Cooking Middle Eastern in Cambodia

I've just treated myself to a number of new cookbooks, which is always dangerous. Buying more than one cookbook at a time usually means that most are ignored in favor of the most exciting one. So this time, I decided to cook exclusively from each cookbook for a week. Turns out to be a genius plan, anyway, because each cuisine really requires a few staple ingredients, and once you already have them in the fridge, it's easier (and cheaper) to make more recipes, or find recipes that you already have the ingredients for at home. I'm a few days in to my first week of Middle Eastern food, and thought I would post some photos and commentary about The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden.

Of the cookbooks that have already arrived (Burma: Rivers of Flavor, Vietnamese Home Cooking, and The Country Cooking of Greece plus Japanese Farm Food is allegedly on its way), The New Book of Middle Eastern Food (TNBOMEF) is certainly the least inspiring in terms of looks. Clocking in at 513 pages, the book is almost entirely text, with three photography sections that have a few old-fashioned photos of the prepared dishes. David Hagerman this photographer is not. But since my initial grocery shop was done the same day I returned home after two weeks in Sri Lanka (more on that later), I was drawn to TNBOMEF as the least Asian of the bunch.  I don't know anything about Middle Eastern food. Nothing. Allegedly this book covers Egypt, Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Syria and North Africa. I've been to Turkey a couple of times, but other than that, I'm a total newb, which is sort of exciting for someone as world-weary as myself.

So I went out and bought tahini, yogurt, parsley and mint. The rest is stuff I'd usually have around or can get easily, anyway. Cooking Middle Eastern food in Cambodia is not as easy as you might think, but maybe not as hard as it could be. In the last year or so we've gotten three types of plain yogurt now available in the country (and I even occasionally make it myself). Before that, everything came from Thailand and even the so-called plain stuff had a liberal dose of saccharin and was disgusting. The fact that I was able to find tahini (or tahina as Claudia Roden calls it) was also a shock, thank god for the WTO, eh?

My first recipe was the easiest one that I could find in the book, cucumber salad with mint. Exactly like it sounds, although I left out the orange-blossom water because unsurprisingly I both didn't know what it was and it's not available in Cambodia.

Feeling emboldened, I moved to my next recipe, salatet hummus, or chickpea salad. I substituted curly parsley for flat-leaf parsley because flat-leaf parsley isn't available in Cambodia. One time they had it at Lucky Supermarket in Phnom Penh priced at $7. No one bought it and it has never been seen again. Luckily for me I know a dude in Kandal province who is obsessed with organic farming and he's promised to grow me some flat-leaf parsley seedlings so I can grow it on my balcony, but they aren't big enough to transplant yet. I have sort of mixed feelings about chickpeas--I always want to like them more than I actually do--and while I really liked this recipe, I'm not gagging to make it again.

My next foray into Middle Eastern food was more intense. When I read the description of batoursh, which described it as "ground meat with eggplants and yogurt" it practically begged me to make it. I love yogurt, especially as part of a meal other than breakfast. I used ground beef instead of ground lamb, because the lamb here is imported from Australia, is really expensive and usually looks rotten. I haven't been able to find pine nuts anywhere, so substituted almonds instead. this had a nice effect, actually, of adding more crunch to the dish than it would have had with pine nuts, so it was a happy substitute.

I bought tahini, but wished I hadn't when I got home. First, I should have made it myself. Sesame seeds are dirt cheap here. Second, I don't like it. I haven't had tahini in quantity since college when I remember hating it but eating it to stay in the good graces of the lesbian cult that was trying to commandeer my life. I assumed that me not liking it was no real reflection on tahini itself, but more a dissatisfaction with my life at that time. Actually, turns out I don't really like the stuff. When I make this recipe again--and I will--I'll leave it out. Roden says it's optional anyway, so I guess I'm not the only one that feels ambivalent about it, which is a relief.

