The story of how I made hot and sour soup

When I was a young person living in a studio apartment in the East Village, relying on post-World Trade Center unemployment checks to survive, my comfort food was hot and sour soup from Fei Ma restaurant. Fei Ma was a tiny, shitty Chinese takeaway with what was probably completely unremarkable food, but to my eager and unrefined palate, it was exotic and perhaps most importantly, cheap.

 Since then, of course, I've been to China, and I realize that the food I ate from that hole-in-the-wall restaurant was nothing like what they serve in China. And frankly, I don't care. My experience of the food in China was difficult -- the stress involved in trying to get a delicious meal nearly negated the enjoyment of said delicious meal. Fei Ma, on the other hand, was ridiculously easy. I'd call, and they'd arrive, climbing the four floors of stairs to my door. Pretty much the opposite of my experience in China where I mostly got inexplicable combinations of food--likely due to my inability to speak Mandarin--which waitresses gathered to watch me attempt to eat, tittering and taking photographs.

 I sometimes think back to the days, in the early aughties, when I thought that a delivery of hot and sour soup could solve all of my problems, and I pine for that magical elixer. So I decided to learn how to make it. I've been testing a few recipes and finally found one that I like. I made it for my Chinese-American friend here in Phnom Penh who feigned approval, but I could read the look on her face which said "This is not how my mother makes hot and sour soup." But she had seconds, so as the kids say, wevs.

As close to American-style Chinese take-out as you'll find in Phnom Penh.

 So when you tell me that this hot and sour soup I've made isn't authentic, please take note that I DON'T CARE. I don't care if real Chinese people in China even eat hot and sour soup and if they do, that the hot and sour soup is nothing like this one or that lily buds are like, totally required. I don't care. I've finally learned to make hot and sour soup exactly like an American Chinese takeaway and I'm pretty pleased with myself.

 The recipe I am using is very close to the recipe by Bruce Cost from Gourmet Mag in 2005. (Note that he wrote an entire cookbook on how to cook American takeaway-style Chinese food.) I tried Mark Bittman's recipe and was astounded by how far off it was--it didn't even include white pepper, which is, frankly, ridiculous. Anyway, here's my variation of Bruce Cost's recipe. His called for dried lily buds, which I found here in Cambodia but what I found was probably not what he was talking about because they were weird and hard and not delicious. So I eliminated them and made some minor changes in the amounts of other things because some of them didn't make sense.

Ingredients:

5 ounces boneless pork loin, cut into 1/4-inch-thick strips
2 teaspoons dark soy sauce
5 small Chinese dried black mushrooms (shitakke-type)
5 small dried tree ear mushrooms
2 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/2 cup sliced bamboo shoots, cut into small strips
2 tablespoons red-wine vinegar
2 tablespoons rice vinegar (not seasoned)
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons oil
4-6 cups chicken broth
4 oz firm tofu, rinsed and drained, then cut into 1/4-inch-thick strips
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground white pepper
2 tablespoons thinly sliced scallion greens
2 tablespoons fresh whole cilantro leaves

Prep:

Toss pork with dark soy sauce in a bowl until pork is well coated.

Soak black and tree ear mushrooms in 3 cups boiling-hot water in another bowl (water should cover mushrooms), turning over black mushrooms occasionally, until softened, about 30 minutes. (Tree ears will expand significantly.) Cut out and discard stems from black mushrooms, then squeeze excess liquid from caps into bowl and thinly slice caps. Remove tree ears from bowl, reserving liquid, and trim off any hard nubs. If large, cut tree ears into bite-size pieces. Stir together 1 cup mushroom-soaking liquid (keep the remainder in case you want more liquid later) with cornstarch in a small bowl and set aside.

Cover bamboo shoots with cold water by 2 inches in a small saucepan, then bring just to a boil (to remove bitterness) and drain in a sieve.

Stir together vinegars, light soy sauce, sugar, and salt in another small bowl.

Heat a wok over high heat until a bead of water vaporizes within 1 to 2 seconds of contact. Pour peanut oil down side of wok, then swirl oil, tilting wok to coat sides. Add pork and stir-fry until meat just changes color, about 1 minute, then add black mushrooms, tree ears, and bamboo shoots and stir-fry 1 minute.

