Marita has Moved

Because I can not sit still for long and felt like a change I decided to move Marita Says. Follow my cooking, sewing and some other adventures at the new Marita Says.

Future Updates and Recent Activities

Last week was an exciting week in the kitchen and soon I will be posting some new recipes that I’ve experimented with. Here are some sample pictures to hopefully pique your interest.


I’ve been getting around to some other fun activities as well. On Friday I got round to buying a T-shirt that has been on my mind after a recent trip to Propaganda in the Emporium.


The shirt is designed by a group called Error Clothing whose designs are stocked at various outlets in Bangkok and is also available in Singapore and North America. I liked the simple design, the feel of the 100% cotton jersey fabric, and fell in love with the endearing image. They have numerous other designs available for order at their website, which is easy to navigate and has a simple color search function.

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Alexander and I went on a two-day visa trip to Vientiane last week and got to spend time at our favorite Vientiane coffee shop, JoMa as well as discovering one or two new pleasing places to while away the time in the slowest capital city I know. We got around to the morning market again and I reminded myself that I still want to say a word or two about Hmong crafts, which we saw aplenty in Luang Phabang on our previous visit, but not today.

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About two weeks ago I bought a new sewing machine. It was inexpensive and on sale and it has all the basic functions I need from a machine; straight stitching, zigzag, buttonholes and easy to use. The only problem was the ‘cutesy’ detail on the one side of the machine.


Saturday afternoon I finally got to use it for the first time. I turned a pair of dress pants of Alexander’s into shorts. A really simple procedure, but I was beaming with excitement when I started working on the project. I have not used a sewing machine since late February. The shorts came out nicely. I moved the hem to just below the knee, a style feature I like because it highlights the calves.


Currently I am working on a bag idea I had recently, drawing up the pattern and working on a mockup. Hopefully I will be able to show off the final creation soon.

Fried Tofu with Cashewnuts

This was my first experiment with a dish we learned how to prepare at the Thai Farm Cooking School in Chiang Mai. It is a very straightforward and tasty Thai dish. The original recipe called for chicken and carrots, I decided to try it with tofu and asparagus.

You’ll need:
90 grams of sliced firm tofu
¼ cup of asparagus sliced into chunks
¼ cup of sliced onions
¼ cup mushrooms
¼ cup of cashew nuts
2 sliced chilies, lightly toasted
¼ cup chopped spring onions
1 tablespoon oil
a pinch of salt
1 teaspoon fish sauce
½ teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon oyster sauce
2 tablespoons water

When you have all the ingredients chopped and ready, here is how to prepare it:
Heat the oil in a wok and add the tofu. Fry until golden brown. Add asparagus, onions, mushrooms and water. Continue stir-frying. When it is almost cooked, add the oyster sauce, fish sauce, sugar, salt and spring onions. Stir-fry and mix well. Turn off the heat, add the cashew nuts and chili and you’re done!

Suggestions for Fried Tofu with Cashew Nuts:
- for more bite, do not seed the chilies
- if you cannot find fish sauce you could probably use soy sauce instead
- you can of course substitute tofu with chicken and the asparagus with carrot

Banana in Coconut Milk with Cinnamon

We have been quite busy in our kitchen. Alexander has been treating me to chicken and red pepper burritos and a fantastically fragrant Oh Paedek or Lao Pork Casserole, while I tried my hand at fried chicken with cashew nuts and a Thai dessert; bananas in coconut milk.

We prepared the very popular and seasonal fresh mango with coconut milk and sticky rice at the Thai Farm Cooking School in Chiang Mai and I decided to add some elements of this dessert plus one or two other ideas to my version of their bananas with coconut milk.

The original recipe calls for one cup of coconut milk, half a cup of water, one tablespoon of sugar, two ripe bananas- sliced into thick chunks, and a pinch of salt. Mine calls for some additional ingredients: an inch of cinnamon stick (thanks to Speedhakoo who supplies me with fresh sticks from Madagascar), half a cup of sticky rice, and vanilla ice cream.

Preparing the dessert is simple. Pour the coconut milk into a pot and heat it over medium heat until it begins to boil. Add the banana, sugar and cinnamon and cook until soft. Remove the cinnamon stick and add just a pinch of salt. Scoop some ice cream and a spoonful of sticky rice into a dessert bowl and pour some of the coconut milk sauce and banana over it and serve.