The finished Batoursh had a layer of mashed eggplant, a layer of yogurt and a layer of ground beef and nuts. It looked a bit like dog vomit. I added some chopped mint as a garnish and to make the dish slightly more exciting added a sprinkle of zahtar, a spice blend I got from Seasoned Pioneers. It was delicious. Would make again.

Tonight I toyed with the idea of going out for dinner and then decided to stick to my Middle Eastern cookery guns and made tomatoes stuffed with herbed rice. As per ush I had to make some substitutions due to my location in Cambodia and general laziness. Instead of short grain rice I used Cambodian pink rice, which worked really well.  I can't find allspice, so instead of that and the cinnamon, I used a ras-el-hanout blend of spices. It contains galangal, rosebuds, black pepper, ginger, cardamom, nigella, cayenne, allspice, lavender, cinnamon, cassia, coriander, mace, nutmeg and cloves. While I recognize that using this spice blend probably changed the face of this recipe, it did it in a good way because it turned out totally delicious, and for once I didn't even mind the sorry state of Cambodian tomatoes (and sorry it is indeed).

Asia's ten greatest street food cities

So here's what I spent most of November and December working on. 9,000 words about 100 street foods in Penang, Taipei, Bangkok, Fukuoka, Hanoi, Singapore, Seoul, Xi'an, Manila and Phnom Penh.
Read more: Asia's 10 greatest street food cities | CNNGo.com

Is it or isn't it? Ribs on Kien Svay

I know a group of guys who go on a journey to visit Restaurant 522, in Kien Svay, Kandal province every now and again. The rickety restaurant is built on stilts; it sits on, and threatens to fall in to, the Mekong river. The restaurant is reached by a ramshackle boat that's loaded up with a cooler full of various local beers to be consumed during the journey: Anchor, Angkor, Cambodia, Klang. It's a lovely thirty minute ride from Phnom Penh during which one watches the murky brown Tonle Sap give way to the dirty blue waters of the Mekong. After declining a few invitations, I finally decided to go. My reason for avoiding the place for so long? It's allegedly a brothel.

I've got no beef with sex workers, but after more than a year-and-a-half in Cambodia, I've realized that I don't want to be there when my male friends are sampling the merchandise. But they assured me that Restaurant 522 was no longer a brothel, or wasn't really a brothel, or was only sort-of a brothel, and that their mango salad was the best I was going to get in Cambodia.

And frankly, I was willing to put up with what could potentially be a very awkward afternoon for the sake of trying this amazing mango salad and what I was even more interested in: their ribs. Cambodian ribs are a wonderful thing, one of my favorite things to eat in the Kingdom of Wonder.

I've never prepared Cambodian ribs (or any other kind of ribs for that matter) so I can't tell you exactly how they do it. I've had different variations here that are made with honey, ginger, fish sauce, Kampot pepper and sometimes, black tea. My current favorite variation is served at 54 Langeach Sros (pictured above) and has a bit of a kick to it. Whenever I go I always order two plates at a time, because I know that no matter how many so-called flexitarians are at the table, they'll be gobbled down in a matter of moments. There's a deep-fried option, but I always go with the grilled ones (healthier, like). One of my favorite bai sach chrouk places also serves ribs--they may be cooked in a garbage can but taste like heaven.

Anyway, it was these promises of amazing ribs and mango salad and a terrible hangover that couldn't be endured on my own that goaded me into a trip to a brothel with ten men. I did receive assurances that the men were going solely for the ribs and mango salad and that I was certain to have a wonderful and completely non-sexy time. After spending more than a few evenings in local hostess bars, though, I've realized that men have only a dim idea of the sort of things that women find threatening, and that despite their assurances, it's usually not very fun. Despite this, and possibly because of my determination to have a good time, I managed to enjoy myself and my lunch.  