Add broth and bring to a boil, then add tofu. Return to a boil and add vinegar mixture. Stir cornstarch mixture, then add to broth and return to a boil, stirring. (Liquid will thicken.) Reduce heat to moderate and simmer 1 minute.

Beat eggs with a fork and add a few drops of sesame oil. Add eggs to soup in a thin stream, stirring slowly in one direction with a spoon. Stir in white pepper, then drizzle in remaining sesame oil and divide among into bowls. Sprinkle with scallions and cilantro before serving.

And you're done. Just like Fei Ma would have made it (although slightly less gloopy and more packed with the expensive ingredients than at a takeaway).

How to be a bad tourist

Here are a series of photos I took of some tourists and a young Burmese girl near Amarapura in Burma earlier this month. This is why when I travel, I try to only take pictures of food.

I'll just straighten your hair so you look a little more "ethnic."

Hold those necklaces up high, girly, I might buy one when we're done with this!

The Burmese sellers watch with resignation during another hair styling, and another tourist joins in.

And then there were four...

If only they would all buy a necklace, this girl could go home for the day. But they didn't.

This was the point where I completely lost my shit

And started jamming my camera in the tourists' faces and taking pictures of them.

Especially the first woman who was treating that poor girl like an animal in the zoo.

As it turns out...

...she didn't like being treated that way, either.

Smoked salmon for breakfast...not in Cambodia

File this under first world problems, but I can't get a decent western breakfast in Cambodia. I rarely want one, anyway. I'm not a breakfast person and if I am going to eat breakfast, I'd rather have bai sach chrouk than toast and tea, anyway.

But once every few months I want a breakfast that includes smoked salmon. As I begin my rant, I'd like to say that smoked salmon is available here, at Lucky supermarket. It's $4 for a frozen package that's from Norway and quite good. It contains enough to cover a good six or eight bagels without skimping. Yet for some reason the expat/NGO dumpholes act like this stuff is as rare as a Cambodian orphan without any living parents.

 Over the weekend I went to Metro for brunch. Metro is a place that activates about a dozen pet peeves in me, being a hangout of overpaid expats and the Khmer riche, both of whom have the capacity to break me out in hives. But, they have a pretty good brunch.

I ordered the eggs benedict with smoked salmon and it was beautiful. I can't deny that. But when I took my first bite, I was overwhelmed with the taste of chemicals.

They had spread margarine all over the English muffins, I realized. And not a nice American margarine, this was straight out of some Chinese toothpaste factory. Further inspection revealed that the Hollandaise sauce itself was not made with actual butter, but this same low-quality margarine. To add insult to injury, the two quarter-sized pieces of lox were doused in the stuff, and the meal cost more than 8 times what a nice plate of bai sach chrouk would.

So that was Sunday. Then this morning I was at Java Cafe, another hot spot for NGO workers in biz casual talking loudly on their mobile phones and drinking lattes. I was just there to drop something off, but after having a long conversation with someone about how pointless it is to eat western food in Cambodia,  I gazed longingly at the bagels. Is it too much to hope for a big Jew-y bagel and lox? The answer, unfortunately is yes.

I ordered the bagel with capers and shallots. They brought me a bagel with one slice of salmon on one side of the bagel and no cream cheese. I went and asked for cream cheese, and after a while, was finally given a shmear. It was okay, but the salmon wasn't as nice as the frozen stuff at Lucky, and the niggardly portion wasn't enough to cover both halves of the bagel.

When I went to pay, I found out that I had been charged an extra $1 for said shmear of cream cheese. Same price as a plate of bai sach chrouk and a bowl of soup.

Here's the breakdown:
Bagel, lox and cream cheese - $2.75
Bagel, lox, capers and shallots - $3
cream cheese - $1

So the addition of capers and shallots to the bagel with lox and cream cheese costs $1.25, an increase of 45%. Keep in mind, shallots cost less than 1 cent each here, and capers are available in bulk quantities for less than in the US. And before you tell me how lucky I am to get a bagel for $4, restrain yourself until you've moved to Cambodia and dealt with all that entails.

