I grew up in a household where every meal included a protein and a starch and vegetables. Mealtimes were never a battle except when grandma came to visit.

My mother described her as someone that successfully distributed the food across the plate in order to make it appear that she had made a good go of it. I suspect she was a meat and potatoes kind of a gal; and even in her old age, would have a good go, but pretty much didn’t really care even for the meat part. Starches never exceeded one; it could be mash potato; boiled potato; rice; some wheat, corn or sorghum based porridge or deep fried potato wedges or a potato bake. On special occasions it might include pasta but you never had more than one. You wouldn’t for example see potatoes and rice at the same meal time. Grandma or Ganty as she was known, hated rice, or at least stated that the only good purpose for rice was pudding! I don’t entirely disagree… though i do like brown rice! You might see a baked potato and a white corn porridge together but that would typically only be at a braaivleis (barbeque) but that porridge was called sadza or pap and most people either had potato pap, not normally both. This leads into the next part of my story.

It is not very often that Mrs J gets irate about home cooking but it seems that in her mind at least; egg noodles and curry; red or green; soused with duck, pork, chicken or seafood simply doesn’t meet a need. Despite my protests that this was an authentic meal and that it wasn’t some confused dish; she insisted that egg noodles were not on; that it had to be rice, born or white but not egg noodles.

It is a funny position to take, I mean, this is the same woman who will gladly switch out rice for quinoa; but egg noodles… she is prejudiced against.

I will do it again – I like it; but when i do, I wll have to to do a rice dish as well in order to avoid the vitriol and the wrath.

After dinner i did a little sleuthing and determined that i was vindicated in my offering. While not normally offered in Thai or Malay cuisine; Green curries with egg noodles are a burmese influenced dish normally served whole. This means that you normally wouldn’t get it as a mix and match meal.

Asian cuisine often involves being offered several dishes and then you choosing the protein, veg and starch etc that meets your palate. All that said, Khao Soi as it is known with a red curry is quite well known and while this dish wasn’t Khao Soi it was nonetheless pretty tasty even if it didn’t meet the expectations of some.