Was this place even still a brothel? I don't know. There were a number of bedrooms there, which was suspicious. The waitresses were flirtatious and did their best to completely ignore my existence, forcing me to serve my own drinks while my male companions were tended to like heroes returning from war.
But the ribs, which were slightly sweet, were delicious,the stir-fried lotus rootlet (said to increase virility) was outstanding and the mango salad was pretty freaking good, although maybe a bit too sour for my Westernized palate. Could a brothel really have excellent ribs? Was this really a brothel? Does it even matter?The jury's still out.

On having, and not having, worms

I was at a party recently--the type I've only just started to be invited to--filled with long-term Cambodia expats. There are a few touchstones for expats, topics that we can discuss with each other that people in the real world would shudder at. Tropical diseases are one such topic, bowel movements, another.

So at this party when a friend of mine launched into a detailed conversation about her gastrointestinal complaints and self-diagnosis of dysentery, I only half-listened. Until she started talking about deworming tablets.

My ears perked up, deworming, you say? What for?

 Her immediate response was, "You mean you haven't taken them before?"

 Me: "No."

 Her: "Oh man, you're supposed to take them every six months..."

 Everyone listening agreed that having been in Cambodia for a year and a half, plus backpacking for a year before that eating street food all over Asia and South America, meant that I most definitely had worms and that they were probably huge by now.

 My first order of business was to check in with my other expat friends around Asia. As it turns out, they've all had worms. Really big ones, sometimes.

 Unhappily, I set off for the drugstore the next day and picked up a box of deworming pills--festooned with photos of all of the worm types it would kill on the outside--which I left on my desk as a reminder of what was probably infesting my gut. I got an extra box as a Secret Santa gift for a guy I had only met once, figuring that he probably needed them as badly as I did.

 For some reason, though, I didn't want to take the pills. Did I really need to kill these worms that weren't bothering me? What if they helped with weight loss? What if they were the closest I'd ever get to a real, long-term relationship?

 It was that final thought and my unending fear of commitment that eventually convinced me to take the pills and kill the worms, to much fanfare. It required me not to drink for 24 hours, which I spent soberly ruminating about the state of my intestines.

 Once one takes the pills, the worms die and evacuate. So I peered into the toilet, hoping to catch a glimpse of these foreign invaders--my punishment for a carefree life and street food gluttony.

 And you know what? No worms.

 Despite my gutter-eating ways, the eight bouts of food poisoning I've had in the last two years due to eating rancid food and the fact that I only wash my hands about once a week, the worms found me inhospitable. And I'm sort of proud of that.

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.

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.

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.

The Golden Triangle

The Phnom Penh expat scene is both lively and irritating. Luckily, there are a variety of overpriced watering holes for western ex-pats, well-connected Khmers and wealthy Korean students to find some common ground and buy expensive drinks. They've even got frozen blue margaritas, if that's your cup of tea.

Pictured above: A 'Golden Triangle' containing Tequila Sauza, Grand Marnier, lime, mint and a Tiger Beer floater, $3.90. (I did not order this.)

Café Metro No. 271 St. 148, Phnom Penh

What to cook for a monk and your dead ancestors?

Last month I woke up bright and early one Saturday morning to head to a pagoda with my colleagues for Pchum Ben, a Cambodian religious festival that is all about monks and dead relatives, two things that Cambodians take very seriously.

One of the cute things about my colleagues is that they seem to forget that I am not Cambodian as well, and as such, don't tell me crucial bits of information about events like these. I know about their propensity to leave out important details, so had done a bit of research before the big day (ie. I read the Wikipedia page about Pchum Ben) so I knew that I had to bring some food with me. (What I didn't find out was that I was supposed to wear a fancy skirt and a white top, but there are only so many battles you win at this sort of thing.)



Although I love to cook, I do not enjoy the pressure of cooking for a critical audience. Most of my colleagues have never tried foreign food and are uninterested in not-Khmer foods. Even more nearby-but-foreign cuisines like Indian or Malaysian food are unheard of in a typical Khmer household. And the way food is eaten--everyone gets their own bowl of rice and shares the other dishes--isn't conducive to western-style pastas or salads. So when I've cooked for my co-workers in the past, I've played it safe and made Thai dishes, which have gone over very well.

