Back into the kitchen, plea for pleasant comments

It’s the day before pay day, and chef Maiyuu is in the kitchen making khao toon na moo tord, a Japanese-style pork omelette.

He makes it with a couple of Japanese sauces, one of which tastes like beer.

It’s the first time he has made a meal in days. Instead, we have been buying prepared food from a market close to home.

He cycles down there every morning, and buys three or four servings of food. When he gets home, he makes the rice to go with it. That food keeps us going for the rest of the day.

‘When I buy from the market, it is much cheaper than making our own. If we are to save money, I’ll have to make my own food less often, and supplement it with food I buy from the market,’ he said yesterday, as we discussed savings plans.

So, Maiyuu will probably cycle to the market to buy food someone else has made, two or three days a week. On the other days, he’ll make his own.

The food from the market is not as tasty, and gets boring after a while, but we can’t have everything. Making our own dishes every day, especially to the restaurant-style standards which Maiyuu sets for himself, is just too expensive.

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Alert readers will notice a few Asian food blogs on the blog roll. I added another one today, Sticky Rice, by an Australian expatriate living in Vietnam.

I like his simple description of what his blog sets out to accomplish: ‘Eating, drinking, sitting, watching -these are the things we love about Hanoi. On this site we will attempt to eat our way through Vietnam's northern capital and pass on the results.’

In one recent post, the author ‘shares’ a nasty email he received from one reader, which made me recall similar unpleasant comments I have received from readers of this blog over the years.

The email is spectacularly rude, and xenophobic. Here’s an excerpt:

'It's always so much fun to listen to a pretentious, self-important expat brit [sic] try to work out his colonial complex by fawning over primitive cultures...’

Now that we have a new template, I thought it might be time to mark a new start in other ways, by making an appeal for pleasant commentary on this blog.

I am not keen on diatribes, especially those about my relationship with my Thai guy. From now on, they get the boot.

Their authors like to dress up their criticism as ‘helpful advice’, and some of it is interesting as feedback. But too much negative carping, as these comments inevitably comprise, lowers the tone. Few readers seem interested anyway.

The internet can attract some odd types, as we know.

Even after 3.5 years of blogging, I am still stunned at the unpleasantness, impatience and general lack of manners which I routinely find in reader comments left at blogs (not just my own). Who do these people think they are?

Most blogging is poorly rewarded. The authors are kind enough to share details of their lives. In so doing they invite criticism, of course.

But we don’t really know what their lives are like; we are hardly in a position to judge, still less criticise. Those readers who persist in posting one rant after another obviously have a complex of their own they need to overcome.

I have a couple of my own regular critics. One left unpleasant messages in response to the post on the savings box. I have deleted them, along with my reply. As I say, it’s time for a fresh start.

Read the Sticky Rice ‘I’ve got hate mail’ post in full, here.