Why does this bagel bother me so much? Is it just because I am broke and resentful? Perhaps. But the problem with Cambodia is that nothing makes sense. There is no obvious logic to the prices, there is no one to ask and there's no point in trying to find out more.

In trying to figure out why this bagel irritated me so much, I came to the conclusion that I was irked that they bothered to serve it at all. If you're going to make a bagel with lox, do it right. Don't leave out the cream cheese. Don't only put salmon on one side of the bagel. Go big or go home. I'll pay double for a totally delicious onion bagel with cream cheese, onion, capers and lox and I won't complain about the price. But I will complain about the price (and everything else) when I go home unfulfilled.

The moral of this story is if you're going to bother with western breakfasts, the DIY kind are always the best. Otherwise just enjoy that bai sach chrouk I can't stop banging on about.

Café Metro No. 271 St. 148, Phnom Penh
Java Cafe 56 Sihanouk Blvd, Phnom Penh

Char...it's what's for dinner

Meals are simple affairs in Cambodia...when it's not a wedding or funeral or engagement party or the King Father's birthday or an auspicious day to open a new office or Pchum Ben or one of the other seemingly bazillion Cambodian holidays.

Beef and lotus rootlet char, from a roadside stall in Kandal province.

But on an average day, for an average Cambodian, char is what's on the menu. Char just means stir-fry in Khmer, and if you look in any of the handful of Cambodian cookbooks that are out there, you won't see very much of it. That's because char dishes are too simple, too, dare I say, boring, to make it into the cookbooks (haven't you heard that Cambodian is going to be the new Vietnamese?) So cookbooks focus on special occasion food, royal cuisine and the dishes that seem more exotic, and ignore what Srey Oun and her family are having for dinner.

Lunch in the provinces: bitter melon soup, char made from crabs picked out of the rice paddy, snails, tomato and pork char and lots of rice. 

Here's what's in most char dishes. One type of meat or fish, and one type of vegetable. The protein can consist of frog, chicken, crabs, fish, prawns, pork, squid, eel, liver, clams, snails or beef. The vegetable might be one of the following: cucumbers, winter melon, tomatoes, Kampot pepper, eggplant, lotus rootlet, baby corn, pumpkin, peppers, chives, mushrooms, papaya, water spinach, mango, ginger, green beans, pineapple, bok choy, bean sprouts, lemongrass, daikon, squash or chayote. Other vegetables and herbs are used in Cambodian cooking, of course, but these are the ones that are most often used in a char dish.

Barely ripe tomato and pork char with scallions.

Here's what most people add to a char dish. Oil, garlic, salt, sugar, soy sauce, fish sauce, black pepper and MSG. Sometimes oyster sauce and corn starch is added. The dish can be garnished with cilantro or scallions, and is always served with rice. The best way to torture a Cambodian from the provinces is to feed them a lunch that has no rice in it -- it does not matter if it is eight slices of sausage pizza, they will complain that they don't feel full and happy without at least a bowl or three of rice.

After taking the weekend off from office work, Rina goes home to work the rice paddy and make lunch.

Some chars will have two types of vegetables, but usually it's just one, and it's always one type of meat. Whereas westerners use vegetables to garnish huge steaks, Cambodians use small pieces of meat to add flavor to vegetables. Chars are usually mostly vegetables with some small bits of meat thrown in. When I was out in Kandal province with my friend Rina, we went shopping together (by shopping I mean picking over the fly-infested pork her neighbor had brought over from town a few hours earlier). For a group of 9 or 10 people, most of them adults and most of them having spent the morning doing grueling work in the rice paddies, Rina bought a piece of pork that was probably 4 ounces, half the size of an average steak in the States.

Lunch in the provinces: a char made from a vegetable called nor nung and beef.

At a family meal, usually one or two types of char are served and a soup. All of the dishes are served family-style, with each person having their own bowl of rice.The soup is spooned onto rice and eaten that way. No one seems to drink water during a meal except the barangs (perhaps explaining the regular mass faintings in Cambodia).

