Hunting for decent street food

Thus far, we have been fairly disappointed with the street food in Bangkok. Part of the problem is we haven't yet found a good source, and another part is that we don't speak enough Thai (the words for noodles, chicken, and not spicy only go so far). But it's also the case that most of what we've seen is practically all the same, regardless of where you are.

The food we've seen is as follows:

Grilled stuff on sticks. Mostly this is chicken and fish, but there are some things that are either sausages, or fishballs, or some combo thereof. The chicken is tasty, though you have to be careful to avoid the liver/gizzard sticks. We haven't had the courage to try one of the fish. They're pretty small, so they'll be very bony, and in most cases they've been sitting around unrefrigerated for some amount of time. The chicken we watch being taken out of an ice cooler and cooked in front of us over hot flame. This doesn't seem possible with the fish.

Noodle soup. The seller has a large vat of bubbling broth, and various bowls of edibles. Point to what you want, and it all goes into a bowl with broth. Problem is, the various edibles are mostly protein (much of it sausages or fish balls or other unidentifiable chopped up stuff), and there don't seem to be many vegetables. The broth tends to be overly greasy and not very appealing. We crave the bright lemon grass, lime leaf, cilantro flavors, but instead get msg and chinese 5 spice.

Fried noodles. We haven't seen many noodle stands that fry noodles. When we do find them, they tend to use quite a lot of oil, and after several meals of fried noodles, you realize that they all taste pretty much the same. Having more Thai would help I think, if we could ask for different sauces, or whether or not they have some vegetables hiding in the stall somewhere. I think that in the absence of our input, they make what they think farangs (white folks) would like, something approximating pad see euw.

Fruit. The fresh fruit is great. Right now it's mostly apples, pineapples, watermelons and mangos. The best stalls have cut fruit arrayed on a tray of ice. Point to the piece you want, and the seller scoops it out, chops it up, and serves it to you in a plastic bag with a long toothpick. Very good. You can also get fried bananas--which can be good--and fried sweet potatoes, which are great if you can find them. There are lots of strawberries in bags, but we have no way of washing them at the hotel. We have bought washed and chopped ones in a cup, but discovered, to our dismay, that instead of sugaring them, they salt them. It's true it brings out the juices, but...ugh.

Battered fried protein. Fried chicken is big. The stalls boil the chicken, then batter it, and fry it. When you order a plate, you get rice that's been cooked in the stock with salt (which tastes very different from the usual plain rice), a piece of the fried chicken that's been chopped into bite size pieces, and a bowl of the broth to use as gravy or soup, your choice. Can be good, can be pretty so so. Other batter fried protein includes shrimp (which are tossed by the handful into batter and fried, which sounds good until you realize that they still have heads and shells), chopped field crabs (which I'm told make even locals sick), and other shellfish (which don't seem to be refrigerated before cooking). (A field crab, in case you're wondering, is a small fresh water crab, about 1 inch from side to side, that lives in rice paddies. They are cooked and eaten whole or mashed up, shells and innards all.)

Green papaya salad. Can be very good, though it can also be so fishy as to be inedible. Shredded green papaya, salt, garlic, tomato, sugar, fish sauce and a few peanuts get pounded together in a mortar with chilies and maybe a green bean or two. You have to be careful, as some places add a field crab to it. The words for not spicy are important here, as the local taste seems to be for incendiary levels of chilies.

And that's what we've found. I have to believe that there is more, better food than we've located. The search will continue.