Seafood Buffet

Yesterday we went for a short afternoon drive to get a break from the heat (the car has A/C, the house does not).  While we were out we checked out a store in our town that we had not been to before.

Wiang Kaen has lots of little stores that sell pretty much the same thing, but each store has its own unique personality and carries some things the others don’t.  I’m glad we checked out this one because it is the only one we’ve found so far that sells wheat flour and it sells 3 kinds—all-purpose flour, bread flour and cake flour.

Since it was such a hot day, we we’re looking for something salty to eat so we got some crackers.  A challenge buying crackers here in Thailand is they tend to be sweet rather than salty—so we settled on some seaweed laced crackers that had less sugar than most.  Ingrid found a can of sardines.  And that became dinner (along with raw veggies).

Nori seaweed crackers

As we were eating dinner, all of a sudden, I was having a memory flashback to about 30 years ago.  At the time we lived in Perry County, Alabama, where I was working on a soil survey.  MacArthur Harris was my supervisor.  He good teacher and manager and he was also a lot of fun.

Soon after we arrived in the county, MacArthur and I were out working in a place called Suttle—about half way between Marion and Selma.  Suttle was named after the family that owned the main ranch in the area.  The family had a small store that sold various groceries and miscellaneous items.  We stopped in there to get lunch; I figured that I would get something at the deli counter.  But MacArthur said he was going to get the seafood buffet.  This really got me wondering, “seafood buffet?”  “In Suttle Store?”  I had been in the store more often than MacArthur and I had never seen such a thing.

Soil map of Suttle area in Perry County, Alabama.
The store is the large building between the "14" and "MlA"

After we made our purchases, we carried the brown bags containing our purchases to the picnic table outside to eat.  MacArthur proceeded to pull out an onion, a box of saltines, and a can of sardines.  He sliced the onion and then laid a slice of onion and some sardine on the each cracker.

MacArthur, wherever you are, you trained me well.  The tradition lives on.

The house where we lived in Marion--we rented the upstairs.