Tonight, a new food.

It’s called karòn ja, and it’s a mix of rice, coconut, and sugar, pulverized, then cooked inside a coconut leaf.

I was given it, along with another frequent patron - a super-shy girl from the U.K. - by my friend of text-messaging-confusion fame. (How that turn out? It’s still slightly confusing, to be honest. For another time.)

“Open it,” she implored.

So, I did. Unpinned the bits of tiny stick that held the leaves closed, then peeled back one leaf, then another, until I saw it. The gelatinous thing.

Then I put it in my mouth.

The taste and texture was exactly like a really really thick brown fruit-roll-up. But, it wasn’t even slightly sweet, at least to my corn-syrup-expecting taste buds.

“Very sweet, chai/mai?”, she asked?

“Nit-noy” - a little.

I was eating an honestly mostly flavorless lump of gooey rice, fingers covered with some kind of sticky mix of oil and burnt leaf, and my friend the Thai chef, who I’d bet my taste buds on in a heartbeat, was raving about how sweet this thing was.

Earlier in the day, I’d had a conversation with another befriended restauranteur about how, as a tall white man, I can actually convince people I can eat “Thai Food” - that is, food with the chilis still left in. I’ve been here almost a month, and I’ve still never had anything I’d describe as very spicy. I understand that I have a ridiculous spice tolerance, but this is Thailand. They’re supposed to singe your hair with the chilis, here.

After we’d gotten through that point (order Thai sa-tay phet phet - roughly, “Thai style super spicy”), she talked about the wonder that is Thai food - all the flavors, spicy, sour, salty, everything strong. And how it was, when compared to the rest of the bland, flavorless food on earth, well, better. I had to agree.

Which brought me to the karòn ja, decidedly not strong in flavor. As I finished it off (over some rather unsettling rumbling of my stomach), I did begin to notice some nuanced flavors at the end. The coconut was smooth, silky, binding everything together. The sugar was just enough to take the edge off the rice, but leave all the good parts. It was, on the whole, subtle, but rather good.

There was a second, smaller roll that came with the first. “This one, with pepper.”, my friend had explained. Already full from my lovely yellow curry and a soup and a sizable helping of karòn ja, I at least unwrapped the top of the second one, and bit in.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over ten years, but not because I don’t love meat. This second one, and I don’t know how, tasted like sausage. I took two delicious bites, until my stomach warned that maybe, just maybe, we should take this to go, or it was leaving without me.

My stomach eventually calmed, and now, it sits in my fridge. For breakfast sausage. Thai-style.