Cucumber, tomato and chicken char made by your truly, in an attempt to find an Asian husband.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've completely assimilated to Khmer culture, and make char for dinner all the time. It's simple and delicious, and worthy of being in the Cambodian cookbooks. You can find dozens of char recipes at this fantastic site, khmerkromrecipes.com.

This is not the sort of dish that really requires a recipe, but here's one I wrote down while watching Rina cook up a storm for her family.

Cambodian Char

3-4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
vegetable oil
pork, chicken or beef cut into thinnish pieces
fish sauce, to taste
1 or 2 tsp sugar
1 small tsp MSG (optional, of course)
2 cups vegetable of choice, such as tomato, cucumber, melon, green papaya
black pepper
scallions, chopped

Heat up your wok and add oil. When it's hot, add the garlic. A minute later, add the pork. Cook for a minute or two, then add the fish sauce, sugar and MSG.

Add one cup of water and the vegetables.

Cook 2-3 minutes or until everything is done (but not overdone!)

Add black pepper and garnish with chopped scallions.

Serve with rice.

7 things you didn't know about Cambodian kitchens

Or maybe you already knew all of this. But I certainly didn't when I first moved to Cambodia.

 1. No ovens

 Ovens are not a traditional part of Cambodian cooking, which relies most on stir-frying, grilling and soups. The only way to get an oven in a Cambodian flat is to rent an apartment that's been tricked out for Westerners (and if you have an apartment with an oven, you're probably paying double what everyone else pays) or buy a standalone oven. I have done neither of these things, and have lived without baking for over a year now.

My current, tiny Cambodian kitchen. At least it has a cabinet.

 2. Bugs

 A standard part of tropical living, my kitchen is filled with creatures. This is not because I leave food sitting around, this is because the weather is conducive to critters, I live in a slum and my neighbors have different standards of hygiene than I'm used to (ie. they leave rotting garbage all over the street). At this moment, I have a dragonfly trapped in my kitchen who refuses to leave. Most days, there are at least a few geckos staring at me blindly as I prepare my lunch.

 The worst are the ants. If I cut an apple on the counter and don't wipe the counter down afterwards, within 6 to 8 minutes, the entire counter is swarming with ants trying to lick the knife. They expectantly wait on the edge of the sink for the water to dry, allowing them to traverse the edges of my drain for stray grains of rice. I have come to believe that the ants are not just innocently trying to feed themselves, but are only here to antagonize me. At one point in my life I didn't believe in pesticides. Now I use Raid like hairspray.

3. Gas burners

 Perhaps this goes without saying, but I was surprised when I moved here to find that my stovetop involves a giant gas tank and a couple of burners. Apparently not turning off the gas is incredibly dangerous, but I cannot remember to do this. One of my friends tells me this is because I was not raised watching Asian soap operas where someone would ring the doorbell and the entire house would explode because of some housewife's failure to close the gas tank. When I die in my apartment inferno, people will point to this blog post as an eeire forecast of things to come.

4. No storage

 Most Cambodians only buy as much food as they will serve to their family that day. They do not understand the concept of buying in bulk. Even staples like uncooked rice can be bought in portion-sized servings. The average Khmer will have bottles of oil, soy sauce and fish sauce, and containers of sugar, salt and MSG next to their gas burner. And that's it. Because they do not understand the Western desire to compulsively hoard food, they do not put cupboards or storage of any kind in the average Cambodian apartment. If you are lucky, you'll find a small tiled pantry, but many kitchens do not even have this. My kitchen has a giant bookshelf that I moved into it, which is a constant reminder of what a glutton I am.

My first kitchen in Phnom Penh. Who needs food storage when they shop every day?

5. MSG

 Yes, I said it. All Cambodian kitchens have MSG in them, usually in at least a few formats. The salt-like crystals, the chicken powder, the chili sauce. The great majority of Khmer household chefs seem to be...not lazy, exactly, but interested in making cooking as quick and dirty as possible. That said, their dinners are pretty good so maybe they are on to something.

6. Hot

 Another probably obvious one, but Cambodian kitchens are hot. The temperature here hovers around 90 most days, but the 70% humidity brings the "feels like" temperature over 100. Even at night. About 20 degrees more, and that's my poorly ventilated kitchen. Imagine trying to prepare dinner in a dry sauna and you'll know what my mealtime is like. This is why many families drag their little grill onto the sidewalk outside their house and make dinner out there.

