Last night was Nikaela and Lorna’s farewell shindig. For me, this is both intense and sad. In a few days, when they both leave Mae Sai, there will be no volunteers that were here 6 months ago when I first got here.

Two days ago, a staff member asked me if I could make salad dressing for this farewell dinner. No problem, I thought. I’ve watched my mom make enough amazing vinaigrette dressings to be able to whip something up for this dinner. He said, “Great! We’ll go to the market tomorrow and shop for ingredients.” So the next day I get into the car with him and two other Thai staff members. We get to the market and check out the vinegar section to see that they have none of the balsamic variety. For me, this was a dead end in the salad dressing making process and I wasn’t sure if I could make it without it.

So the obvious next step in this situation for a cuisine-challenged moron is to call Mom. Now, my mom is in France right now. And my cell phone doesn’t let me call France….or I just don’t know the right code combination to dial out of Thailand and into France. I called my brother and my Dad in New York to call my mom to call me….and I completely forgot about the time difference and in New York it was 2:00 am….and I wanted to talk about salad dressing.

My brother was nice enough to not hang up on me. In fact, he helped me out and called my Mom in France so that she could call me….

Let me take the opportunity to acknowledge the fact that this story is already long and ridiculous and testament to my being a dumbass. It only gets worse though, so if you’re sick of this now, stop reading.

So after a conversation with my mom, where she reassured me that making a vinaigrette without balsamic vinegar is doable, I put regular distilled vinegar into the shopping basket along with oil, mustard and a few different herbs. We get into the check out line and the staff asked me, “…are you going to buy any sugar or cream?” I told them I didn’t really know how to make a cream dressing and they looked a little taken aback….but they trusted me, which in retrospect, was a mistake.

Getting back to the centre and into the kitchen, I started pouring and whisking together the different ingredients…and then I sampled it and thought to myself how I really miss good ole’ vinaigrette on a mixed green salad. I thought the dressing was decent, but to be sure, I asked a kitchen staff member to sample it to see what it needed. She dipped her finger into the bowl and sampled it, then shook her head violently while grimacing and saying, “SOUR! SOUR! HOW CAN YOU EAT THIS?!?”

This was a little disconcerting for a first sample, and I tried to get other people in the kitchen to try it to. Most people were too freaked by the color and the first woman’s reaction, and then everyone that actually tried it went into momentary spasms as the tastes wore off.

Note: Up until this point, I thought of Thailand as a country that enjoys extreeeeme tastes. Everything is either spicy till you sweat and cry or so sweet that you feel cavities form in your teeth. I couldn’t believe these guys couldn’t handle a little bit of sour.
In any case, they were freaked. And I felt like an idiot. I felt like the Amelia Badelia of Northern Thailand.

And I offered to bottle it, pay for those ingredients myself while they made a new dressing that was more up to par with what they were hoping for. But no. They insisted this concoction could be transformed into something they would eat. Saik went back to the market and came back with cans of condensed milk. And I just watched as he poured three cans into the bowl and mixed it up with a whisk. It was intense. So he sampled it after the new addition and he said, “I think that’s better.” Then I tasted it…and I felt differently, but whatever, he’s a better judge of what’s conventionally tasty in Thailand than I am. Three hours later, the party started and they brought out the giant bowl of salad dressing….which they had heated up under a stove unit. And worse yet, the salad they had made, was a fruit salad. It had pineapples, rambutan, watermelon, sweet corn, kidney beans and a little lettuce. And they served every bowl drenched with the hot salad dressing which consisted of: Yellow mustard, vinager, oil, herbs and condensed milk.

At the end of the day, it didn’t matter. The important thing was that we had a formal farewell shindig for two volunteers that are leaving. And Dayk, one of the kids that lives on site, wrote a song and played it on the guitar for everyone. It was about people always coming into these kids lives and then leaving. It goes into how that really sucks, but he knows that we’ll meet together in “the dream world”. No one was really thinking about the fruit salad or at least everyone was nice enough to curb their comments about it until the end of the night. And the bright side is, no one in Mae Sai will ever ask me to help them in the kitchen ever again.