It turned out to be quite a decadently rich dessert, considering all the ingredients, but one has to go over the top every now and then.

Suggestions for making bananas in coconut milk:
- for two people I suggest halving the recipe, a whole cup of coconut milk could be a bit much.
- a splash of dark rum wouldn’t hurt!
- an attractive serving suggestion would be to add a piece of cinnamon stick to the dish.
- the sticky rice I picked up from a sweet lady selling Thai desserts in bags from a street side table on the way home. If finding sweet sticky rice is going to be tricky, you could probably also use tapioca.
- of course both the ice cream and sticky rice are optional, but it does add a little something to an otherwise very liquid-y dessert

First Balcony Dinner

Finally having our balcony kitchen ready, I could not wait to try my hand at some ideas that had been taking shape over the past few months of traveling. The recipe books from the Thai and Lao cooking courses we did would finally be put to good use, but for our first home cooked meal in the new apartment it had to be something original.

In Siem Reap we ate stir-fried pumpkin at a couple of Khmer restaurants. The dish was an instant hit with us and Alexander suggested this as the first one to be prepared in the new kitchen.

I decided not to search for a recipe but just let my senses guide me in experimenting with a new dish. The basics seemed pretty simple; pumpkin, perhaps some chicken, egg and flavoring.

At Tesco down the road, there is unfortunately no Trader Joe’s in Bangkok, we picked up a quartered piece of green pumpkin, one de-boned chicken breast, 2 long green chili peppers (I believe it may have been banana chilies, also known as Hungarian wax chilies), a handful of shiitake mushrooms, eggs and mushroom sauce.

I was a bit nervous about how the dish would turn out, but there was nothing to be worried about. It was a scrumptious success and a hearty first meal.

Preparing this dish turned out to be surprisingly simple. Here’s what you do; clean and slice up the mushrooms, cut up the chicken breast, half the piece of pumpkin, peel and cube it, and slice up the two peppers.

When all is sliced and cubed you can start cooking. Heat about a tablespoon full of sunflower oil over medium to high heat (vegetable oil or any other oil that is not too fragrant would also work) in a wok, when the oil is hot add the pumpkin and cook until it begins too soften a little. Add the chicken and the green chilies at the same time and mix it through with the pumpkin. When the chicken begins to turn light brown, add the mushrooms and keep on stirring it all around. Move everything to the side of the wok so there is a little space in the center for breaking one egg. Gently break up the egg in the pan so it can cook a little and then mix this through with the rest of the ingredients as well. Add about a tablespoon and a half for mushroom sauce when everything is cooked, give it a good stir around and your stir-fried pumpkin is ready to be served!

Suggestions for making stir-fried pumpkin:
- one usually stir-fries over a higher heat, make sure you keep on moving the ingredients in the wok so it does not burn.
- the chili peppers I used turned out to be a bit mild, add a small red or green chili, unseeded, for more spice.
- mushroom sauce adds a lovely flavor to your cooking but do not use too much as it could make the dish too salty, you’ll be able to find it at Asian grocers or the Asian section of a good grocery store.
- you could probably use tofu instead of chicken or even pork, but I doubt if beef would go well with this dish.
- the egg is optional, but I find that it adds some texture to certain dishes and somehow ‘binds’ all the ingredients.

Bangkok Kitchen

Some hours after waxing poetically about living in Ho Chi Minh City we were looking at the earliest possible flights to Bangkok. My beloved Krung Thep has not been calling, but screaming since we left it almost two months before. It just made plain sense to go back.

We barely set foot in Bangkok when a roller coaster ride of interviews, shopping for decent clothes and house hunting began. It was a nerve wrecking couple of days, but after just over a week both of us had work, a couple of ties and we found the perfect little apartment.

As much as I love traveling, I need to nest, and so finding a place seemed almost more of a priority than finding work. We looked at numerous apartments in various parts of town and finally found two we really liked. We had just finished looking at the second one of the two and were standing outside trying to make up our minds. One of the agent's, in a strong move to win us over, told us that he, as an agent, can give us some advice on picking the right place. He said that when you walk into an apartment and you feel like it is home, you should take it. And so we bid him farewell and called the agent for the apartment on Sukhumvit Soi 11.