7. Fruit and veg 

Lest I seem like I'm complaining (I'm not), there's another addition to my kitchen that was non-existent when I lived in London and Dublin. Fresh fruit and vegetables, and not of the depressing potatoes and cabbage variety. I can get fresh mangoes for $0.25 apiece here, and right now I've got fresh papaya, bananas and lychees waiting for me to devour them. I used to pay 60 cents for one stalk of lemongrass when I lived in London -- now I pay 2 cents per stalk. There are a plethora of vegetables on offer here, and though I don't know what half of them are, I appreciate their existence. For the first time in my life, I am getting my 5 a day and I'm not even trying.

Some Cambodian food stories

I've had a couple of food articles out lately -- if you're looking for more info on the Cambodian food scene, please check 'em out.

Outtake from the delicious Cambodian dishes -- taken at 54 Langeach Sros on St 178, Phnom Penh.

10 Delicious Cambodian Dishes at CNN Go

Destination Cambodia: It'll all end in beers. An article about Phnom Penh beer gardens -- where to drink and what to eat. From the South China Morning Post.

My street food series on Travelfish:

Phnom Penh street food: Bai sach chrouk
Phnom Penh street food: Coconut milk desserts
Phnom Penh street food: Nom banh chok
Eating crickets in Phnom Penh

I've got a lot more food stories and restaurant reviews on the Travelfish Phnom Penh blog, if you're interested.

Finally getting on the bento train

I've been interested in bento since I was a teenager and discovered the Sanrio store at the Fairfield Mall. I can't say that I actually made lunch with any of my Kerokerokeroppi accessories more than a few times -- my bento box seemed far better suited to carrying my collection of mentholated cigarettes and hairclips.

When I traveled through Japan on my grand tour, I wistfully looked at all of the bento boxes, desperately wanting a Mameshiba one but not being able to justifying buying something that I'd have to carry around for the next twelve months on my back. So after settling in Cambodia last year, I vowed that eventually I'd get into bento.

Here's what I made:

Chicken kaarage, Japanese fried chicken
My dad's perfect sesame noodles (if anyone is interested I'll post the recipe)
Sunomono salad, Japanese cucumber and wakame salad
Sliced watermelon
Longans
Cherry tomato

It was a pretty successful first attempt. I think I got the balance right of carbs/protein/fruit/vegetables although I could have probably got some extra veg in there. I've never actually made fried chicken before so the experience was sort of terrifying and at the same time, pretty cool. Lots of oil going everywhere and me squealing and shrieking.

It was especially gratifying because I just left the whole mess in the kitchen for the cleaner to deal with -- which almost made up for the dengue fever when it comes to this living-in-Cambodia lark.


My tiny ridiculous kitchen.

On hunger and tropical fevers

I've recently recovered from a whopper of an illness that included a staph infection caused by itching a mosquito bite, and a tropical fever, thought to be dengue, that quite probably sprang from the same mosquito bite. This my friends, is tropical living at its best.

I spent about three weeks in bed, crying mostly, and watching DVDs (thank goodness for lax copyright protection in Cambodia, where DVDs cost $1.50 each). The strangest thing about the whole illness, other than seriously wondering if I really was going to die in some Phnom Penh alley that reeks of rotting garbage, was that I lost my appetite.

I mean really lost it. I just wasn't hungry. I'd think that maybe I should eat something, but couldn't think of anything that seemed tempting. A friend brought over Indian food and I couldn't force myself to eat it. I felt like I'd already eating three lunches and was trying to eat another -- I wasn't in the slightest bit hungry. I went for entire 24 hour periods without thinking about solid food.

This was a strange experience for me. Bizarre, even. I am always hungry. Even if I am not hungry, I am capable of eating a full meal at any given time, even if I've just finished one. When I've been sick in the past, I've never been able to figure out whether you are supposed to feed or starve a cold or flu, so I'd feed both. Terrible bouts of food poisoning wouldn't put me off eating -- I'd just have lunch and wait for it to come back out again. I've never lost my appetite before.

