spice2I renewed my lucky acquaintance with Christina Arokiasamy, The Spice Merchant’s Daughter, for an article in this month’s Sunset magazine. It doesn’t seem to be online yet, but I’ll update if there’s a link. For the story, Christina took me on a whirlwind shopping tour for ingredients used in Southeast Asian cooking, including a market I’d never visited before, Mekong Rainier in Columbia City (3400 Rainier Ave. S.). The exterior can politely be described as nondescript, I probably would have blown right past it on my own. When Christina took me inside, though, I found a wealth of inexpensive spices, supplies, and produce. I left with a loaded bag of palm sugar, oyster sauce, tamarind, Asian greens, and her favorite brand of rice stick noodles.

Every time I leave her company, I pledge to spend more time cooking dishes like hers, alive with lime juice and ginger and freshly ground spices. So I signed up, along with a few friends, for one of her hands-on cooking classes, where we learned to make an intense Massaman curry, a green papaya salad, and other specialties. I was assigned to grate the papaya, and she handed me a kitchen tool perfectly designed for doing so, one that easily shredded perfect, long neat lengths into the bowl. “What IS this?” I asked. “Oh, that’s a papaya twizzler,” Christina said, or at least that’s the word I heard.

“Where do you get them?”

“Oh, I got mine at Ikea.”

Pause.

“In Bangkok.”

Bookmark and Share