Because of the Cambodian habit of saying whatever comes to mind, I know that I will be sure to hear exactly what they think, "You're fat, this tastes bad." But for the holiday I decided that I finally make something extremely foreign. My plan had originally been to make Shrimp Saganaki, a recipe I made when I was in London and have been craving since, and it seemed like it could go with rice. But after wandering around a filthy market unsuccessfully looking for decent shrimp I revised my plan.



Everyone brought at least two bowls of food--one (or more, depending on how wealthy or religious one is) for the monks to eat and one for us to share as a group after the prayers. One of the managers brought a bucket (seriously, she had lined it with plastic) of a very fancy red curry made with coconut milk, chicken, chicken feet and blood. It was clearly special occasion food--around the office we almost never have coconut milk in anything. She put out a half dozen bowls for the monks and bowls and bowls of bread to sop it up with.

Every monk at the pagoda takes at least one bite from every bowl that is presented to them. My colleagues explained that the food the monks eat is transferred directly to our ancestors, so in essence, we're feeding our dead relatives.



Knowing this, I decided to make something my Irish-Italian grandfather would have loved. Can you guess which dish is mine?

I have to admit that I took great pleasure in the monks' quizzical looks as they inspected my pasta with porky tomato sauce, heavy on the tomato paste just the way my grandfather, Red, would have liked it. "You're going to make me eat this?" they must have thought.

The pagoda we went to was deep in Kandal province, near no tourist attractions and clearly unused to having foreign visitors. Despite my inappropriate dress and non-Buddhistness I was shepherded through the place and the prayers, had incense thrown into my hands and got to watch with delight as the monks chanted over my penne. I'm not one for religion, but that this was the sort of event I could get behind. What better way to remember the dead than to make their favorite foods?



So I know that your first question will be, did they like it? And the answer is not really. All of my colleagues tried a few bites and thought it was hilarious and very interesting, but no one loved it as much as I did (or Red would have).

The exception was one of my co-workers who made my day by eating as much as the twenty others combined. So I said a prayer for his dead ancestors too, because they obviously did something right.

Thanksgiving in Cambodia

Thanksgiving dinner at Lone Star Saloon, Phnom Penh Cambodia. My first Thanksgiving dinner in a few years, and as expected, I feel disgusted with myself but at the same time incredibly self-satisfied. 

When you buy vegetables at the supermarket in Cambodia...*

Resembling Watercress
"You look so familiar! You remind me exactly of this watercress I used to know."

*Do not construe this post as a suggestion to buy supermarket vegetables in Cambodia

Another breakfast in Cambodia

For my first two weeks in Cambodia I ate rice every day for breakfast. I didn't have eyes for noodle soup, I was too busy feasting on random meats and rice and pickled cucumbers. There's no other way to slice it, this is a wonderful way to wake up. Especially for just $1.

Since that time I have tried to restrain myself, as I figure I have two other meals a day to eat rice. I don't understand how people here metabolize 5-10 cups of rice a day, but I commend them for it.

Meal above from the infamous noodle shop on the corner of Street 5 and Street 136, Phnom Penh.

Breakfast in Cambodia: Khmer noodles

One of my favorite traditional breakfasts in Cambodia is nom banh chok, or Khmer noodles. A heaping bowl of noodles, gravy and vegetables served with a few chilis on the side. Like most food in Cambodia, it's served at room temperature, and often in a plastic bag.

There are usually two kinds of gravy, one that is made with fish sauce, lemongrass, garlic, salt, sugar and fish of some sort. My cultural ambassador (read: my co-worker) started to get flustered when I was grilling her around this so what I am telling you may be completely incorrect. The other gravy choice is called green curry, so I'm going to assume it's probably a green curry.