It took dengue fever to give me an insight into what normal people live like. I've always wondered what it must be like to be stupid, and finally got the opportunity to find out after having my wisdom teeth removed and being rendered mute and moronic by the dental drugs for over four hours. By the time I "got" a joke, it would be minutes later, far too late to respond. I finally understood what my high school classmates had to endure, having hit every branch on the way down from the stupid tree. I felt guilty for every "duh" I spit out at them over the years.

And now, being indifferent to food. I finally understood the girls who said "Oh I don't care," when you ask what they wanted for lunch. "It doesn't matter. Whatever." "Oh, I'm not hungry." Uh, yeah.

If you ask me what I want for lunch, I always care. It always matter. But not with this tropical fever, it took my very humanity away. I had become one of them -- those people that don't care about food.

Nothing sounded tempting, and after a few days of consuming nothing but water, I knew I had to force myself to eat. The only things that sort of sounded halfway edible were sweets. But the sweets selection here is lacking, and I was unable to leave my house. Finally, I managed to source a few -- and I'm ashamed to admit this -- Better Crocker cake mixes. I've got no oven of course, because I live in Cambodia, so once a week I'd pull myself to a standing position and dump the whole lot into my Crock Pot, wait four hours and force some slow-cooked instant cake into my mouth. The old Lina would have been able to eat an entire cake in one sitting, relished it, in fact. New, normal Lina found even a small piece of much-anticipated cake overwhelming.

I'm back to my old self now. Indeed, I just had to eat a curry to get through writing this post, but I'm glad that I had the opportunity to be exactly the person I've never been before and with any luck, will never be again.

The mile-high supper club

There are a few things in the world that I'm obsessed with: Italian disco, flat-footed squatting, street food, and collecting miles. There's no way around it, I'm a miles junkie. This is an addiction that has paid off, and with a little help from the FlyerTalk lending team on Kiva, I did my most recent trip "up front."

Of course what I find most exciting about business class is the food. I can't tell you why, because even the best business class food is still marginally worse than what you'd get at the airport, but there's something thrilling about being called Miss Goldberg and having a table set for you, especially when you're essentially in bed and watching Inception at the same time. I've always loved airplane food, though, ever since my first cross-country American Airlines flight alone at the age of four. There's just something thrilling about all of the little meal components and the toothpick and asking for another soda (or wine, these days) and getting it. I can't explain it, but I love it.

I didn't manage to take pictures of all of the meals I ate on this trip (and it was quite a trip, from Phnom Penh to Bangkok to Barcelona via Amman and Madrid, to New York (with a detour in the Berkshires) and back to Phnom Penh via Vancouver and Hong Kong, a lot of flights). But here are a few highlights. Unfortunately most were taken with my phone because I was trying to play it cool.


Royal Jordanian airline had the (to my palate) strangest meals. Perhaps this is because I know nothing about Jordanian cuisine -- before this flight I hadn't even realized that Jordan was a country and not just a New Kid on the Block. Unfortunately I didn't keep the menu for this one, but it was certainly bizarre. Lots of processed meats and a tomato stuffed with some sort of mayonnaise-based salad.


This is the standard Iberia meal for short-haul flights right now. It's cold, and sort of disgusting but also a little bit appealing. Pasta with some slivers of cold fish and caviar, and mysteriously, a soft, Brie-esque cheese. Served with a small bottle of olive oil. Torres wine which ain't bad.


Long-haul Iberia from Madrid to New York was much more rewarding. This was the starter plate: hot bread with extra-virgin olive oil, salmorejo with egg and iberico ham, small potatoes salad with tuna belly and smoked anchovy and a Pedro Ximenez balsamic vinaigrette. This was easily better than most of the food you'd find on the Ramblas in Barcelona, and I was happy to get one last anchovy into me.


Dessert on Iberia was a coconut and passion fruit cake by Paco Torreblanca.


Cathay Pacific had the best food, even if my pictures don't reflect it. My 20 hour flight from JFK-YVR-HKG sucked the life out of me so quickly that I forgot to take pictures (and it was just too dark onboard most of the time). My main was stir-fried prawns with X.O. sauce (love that stuff) and then I ended up with this tiramisu.


