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I ate a lot of new and interesting things in Thailand, including adding several new species to my list of “things that I’m definitely above in the food chain.” I don’t recall ever eating a reptile before, so Iguana works on two levels.

I’m usually pretty enthused about eating something totally new, but I was kind of nervous about the Iguana. I distinctly remember Iguana as being the one thing that Tony Bourdain has repeatedly described as awful, on the air, in print and in interviews, and that knowledge was definitely present in my mind. I’ve got a pretty decent photo narrative of the meal, from hunting, to cooking, to the finished meal, so I’ll let the pictures, with some commentary, tell the story.

above - Jessada with an Iguana. This is a little guy, and when Ole and Danoi arrived with it, we weren’t sure if there would be enough iguana or big enough iguana to eat. That’s Ole in the background, wearing the baseball cap.

above - Deceased iguana in a moped basket. There’s something “so Thailand” about a moped basket filled with lunch-to-be, and I can’t quite explain it.

above - Danoi shooting mangosteen with a slingshot. As far as I can tell, every male in Kalasin under 40 has a home made slingshot, and is deadly accurate with it. I was never quite able to figure out how old all of my friends in Kalasin were, but Jessada is in his 30’s, and they seem to have grown up together. Everyone got really, really into shooting at the mangosteen. Their enthusiasm reminded me a lot of being a teenager and spending months practicing with blowguns and throwing axes.

above - Back at Ole’s house, Lek (who’s personality totally goes with the awesome cowboy hat - strong, silent type, all the way) skinned and cleaned the iguana. One of these guys was totally alive throughout the whole skinning process, and was still moving when he hit the coals. If you’d like to see a close-up of the plate of skinned iguana, look here.

above - Ole cooks the iguana over a small charcoal brazier. My host, Jessada, had a house fully equipped with a modern kitchen, but everyone else in the village that I met did most of their cooking in the yard, over charcoal. This area where Ole is cooking is directly adjacent to their water storage cistern and is home to a variety of livestock during the day. The kind of kitchen sterility that we think is normal or healthy in the West is totally absent in rural Thailand.

After shooting this photo, Jessada said “You want to go see boxing?” and threw me onto the back of a moped to go see some young kids practicing their kickboxing, which was awesome. More on that in another post.

above - Here Danoi mixes and mashes the iguana with spices. I had no idea what he was doing, as I had been gone watching kids box for about 20 minutes. The mortar and pestle seem to be a basic part of food prep in Kalasin. Danoi and Ole were both enthusiastic cooks. That knife that’s on the plate in front of Danoi was used for every imaginable kitchen task, as was the big round of wood at the bottom of the photo. Despite the total lack of “Western style sanitation”, all of the cooks I saw in Kalasin were really meticulous about cleaning their cutting surface, and their blades.

above - Danoi cuts green papaya to make the ubiquitous green papaya salad that accompanies every meal in Kalasin. Usually there would be two kinds of salad, one spicy and one more savory.

above - the finished lunch, ready to serve. The dish in the center with the hard boiled eggs and the garlic is the iguana. Center, with the leafy herb is a sort of glass noodle with fish sauce, on the left is the omnipresent green papaya salad, the soup just above and to the left of the noodle was this pumkin/squash & beef soup that was insanely good, the dish to the right it more iguana with hard boiled eggs and the dish at the very top is another green papaya salad. The baskets all had Isaan style sticky rice. The whole meal was eaten with the hands, although I was still really clumsy at eating Isaan style and the guys brought me a spoon, since I was getting my fingers in everything.

To be totally honest, the iguana was not that interesting, although it was novel. It certainly wasn’t the off-putting disaster that Tony Bourdain encountered in Mexico, though. I actually didn’t realize that I was eating the iguana (it wasn’t really a big deal to anyone), until I was halfway through the meal. I kept thinking “where is the iguana?”, since I was gone for much of the prep. Only after eating a ton of it, with the egg, I realised “Oh, that’s the iguana!” According to my notes the flavour of the iguana was mint/chili/iguana.

The pumpkin/squash based beef soup was one of the best things I tasted in Thailand, and I’d kill to know how to make it myself. The squash had the best mouth feel, incredibly tender, awash in a barely oily beef broth.

I think this was the second meal that I ate with Kalasin style whiskey. In Thailand, any hard liquor is called whiskey, and the Kalasin style is basically a fermented rice grain alcohol. The fermentation appears to be somewhat inefficient, as it has a hard hangover. The plus side to the inefficient fermentation is the whiskey has a sort of raisin finish that’s really, really nice. Whiskey in Thailand is drunk as a shot, followed by a glass of water. Generally the whiskey and water are drunk out of a pair of glasses that are shared and passed around, which is a nice social experience. Thai people seem to have a general low tolerance for alcohol, as they really were concerned that I might drink too much and get plastered, but their version of plastered seems to be really conservative by American standards. I really miss Kalasin whiskey, now that I can’t get it.