The noodles are made from rice--Eating Asia has a really interesting post on how they make the noodles for nom banh chok. Cambodians are serious about their nom bahn chok noodles. I have been told several times that Khmers invented these noodles and that many other countries have stolen the idea. I've met a few noodle makers and it's not particularly lucrative and very physically demanding. I don't envy them the job, but I'm eternally grateful that they do it.

The dish is served with shredded cucumber, banana flowers, water lily stem, long beans, lime wedges and a pile of vegetable leaves that I cannot identify.

Living in Asia has given me a new freedom with breakfast. Cereal, phhhht. I'd rather eat nom banh chok.

Eating North Korean in Cambodia

Anyone who has had to stomach my presence for more than a few hours doubtlessly knows about my interest in the politics of the Korean peninsula and North Korean specifically. I've ruled out going to the mass games (check the video) for political reasons but have been happy to discover that I can explore North Korea in Phnom Penh.

Due to Cambodia's habit of embracing the most corrupt world leaders, they have a long and close relationship with North Korea. We've got an embassy here,there are diplomatic missions, they sell North Korean kimchi at the grocery store and perhaps most importantly, I've got a window into North Korean cuisine.

I had long speculated that North Korean food was the more pure version of Korean food--what Korean cuisine was before it was tainted by imperialism, capitalism and mayonnaise.


The menu at Pyongyang Restaurant

I had the opportunity to find out when I visited Pyongyang Restaurant in Phnom Penh recently. The restaurant is allegedly run by the North Korean government as a place to launder money and funnel cash to the DPRK. The waitresses are all North Korean citizens as well. They're good-looking, play traditional Korean instruments and are dedicated to the cause.



Unfortunately there are no photos allowed in the place, so I didn't get any pictures of the food or floor show, but here's what I learned. North Korean food is not as spicy as south Korean food and there's much more focus on noodle dishes. There were a few banchan, but far less than any self-respecting South Korean joint would serve. The dishes were not nearly as complex or interesting as the Korean food I am used to. I'd use the word "rustic" to describe it. Everything was cut roughly and the bulgogi which is usually cut very thin was thick and tough. It was sort of like what your (Korean) grandma would make once she stopped giving a damn.

However, the floor show of six North Korean women singing, dancing and playing traditional instruments as well as the excellent decor highlighted by the bright fluorescent lighting made the experience of contributing ten bucks to the axis of evil well worth it.

Pyongyang Restaurant
400 Monivong Blvd(between Mao Tse Tung and Street 392)
Phnom Penh, Cambodia

How we celebrate a new office

The organization I am working for recently opened a new service office in Kandal province. To inaugurate the place some of the staff and most of the management headed over in the large trucks and SUVs that are strangely popular among the Khmer riche.



When we arrived they busted out coolers and bags from the truck and started putting it all out on plates and setting up the Buddhist altar that is found in just about every office, restaurant and home in Cambodia. Everyone was very busy but someone managed to throw some incense into my hands and push me towards the altar to pray awkwardly. This may have been in large part due to my rumbling stomach--the five feet in from the altar was covered in various foodstuffs that I was having a hard time ignoring.



I definitely suffered for a while thinking all of this food was getting wasted on the gods and spirits of the place (and I was told that the extra table set up outside was for the angel) . But it turns out that Buddhism is a very sensible religion in that once all the praying and incense burning was done, we got to bring it all back to the office to share with the staff for lunch.



Our celebratory lunch. I sat next to the COO who kept adding spoonfuls of crab and other goodies to my plate. The crab had a variety of "sauces" to go with it. The ubiquitous fish sauce with chilis and another nice one of green beans cut very small, fish sauce and very hot chilis.

Twice the chicken we get in the west.

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Cakes with coconut milk and a little bit of incense ash.


One of my best meals so far in Cambodia, both for the camaraderie and the food. Thanks, angels!

Pork-stuffed bitter melon in clear soup

Over the weekend my friend Rina took me to her homeland in Kandal province. She spent the time at her parent's house alternately working in the rice paddy, tormenting me, and cooking huge meals for all of the family friends who came to help with the farming.