The worst picture, but my favorite airplane meal of the trip. This was breakfast of shredded pork and mushroom congee with pan-fried turnip cake with preserved meats on Cathay Pacific. I could eat this for breakfast every day. I love turnip cake.


And my final meal on Dragonair -- braised rice vermicelli with roast duck and snow vegetables and assorted dim sum.

Intestinal fortitude: The good, the bad and the home-made yogurt

I’ve been a negligent blogger as of late. I’ve got this whole other blog that I actually get paid to write, and that’s been sucking a lot of my creative attention. That and I’m lazy.



But let’s talk about yogurt. One of the things that living in the tropics has done is to make me increasingly aware of the fragility of my own health. Cambodian doctors are more likely to kill you than make you well, many of the medications I’m familiar with aren’t easily available and medical care from a Western-trained doctor is ridiculously expensive. So I’ve started taking vitamins, exercising and eating yogurt in the hopes I won’t need to be airlifted to Bangkok someday.

Why yogurt? It’s great for intestinal health and the flora. Eating it supposedly makes you less susceptible to bad bacteria -- the kind you get from eating gnarly street food. Of course what it doesn’t protect you from is bad yogurt, which I deliberately chose to eat on Monday.

My only explanation is now that I live in a cowboy society without rules, I figured that the laws of science don’t apply to me either. I ate a big helping of yogurt that had gone bad, mixed with a curry to mask the taste, reasoning that since yogurt is basically spoiled anyway, eating a rancid bowl wouldn’t make any difference. I was wrong.

I’m someone that doesn’t have a lot of food hangups. I don’t check to see if vegetables have been washed safely, if ice is from a machine or if the street food vendor has clean fingernails. I just eat whatever looks good and figure that any intestinal distress that comes my way is just the price I pay for deliciousness. I believe that sustained low-level exposure to bacteria has also helped me build up an internal resistance that prevents me from getting sick very often. No so this yogurt.

Suffice to say it was gruesome and the fact that I was quite aware that I had deliberately eaten bad yogurt did not make the next 24 hours of spewing any more bearable. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was as bad as Bolivia, and that’s saying something. It's right up there with Rome and Peru in terms of being one of the great bouts of food poisoning in my life. My first in Asia, in fact.

By Wednesday I was walking again, and the thought of ever eating yogurt again made my legs go wobbly. But screw it, right? There’s nothing that will help one recover from a bout of extreme food poisoning like getting some good healthy bacteria into the old gut. The reason I got sick in the first place was because I ate day-old raita from an Indian takeaway. If it’s reasonably fresh, yogurt should not go bad after a day. But yogurt in Cambodia is never particularly fresh, dated properly, or reasonably priced. So I decided to make it myself.



Apparently making yogurt is actually really easy, which is bizarre because it seems like difficult prairie-woman work, like milking cows and churning butter. And Cambodia is a great place to make one's own yogurt as the daily 95 degree weather is conducive to all sorts of bacterial growth, yogurt included. As part of my now-I-live-in-Cambodia campaign, I bought myself a slow-cooker which has been gathering dust after a chicken feet-stock experiment a few months ago. So I found this recipe on Nourishing Days, bought some starter yogurt from the Bangladeshi market, and made myself a batch.

In Cambodia it is difficult to find plain yogurt. Most yogurt is imported from Thailand and is heavily sweetened. Even the yogurt marked “plain” is sweetened or vanilla-flavored. There’s one dairy that makes actual plain yogurt, but it’s expensive, the containers leak and it always goes off before the sell-by date. I tend to not trust the Bangladeshi because there are not dates involved whatsoever, so I never know if I’ve gotten today’s or last week’s batch.



But my yogurt -- oh it is so fresh and perfect! Despite the fact that I am still sick from the evil yogurt, nothing tastes better than my yogurt. I have been eating it in the mornings with fresh passionfruit and honey and thinking how lucky I am that I have access to passionfruit for next to nothing and enough time on my hands that can do things like make yogurt and worry about intestinal flora. This is the life.