Thai Chocolate Chip Cookies

When I first arrived June asked me many standard "get to know you" questions straight out of her English Language textbook. "How are you?" "Where are you from?" "What is your age?" "What do you like to do?" And for that question I answered, "Well, I like to cook." And June responded, "You can cook cookies." She meant to ask, "Can you bake cookies?" to which I responded "Yes." And then she said, "You can cook cookies for me." She meant to ask, "Would you bake cookies for me?" Thai people struggled with our question words. In Thai the question part goes at the end of the statement, putting it at the beginning is strange to them. Even harder is remembering to raise you voice at the end of your question.

It has literally taken 1.5 weeks to gather all the necessary supplies for baking cookies. Thais don't bake. In fact, the "kitchen" in this mansion is separate from the house and the main cooking area is outside. My host family has an oven but I believe it is really more for show than for cooking purposes. But eventually we gathered all purpose flour (hidden in the aisle with rice flour and tempura flour), sugar (easy to find here!), brown cane sugar (no brown molasses sugar unfortunately), butter (no prob), salt (got it), baking soda (very difficult to track down), eggs (in the fridge), chocolate chips (in the candy aisle) and vanilla extract (impossible. had to substitute for almond extract). Fortunately, my host family realized their baking shortcomings before I did. They had no measuring cups, or measuring spoons. No baking trays. But somehow they tracked all of those necessary parts down. So tonight we baked cookies.

The brown sugar was a little different. It was hot as Hades in the kitchen. Eager June throw in the butter before it had fully softened. But the cookies turned out great. My host father was very keen on learning how to make the cookies. He hovered over me while I was measuring, mixing, and scooping. He asked questions like, "Why no milk?" "You stir slowly?" "Have need everything?" June pranced around the kitchen in an apron, occasionally helping me mix the dough, but mainly playing DJ on her blackberry. Both were content on letting me bake. However, when I pulled out the gooey, hot cookies from the oven June and her father were disappointed. "Too soft! Can't pick up!" I was shocked. Not only would they not eat the raw dough, now they wanted hard cookies. I smiled and slide them back in. 3 to 4 minutes later I pulled harder, crispier, going to be dry cookies from the inexperienced oven. They loved them. I encouraged them to eat them with milk but my advice feel on deaf ears.

I ate 4 cookies. With milk. Soy milk. But it was close. Nice to have a little bit of home over here in this strange place :)