Does It Make Me a Rube if I Admit I'm Not Crazy About Pad See Ew for Breakfast?

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I love Thai cooking — stir-fries, noodle dishes, grilled meat and seafood, and green, red, and yellow curries. If your world hasn’t yet been rocked by tom yum soup, I assert you’ve never had real tom yum.

But I’m not crazy about these dishes for breakfast.

Which, interestingly, is fairly common in Thailand.

The most popular Thai breakfasts are probably khao tom and “joke” — which I don’t even know how to write phonetically, but it doesn’t sound anything like it’s written in English. These are both porridge-like dishes made by boiling rice. In khao tom, the rice is less boiled, more recognizable as rice. Both might also have a fried egg on top.

I like both these breakfast dishes, but they can be heavy on the meat. And it’s also heavy meat. Joke is made with pork, and khao tom is often made with fish and seafood, which, as much as I try, I simply do not like, Sam-I-Am — at least not early in the morning.

This is not khao tom, which is more of a soup, but you get the idea. Photo by suradeach …