Wonderfood

Every so often, when I am home after being on-call and Peter can get away for lunch, we eat somewhere without chicken fingers on the menu. Recently, we decided to eat at Bangkok Alley, a Thai restaurant on Germantown Rd. Now we enjoy Thai food, but there are really different types of Thai--there's the sweetened-up Americanized version (less spice, more coconut milk) and there's the more authentic (so we've heard) kind, with unique blends of spices we rarely get to eat here. In New Haven, when I was at Yale, we had some awesome Thai food. In Northampton, where I went to college, again, yum-yum. In Davenport, we had a decent Thai place called Exotic Thai, which could satisfy the craving but wouldn't scare the Midwesterners' palate. We were reasonably sure Bangkok Alley would be on par with Exotic Thai. We were wrong.

In a matter of minutes, I became a huge advocate of Edamame. This is a soy bean. Oh, yum, you may say. No, really, it IS yum! They look like small, plump snow peas, served in a bowl. The skins are buttered and salted. You pick them up with your fingers, bite into them and suck the peas out. They are very nutty and soft, wa taste and texture which blends perfectly with the buttery, salty skin. The skin is then deposited in a side bowl, crab leg-style. There are about 3 peas in each pod. I could have been finished eating after this appetizer, but I had some scrumtious curry after that, with a little coconut milk and a lot of zing. Edamame was recently featured in an issue of Mother Earth News and is touted as being exceptionally good for you. I can hardly believe this is true, since these peas are so tasty. And things this tasty are rarely good for you, right? (Don't tell my kids I said that.) Edamame (ee-da-mommy, according to the server) is a WonderFood.