Chef Khun Poo invites you to her unfortunately-named website for delicious Bangkok recipes!
That would have been my third guess.
Perhaps my favorite part: the website has a “Frequently Asked Questions” page that makes no mention whatsoever of the obvious.
The original Earthbound had a character whose default name was “Poo.” You wonder if the translators were asleep or very tongue in cheek.
But not as bad as the Thai version of Carmen Sandiego: “Searching for Kittiporn.”
I have cooked with Poo.
This was when I lived in Bangkok, and she is a very nice lady and a great teacher. The cooking school she runs, Helping Hands, is a home-grown initiative started by Poo and a foreign aid worker as a way to help encourage community development in the Klong Toey slum. It’s only one of several such initiatives and Khun Poo is very active in giving back to her community and helping others “jump-start” their own businesses.
If you find yourself in Bangkok, go cook with Poo. It’s a great way to have fun, eat tasty food and get a slice of life you might not otherwise see.
(BTW: “Poo” in Thai means “crab”, and is a really common nickname. It’s actually pronounced somewhere between “boo” and “poo”.)
Well, I for one am disappointed.
It’s also the nickname of the current prime minister.
You’ve played the game, and have to ask?
Good point. But the other three character names were pretty mundane. And in the era of SNES Final Fantasy, mistranslations abounded.
What a shitty name for a website.
I bought two of her cookbooks and now I have to decide who’s getting one for Christmas. If you don’t think you’ll cook much Thai food, you can get an apron instead.
Just make sure you don’t fall for an imitation.
<leaves before anyone gets it>
Don’t worry, only realpoo touches my hair.
Haha, poocrab. That’s a great schoolyard insult. But surely boo and poo are pronounced the same? Do you mean bow?
A couple of months ago Cooking with Poo won the “Diagram Prize for the oddest book title of the year”, whatever that was. The thing is, she looks so happy on the front cover, and I really can imagine her fronting a TV show. In fact I would love to see her in action, I might pick up some tips.
“The 114-page cookbook derives its unsanitary title from author Saiyuud Diwong’s nickname, Poo, which is Thai for crab. Diwong lives in Bangkok’s Klong Toey slum, where she runs a community cookery school. Her book was crowned winner of the Diagram prize following a public vote, beating an array of oddments including Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge; The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the Future of American Mass Hysteria; and Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World, to win the award.”
I used to work with a lady whose actual real name was Tittifer, and she was from Malaysia or somewhere similar, and she insisted on being called Titty. This was years before In the Night Garden, and so where on Earth did “tittifer” come from? Or was she actually called Titty? There was a Titty in Swallows & Amazons. And what’s the deal with tofu, it’s tasteless. This haunts my mind.
But, having said that bit about crab:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/travel/home-style-recipes-for-curious-cooks/story-e6frg8rf-1226305582265
“Saiyuud is better known as Poo, a nickname shortened from Chompoo, which means rose-apple in Thai, and she has crafted a living teaching tourists how to cook Thai food, first escorting them around the market to see the produce on offer and then introducing a selection of staple recipes to be prepared at her tiny cooking school.”
She appears to be perpetually jolly and in this photo she’s wearing a t-shirt that reads I COOKED WITH POO AND I LIKED IT.
And, yes, there is a book about cooking with semen. It’s called Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes and the more I think about it the more I regret eating that yoghurt I had earlier.
OK, I officially *love *Poo.
There’s also Cooking with Pooh.
I was just going to post that if she only spelled her name with an H it would be so different…but maybe pooh means something even worse in her language!
I’m not absolutely sure, because I’m closer to understanding Japanese and Chinese, but I think it means a combination of the b and p sounds. Something related to the f/v sound but without the wind?
No, it’s a consonant sound that does not exist in English. It falls somewhere between a B and P sound but not quite either one. But I believe it’s closer to “boo” instead of “poo.” You’re probably better off saing “boo.” The hard P sound is always transliterated as “ph.” If you see that in Thai transliterations, it is never pronounced as F.