent with them though (Suan Chalern just this side of MaeSuay). One might expect the Chinese who export apples to make applesauce, as it will keep longer than apples, but no… There’s rumor of some epidemic disease current among our pigs these days, and the Thai food at restaurants hardly competes in taste with that of Thai restaurants in so many other countries, but still, we get by.
To catch the chickens we use the tallest aluminum ladder I could get; I hold it while Muay climbs. She’ll have scoped out which chickens are roosting where first. Some like to go high in the trees, others like our veranda. Anyway, both of us will have a flashlight. Muay grabs a rooster or hen without chicks by the legs, and passes it down to me. I take it over to a cage (either steel wire or bamboo – we use both). Sometimes nasty ants bite us – I keep the grass mowed well enough that leeches and scorpions haven’t been a problem.
Were Muay to kill and gut a chicken the price would rise B30 (a dollar is not B34). Live chickens, however, do not require refrigeration! So we put the 18 in one of the round bamboo chicken baskets, put that in the backseat of the car, and headed up to the hills. We sold an old boss of hers three for B370, and she told me that when she worked there she got B1500 a month. Her first job paid only B200/mo. but most of that was in rice (lots of rice – 45 kilos!)… the most her father ever made was under B1000 a month. I spent more on car fuel than I got for the three, and the other twelve went to her mother, meaning I expect nothing back, but that’s OK, I got some interesting photos. I hope readers will enjoy them! And don’t forget to propitiate local spirits and your ancestors. (I wonder if those more businesslike Chinese on the eastern seaboard neglected to do that, leading to current economic turmoil!)
Friday, June 19, 2015
Yesterday at Ban PaSakGai school. In the early evening there was also volleyball - all the players seemed to be gay (katoey) or transexual, although I didn't ask. They were clearly having fun (although perhaps not quite as much as Jit - it isn't clear, but if you look closely, his name is on his shirt, in Thai) and staying healthy - wish I was fit enough to have asked to join in.
Monday, April 6, 2015
haze solution
Tis was in both the Nation and Bangkok Post this morning. I wrote and sent it early yesterday, in exasperation.
There is a way to limit the yearly haze, but the rich and powerful are surely too addicted to American-style idiocy to try it. Long ago in England, villages had commons, an area of communal ownership where locals could graze livestock.
If each Thai village had a plot of land where husks and stalks could be brought to be chopped up and composted, they wouldn't need to be burned, but could instead provide fertilising mulch. Some will say, in the manner of those in America who promote privatisation, that this could be done as a business. I don't think so. But it could be done, and without much problem, if profit and class didn't come before people and stability.
There is a way to limit the yearly haze, but the rich and powerful are surely too addicted to American-style idiocy to try it. Long ago in England, villages had commons, an area of communal ownership where locals could graze livestock.
If each Thai village had a plot of land where husks and stalks could be brought to be chopped up and composted, they wouldn't need to be burned, but could instead provide fertilising mulch. Some will say, in the manner of those in America who promote privatisation, that this could be done as a business. I don't think so. But it could be done, and without much problem, if profit and class didn't come before people and stability.
Friday, February 27, 2015
Drunk bug hunting
Around here, where it isn't rice-fields or ground covered with fill-dirt taken from our mountains, anyway, one finds meter-high mounds of very hard dirt, made by termites. The termites ar often underground, and near their nests, nests of Maeng-mao "drunk bugs" can often be found. Something from them the size of goose eggs sells at market for about B3000 (almost $100) a kilo, and today Muay decided to take the kids out to look for some. Where the previous owner had had a chicken coop for his fighting cocks, I'd left a pile of rotting bamboo and other debris; yesterday Muay burned that pile and also some piles of leaves (local custom is to rird of insects and other pests that way; this results in seasonal haze, top-soil loss due to run-off, and reduced biodiversity, but all that wasn't a problem until recently. Now the government has "banned" burning, but being big city folk, they have no advice about composting, top-soil preservation and regeneration, or biodiversity). Under my many-year-old pile were, of course, some termites, but we didn't find drunk-bug nests. Doubtless, right after the first rain, there will be lots of the drunk-bugs flying about any light, fluttering crazily on the ground while dying or being picked up for food. It gets hard to go in and out of houses early evenings as they like to rush inside and fly madly about. Almost as annoying as angered house-flies but not noisy.
At least I was able to buy some red-ant eggs up in the mountains the other day! fun to eat; they pop and are delicious!
At least I was able to buy some red-ant eggs up in the mountains the other day! fun to eat; they pop and are delicious!
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Yesterday I took the family up to the border for New Year Celebrations (Chinese, Lahu, Lisu and Yao) – dancing, feasting, firecrackers, socializing… and saw a bamboo basket larger than usual for sale at the colorfully named Ban Sam Yaek (t-intersection village). There was also a chicken-carrier (pictured). Today an Akha friend and her mother came over to get four chickens and some bamboo. They cut down one of our tall bamboo trees and formed something like a combination of my basket and chicken-carrier, but for chicken nesting. The four chickens, legs tied, were put in a feed (rice) sack, a plastic bag was turned into a handle for the nesting ‘box’ and all, with some oranges and a little other food, loaded up onto the family’s only transportation…
That last is our dog, Mali.
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