Our place is newly built, and came furnished with a bed, lounge set, built in cupboards and after some bargaining, a television. It did not come, however, with a kitchen. As buying food on the street here is such a culinary delight and so easy and inexpensive it makes sense that people would opt to rather just pick up a meal than slave away in front of a stove in the tropical city heat.

But we enjoy cooking in all kinds of climes and places and figured that arranging a kitchen would be an exciting challenge.

The layout of the apartment is such that a kitchen would have to go onto one of the tiny balconies where there is a kitchen sink. The surface area is not enormous and after adding a camp gas stove there is very little work space left. I took some measurements and scoured the home ware departments of some stores until I found a cutting board that would be large enough to fit over part of the sink so we can use it as a work surface.


This made working outside easier, but we still had to extend the kitchen somewhat into the living room/ den area of the apartment, creating a pantry.


Through our browsing around cute little coffee shops such as Vanilla Industry, well stocked grocery stores like Tops, and overwhelming centers like Central we picked up enough utensils, crockery, cutlery and seasonings to get our extended kitchen going. We decided to use the extended shelve in the aforementioned room as storage space for all these items.


And so our kitchen happened.

Ho Chi Minh- first impressions

When I woke up from my nap on the bus we were already somewhere within the limits of Ho Chi Minh city. We were cruising down a narrow street lined with shop houses, goods like clothing, gold and food displayed outside on the street on mannequins or in glass cabinets.

The narrow streets and shop houses reminded me a little of the suburban streets of Taipei, the wares outside was reminiscent of China Town in Bangkok. I felt like I was arriving somewhere familiar.

But I was still nervous and not sure what to expect. Reading in various guide books and listening to the stories of other travelers I was preparing myself for a frenetic city where the traffic is an endless nightmare and everybody is trying to get you to buy something off them.

Our bus arrived at its designated spot in the backpacker area of town and we disembarked, expecting fifty or so touts to jump on our bags and expecting to take us off to the guesthouse or hotel of their choice.

There were only a handful of touts and a simple ‘No thank you’ seemed to be acceptable to them so we were able to pick up our bags and cross the street to the hotel with whom the bus company is affiliated with. We found a clean and neat room with hot water for US$9 and stretched out on the bed. We have arrived in what may become our new hometown.

A peep outside the window revealed another the upstairs patio of another slim, three storied building where a Guanyin statue resided and some back alleys down below. I could be somewhere in Taipei or even downtown Hsinchu, I thought to myself. Even the bathroom looked like a standard Taiwanese bathroom, complete with tiny tub.

We went to a seedy bar/bubble juice shop next door to wait out the rain and ordered iced mocha bubble drinks. The interior reminded me of some tacky places I’ve seen in Taiwan. The kind that wanted to create something funky or classy but the whole aim just got lost somewhere in a sea of fake wisteria and too bright furniture. The mocha was good though and the feeling of being somewhere familiar kept on growing in me.

We waited out the enormous downpour that started just after we arrived and then decided to go for a stroll past the city’s biggest market and to Dong Khoi street where the nicer hotels and restaurants are.

We were walking down a broad boulevard lined with enormous trees. The architecture a combination of attractive French colonial buildings, Chinese shop houses and some modern office blocks and hotels.

This was not what I was expecting and it felt great!

We walked into two bookstores. The one stocked stationary, tacky notebooks and books in Vietnamese. The second one had some English selections as well as really unattractive toys. Reminded me of the kind of book stores I would frequent back in Hsinchu looking for stationary items and the odd English magazine.

The area around Dong Khoi was a complete surprise. Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, Mango and Versace are all here. Sushi restaurants and pretty cafes seems to abound. I was thrilled.

What definitely lacked, and this is a great thing, was touts. A couple of men approached us offering motorbike rides and then in a lower voice marijuana. One creepy fellow walked up to us and in one breath grumbled, “Sex. Massage. Marijuana.” Otherwise our walk was hassle free. Sure, crossing the streets was a bit of a mission at times, but not as bad as I thought it would be.

It has been weeks since we left Bangkok and for the first time we were back in a city with a truly urban and cosmopolitan feel to it. And it reminds me of Taipei a lot. And Alexander pointed out that it still has a bit of a European atmosphere. And we had awesome noodles at a noodle chain for dinner.

So my first impressions of HCMC or Saigon are overwhelmingly positive. Hopefully I will not be disappointed and if all goes well we will really be calling it home soon.