I’ve been listening to Pailin (of Hot Thai Kitchen)’s new podcast, Sabai, like it’s my new best friend. I’ve been following her for years now. For the longest time, I thought that Thai food was too difficult or required too many ingredients to make at home. After watching just a few of her videos, I’ve realized that it’s actually quite approachable, easy to execute (well, most dishes…), and has quite the overlap with Chinese and Vietnamese ingredients I normally buy. Thai food is exactly what she says: if something is different than what you are used to, then you think it’s strange or too difficult. Pai does an amazing job demystifying Thai food and making it seem like easy home-cooking for anyone.

Pai recently had an episode where she and her cohost, Hong Thaimee, discussed rice. I had no idea what a commodity real Thai jasmine rice was. Unless we buy white or brown basmati or Japanese medium grain rice, we normally buy white/brown jasmine rice that is always imported from Thailand. But Pai and Hong specified in their rice episode that because Thai jasmine rice has become so popular, many “fakes” have come out in the market from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, and the quality and fragrance just are not the same. So they insisted for true authenticity, we had to look for the green circle logo for Thai government certification, which has some grains of rice in the image. And if we got this, we would know for sure that we were getting premium Thai jasmine rice of the highest quality. Of course, I’d take any recommendation Pai gave me, so I took a screen shot of the government certification image and saved it on my phone for future reference.

Yesterday, I went down to Manhattan Chinatown and visited my favorite Vietnamese market to pick up some more white jasmine rice. And I realized that the rice I had previously been buying actually *was* Thai government certified, and it wasn’t too expensive (five pounds for $7). Well, this was an exciting discovery: I had already been buying the “in the know” rice before I actually knew! I also picked up a bag of purple rice since I still had some space in my backpack. I ended up walking eight pounds of rice, a bottle of light soy sauce, and a small bag of Chinese bakery goodies, all the way from Chinatown and eventually up to Koreatown. I think that’s my rucking for the day.