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Almost as mouth watering of a sight as a turkey fresh from the oven.

Personally, I think all holidays should be celebrated with copious amounts of sex. Which might explain my personal creed that every day should be treated like a holiday. The exception to the holiday/sex thingy is Thanksgiving. Not because it is considered a family holiday (though I don’t recommend having sex with your family members) but because the copious amounts of food that make Thanksgiving what it is take precedence over any sex you might otherwise have. Thanksgiving is about stuffing yourself until you need to buy at least one size larger in pants. Or until you’ve reached the age where you can say the hell with it and just slip on a pair of sweats. The problem with eating until you can’t move is that that condition takes a lot of the fun out of sex. So unless you knock one off before the food is ready Thanksgiving is a dry holiday. I’m not complaining. Thanksgiving is the one day out of the year that given a choice between a blow job and a second helping of turkey and stuffing smothered in gravy I’d go with the steaming pile of food every time.

But you can celebrate the holiday any way you’d like.

With my mind focused on all the food I will be eating in just a few short hours, it seems appropriate for today’s post to be about food. Fortunately with my blog it is not an either or proposition like it is in real life, so there’s a sex post too. Or at least a naked male flesh post. Or two. The two is because Thanksgiving is all about overindulging and just in case you decided to to go with the sex option I didn’t want to shortchange ya.

When I was a child a new indoor shopping mall opened not far from our house. Not just new in construction but in shopping experience too. It was the dawn of the days of shopping malls and we were fortunate to have one of the very first built on the west coast within easy driving distance from home. Much like with Super WalMart today, along with the mall came a sundry of new stores and restaurants huddled nearby where hopes were high of siphoning off some of the traffic headed to the mall. One of the new restaurants that became a family favorite – and which I can still picture though what that mall looked like has faded to a blur – was called The World Bazaar. It was what as a visitor to Thailand you know as a food court.

I doubt the food was exceptional. But it was cheap. Which scored with my folks. The selection was . . . I’d make mention of a kid in a candy store but with your choice of a dozen different international cuisines the candy store would pale in comparison. Dining there was a lot like having a Thanksgiving dinner. More food and more dishes to try than anyone ever would really need. Even a family of fat Americans. I’m not sure which came first, the closing of The World Bazaar or my maturing to the realization that with food (as with most things) quality matters more than quantity. That restaurant is a nice memory today but if it was still in business you wouldn’t be able to drag me in there if I was starving. Unless perhaps my only other dining choice was the restaurant down the street from where I currently live that is called The Feed Bag. I kid you not. I guess not everyone learns about that quality/quantity equation.

The first time I saw a food court in Thailand, as you may guess, I was less than thrilled with the idea of eating there. As in refused to do so. Thomas Wolfe said that you can’t go home again and I was willing to take him up on that idea. The World Bazaar may have been a warm memory from my childhood but that didn’t mean I needed to reexperience that dining paradigm as an adult. I know. Stupid farang.

Noom, of course, forced the issue. He went along with my emphatic No! the first few times he led me to the food court at MBK. His plaintive cry of “But I hungry!” was all it took the third time around. Now I’m addicted to food courts in Thailand. Like with The World Bazaar, the selection of different dishes is a plus, as is the inexpensive price. Unlike with The World Bazaar, the food is all cooked fresh. And if you are not a whimpy diner, even if you don’t know what some dish is all you have to do is point and hand over your coupons. The food court experience is one of the best ways to try new Thai dishes.

Because we are big on tradition (we meaning Noom) we eat at MBK’s food court more than any other. The one at the Big C across from Central World is second because they have free water. Free is almost as good as tradition in Noom’s opinion. Though many claim the food court at Siam Paragon is tops, Noom is consistent and if free is good paying 10 baht more than you have to for a dish is just plain foolhardy so that food court is not one of his favorites. Though he enjoys eating at nicer restaurants, or pretends to for my benefit, when we stumbled into the food court at the Nigh Bazaar in Chiang Mai it was like he’d just found home. Now within a few minutes of take off when we fly up to Chiang Mai Noom nods his head once and announces, “Tonight we eat at night market.” End of subject.

Since a farang would never be able to figure out how a food court works, despite the number of times we’ve eaten at one, we have a tradition for that too. I hand him a wad of baht, several hundred more than needed, he buys the coupons, hands me a stack, and we go off on our separate ways meeting back at an empty table with our respective tray filled. I’m always amazed that such a little guy can eat that much food – usually he has a full tray, drops it off at the table, and then heads back out to get more. And then again I’m amazed that such a little guy can each that much food when he’s polished off everything he bought and then helps himself to half of mine. That’s only a problem when he digs into my mango sticky rice. Stabbing his hand with my fork is now a tradition when we dine at a food court too.

I’m an old hand at food court dining now. I know the rice cooker filled with water is there to rinse off your utensils before their use. I know that unless the food court sucks no matter what time of the day you visit every table will be filled. And I know your best bet for getting a table is to stand next to someone who looks like they are almost finished eating so that your presence disrupts their meal and they quickly scurry away. I also know that whoever decided whatever you plan on drinking has to be purchased from yet another specific vendor deserves to be shot.

My folks liked taking us kids to The World Bazaar because it meant a meal out where they didn’t have to hear at least one of the kids whine about where the family was dining. Noom likes food courts because of the cheap price and abundance of food, but I suspect it’s also because he can get his fill of fish without listening to me whine about having to dine at a seafood restaurant. Hey, we all have our own traditions.

So there you have it. A post about food in honor of all the food headed my way in just a few hours. Thanksgiving will be a sexless holiday, but that doesn’t mean foreplay is entirely out of the question. I hear a piece of pumpkin pie calling my name right now. Whichever way your holiday goes, a bit of head or the tail end of the turkey, I hope y’all have a great Thanksgiving.

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