On a Thursday a few weeks ago, I met a friend for an after-work cocktail in a Nolita bar. With the weekend just around the figurative corner and Chinatown around the literal one,  I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pay a visit to Bangkok Center Grocery, the place for just about all your Thai cooking needs, to pick up some ingredients for a  project I’d dog-eared a really long time ago in David Thompson’s tome on Thai cuisine. When I arrived at Mother’s Ruin, my friend took one look at me, raised her eyebrows and said, “Uh, what have you got there?” I looked down at the giant pack of banana leaves and the wispy end of a lemongrass stalk poking out of my tote bag and told her I had stopped in Chinatown for some key ingredients before our meet-up. “Of course you did,” she replied. If I showed up to an after-work function with a 3-foot burdock root sticking out of my bag, no one would be surprised.

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