A Thai restaurant near me has opened a sidewalk window selling individual skewers of chicken satay for $1 and red curry chicken for $3.

This was an offer I could not refuse. So I ponied up $3 and got a surprisingly large serving of rice, red curry, a few pieces of chicken…and, oh, *about a pound of canned bamboo shoots.*

Does anybody out there just love canned bamboo shoots? I didn’t think so. Would this dish have felt like it was worth $3 if they’d just left out the bamboo shoots? Yep.