Hearts and Thai food

February 9

I bet you don’t have a model of a defibrillator on your desk. Well, I do. It’s an exact replica of the Medtronic Virtuoso™ with Conexus™ Telemetry that gets installed into people whose hearts have a tendency to stop beating. The defibrillator gives the heart a little jolt and the patient continues to live.
My new friend Jennifer Watson sells them and she brought one to dinner for me to have. It's missing the Virtuoso’s guts, but it looks the same.
Or so she says. I wouldn’t know, really, but is that something to lie about?
Jennifer doesn’t just sell defibrillators. She watches the doctors install them to make sure they attach them right. Because it’s important.
And she loves eating. She loves it! She has no interest in cooking, though. Chefs have flirted with her, hoping to seduce her with the allure of a private lesson, but that is not the right approach for Jennifer.
I’d told her about Rhong Tiam, my favorite Thai place in the city, and she thought our eating there together would be a good idea.
And indeed it was, as Jennifer has possibly a higher threshold for spicy food than I do, and thinks eating is just about the greatest thing in the world to do. So she gets up early in the morning to work out to make up for it.
Me, I just eat. I used to go to the gym regularly, but when I stopped going and the world didn’t end I realized I didn’t have to go, and I find it hard to work up the motivation to do so.
At least if I ever need to have a defibrillator installed, I’ll know what it looks like.
What we ate:
Thai chorizo (sai krok isaan)
Vietnamese summer rolls (Jennifer apologized, but she loves them, and I’m not the purist I once was — I mean, go ahead and have Vietnamese food in a Thai restaurant if you want to; even on Rhong Thiam’s menu in its Thai classics section the first dish listed is rendang, and that’s actually Malay)
Thai beef salad (neua nam tok)
Southern style chicken (khua glin gai)
Honey duck (a bit different from the classic pet yang nam phueng, but still delicious)
Then we chatted for about an hour and decided to finish up with tom yam noodle soup with beef