I did my best to try and record the recipes as she was making them, but the amounts given are just estimates. One of the things I have learned so far about Khmer food is that it is not a precise science. If you don't have an ingredient, you substitute something else. If you have something extra, you can probably add it in. Every recipe is made slightly different every time, but still turns out delicious.

Bitter melon is bitter. There's no way around it. The boiling does soften the taste as does the pork, but it's still a bitter flavor. Americans don't have much appreciation for bitter the way many other cultures do, and although I'm learning to adjust, it's not on the top of my list of favorite foods (and is why I haven't tested this recipe at home before posting it).

Ingredients (approximate):

3 bitter melons

For the filling:

2 cups pork

2-3 cloves garlic, chopped

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tsp msg

2 scallions/spring onions, chopped

1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

For the soup:

Water

3.5 tablespoons fish sauce

1.5 tablespoons sugar

1 tsp msg

1 tsp salt

Note about the msg--although it was used in this recipe, you can omit it. It will still be flavorful without. You'd be surprised how often you find msg in food around here.

Directions:

1. Rina got a giant hunk of pork and then basically battered it with a knife to make it into a mince/mush. The notes I took while she was doing this was "chop shit out of pork." You can use her method or get minced pork.

2. Combine pork with all of the other filling ingredients. Mix well.

3. Cut the bitter melons in half and remove seeds with a spoon.

4. Stuff hollowed-out melon with the pork mixture.

5. Add to pot and fill with water until covered. Bring to a boil.

6. When melon becomes soft enough to break with a spoon, add additional fish sauce, sugar, msg and salt to the broth.

This dish is made in Thailand and Vietnam as well. In Khmer, it's name sounds like "sngor mras." Here, it's served with rice, and is not eaten the way we westerners usually approach a soup. The soup is served family style and each person gets their own bowl of rice. Everyone serves themselves and small spoonfuls of the meat, melon and broth are added bite by bite to the bowl of rice.

Lunch on National Road 5

Another lunch in the field. This time it consisted of sweet pork with a marinated egg that was reminiscent of the "bacon candy" that Robyn from EatingAsia tipped me off about, green peppers and pork and because I was feeling sick, tom yum soup. I had a long debate with my co-workers about whether or not tom yum was Khmer, one arguing that it was and the other arguing that it was of Thai origin. I've had it at Thai restaurants, so I guess I'll give it to them.

First lunch in the field

I'm mostly settled in here in Phnom Penh. A big part of my job involves visiting rural Kandal province outside of town. (If you want to know more about what I am doing, check out my Kiva blog.) We call these days going out "in the field." Yesterday was my first day in the field and as such, my first lunch in the field.



When the Khmer fellow I was working with asked what I wanted for lunch, I said, "Oh, anything" and let him do the ordering. My laissez-faire attitude was rewarded with a big bowl of duck in a sans-coconut milk green curry with water morning glory and giant hunks of blood.

Now, this isn't my first run-in with blood. I'm generally pretty disgusted by blood sausage of any sort and find a full English breakfast to be pretty unpleasant due to the blood angle. But there have been occasions when I've actually enjoyed duck blood, so I gave this one a shot and was pleasantly surprised. Mild and overpowered by the curry, it was not unpleasant, and the bone-in duck meat in the dish was tender and delicious. I got the sense that this duck had been quacking pretty recently.



We also had fish, one big one and a plate of small ones that were meant to be eaten whole, bones and all. Another dish was papaya soaked in copious amounts of fish sauce. They love fish sauce around here it seems, which is lucky because I do too.



My favorite dish was the kro auchhouk with beef. I had never eaten lotus rootlet before, and in fact, we just had a group huddle here in the office trying to figure out what it's called in English.

We decided on lotus rootlet or lotus rhizome, although there may be a more common variation that I'm not aware of.

All in all, my "field" meals was the best I have had so far in Cambodia and it almost made the 7 hours on the back of a motorcycle worth it.