A Thai pantry

Things you won't find in a Thai pantry:
   - cheese
   - peanut butter
   - chocolate
   - a good hearty bread

Which means all of the above tend to be pretty pricey.  It also means the typical Thai doesn't have a lot of experience with those ingredients.  So my favorite place to get stir-fried vegetables with chicken and cashews, is NOT the place to order pizza.  We're talking a sauce that tastes like the sweet Thai version of ketchup, a creamy processed cheese, and pieces of some sort of seafood, all on what almost tasted like pita bread.  Not exactly Pizza Hut.

On the other hand, actual Thai food can be super cheap and quite good.  A large plate of the above-mentioned stir-fry is only 45 baht ($1.50).  A few blocks from my work there's a place called The Salad Concept, where huge salads are only 50 baht.  Five kinds of lettuce and five different toppings (bell pepper, tomatoes, pumpkin, carrots, olives, etc, etc) fill a bowl the size of a bowling ball cut in half.  I think the petite little side-salads at McDonalds cost about the same in the states.