Open-face Grilled Cheese Sandwich

What to do with one slice of bread, one mozzarella stick, and a nice nonstick pan.

Toasted one side of the bread and covered the pan to melt the cheese. Flipped.

Crunchy cheese toast.

Road Food in Cambodia

I just got back from a three month stay in Cambodia. I spent a lot of time sitting in cars/vans/buses. Here are some of the things I ate.

Milk fruit. Sticky, sappy, sweet.

Banana dessert version of this.

This is how you enjoy a Battambang orange. Lots of seeds, tasty juice.

Nom krok, sort of a Khmer version of takoyaki, but vegetarian. Until you soak it in luscious coconut-y fish sauce.

Ripe tamarind again.

Fresh longan ruins you for the frozen/imported kind in the US.

The last mango from my aunt's tree. Sometimes I ate 3 a day.

Green water apple (also from my aunt's farm) that I mistook for a cashew apple when I first saw it.

Pink pomegranate.

Boiled little taro.

Similar to typical bananas found in the US, but still green when ripe. Not my favorite. 

My very favorite bananas were nam va. I could eat those for days. How I miss their abundance. My family's able to grow them in the backyard, though, so I got to have a few to ease my missing Cambodia. In a few years, I've promised myself, I'll go back. And I'll brave the dry, hot season, because that's also the season for mangos, and mangos are special.

Khmer Snack: Ripe Tamarind

Sweet and sticky, not as tangy as I expected.

How to eat ripe tamarind:

1. Find the fibrous stem and pull down the length of the fruit create an opening.
2. Peel away the brown rind. Might be helpful to give it a rinse so that you don't end up getting dirt on the fruit.
3. Eat them lump by lump or all at once, remembering to spit out the large seeds.