Through Bajan Eyes

I like my belly bad. I love to partake of local cuisine when I travel.

For me food is a major part of the travel experience. I love to sample the local delicacies when I visit a place. And I’m not satisfied to just eat in tourist-trap restaurants which serve sterilised version of local cuisine. I want it cooked up in the traditional way – even if that means it was cooked on a few rocks in someone’s back yard. Restaurant fare often differs from home-cooked food. It’s too sophisticated. I prefer what I like to call ‘folk food’. I.e. what the people prepare and eat in their homes, far from the tourist trail.

So to this end, I will buy food from roadside vendors; old women with baskets and I especially love if I’m invited to someone’s home for an old-fashioned, home-cooked meal. This has provided me with some memorable culinary experiences. For the most part these have been quite good, but there have been one or two incidences that I’ve chalked up to experience though.

Some of my best culinary experiences were in Thailand. There, I was staying with a friend who lived with local Thai women. One of these women, Kung, cooked for us and was also able to take me to some of the more 'local' restaurants and food establishments. Spice food is extremely spicy, so it was good to have some local knowledge as to which dishes were hotter.

My favourite Thai restaurant was at Laem Hin. It was part fish-farm, part restaurant. You can only get to the restaurant by boat and the fish is caught fresh from the fish pens that are actually part of the restaurant.

Another Thai experience that I remember fondly was when I visited a small village near Surat Thani (read more about that here). The women of household I was staying with, prepared for me traditional Thai dishes. This was a fantastic experience even though some of the dishes were too 'spicy' for me.

I love trying new foods. Some of the 'stranger' things I've eaten were reindeer and moose meat in Norway, along with lungemos (which is similar to chitterlings, I've been told). I also drank horse milk and ate the cheese made from it in Mongolia. In China, I ate cuttlefish and things that I still don't know what it was (and I'm probably better of not knowing).

Some tips that I use in deciding what to try:

1.If it looks strange and smells bad, don’t eat it.
2.If a restaurant seems popular with locals, then it’s probably worth a try.
3.Take tips from locals – ask them to recommend things or if something is good.

Most of the time, I've enjoyed my new foods. But there have been things that I thought were horrible . . . and things that actually made me ill. But that won't deter me. When I travel, the food is a very important part of the culture and so I will continue to indulge in 'folk food' wherever I go.