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. 

Project 365 - Day 12 // My Favorite Khmer Dessert

It involves durian. I don't understand what the fuss is about regarding the supposed scent. Durian has never smelled foul to me. I guess I'm missing that gene? While I didn't always like the texture of fresh durian as a child, I hardly reacted to it the way so many people in popular culture do. 

My favorite Khmer dessert dish involves durian, sugar, coconut milk, and glutinous rice:

The Khmer word for it is something like "sohn-schia." At least, that's the best I can do to anglicize it. The sauce is creamy and sort of aromatic. My mother knows I swoon when she makes this. It's definitely a comfort food for me. One of these days I'm going to attempt it myself. Glutinous rice intimidates me. I'll have to get over it. The older I get, the more I realize I have to really start learning how to cook Cambodian food myself, or I'll have to depend on restaurants whose food will never be quite like (or quite as good) as my mama's.

All Green Everything

A fun box from my personal CSA a few months ago. Those are the bitter melons that went into the Southeast Asian roomie soup. So pretty.

Bitter Melon Soup

I'm finally coming through on my promise to post about bitter melon soup. My roommate and I made a team effort. I played sous-chef since she had actually made it once before.

For the filling:

Broke vermicelli noodles into 2-inch pieces and soaked in warm water:

We seasoned the ground pork with garlic, fish sauce, ground white pepper, and chopped shitake mushrooms, then added the noods.

Tending to the bitter melon:

We blanched the bitter melon in boiling water:

Sliced into 3-4" pieces. One of them had dark red-orange seeds because it was a tad over-ripe. Looks pretty cool, though.

Scooped out.

Stuffed and simmering in some home-made chicken broth we had in the freezer.

The finished product:

It was good, but could have used more simmering, maybe in less liquid. Like most soups, this is one that's supposed to be better a day or two later, after it's been cooled and re-heated. We were on a time limit though since our friend was coming over for dinner. She approved, though, so 'tis all good.

Notes for next time: more fish sauce, mung noodles instead of vermicelli noodles, less liquid, longer simmering.

My dad has a big trellis (like this one) that squash and melon grow on every year. I love walking beneath it in late spring as the green tendrils start working their way in and out of all the slats. Until next summer! I'll have another bitter melon recipe then.

Box o' Green // My Parents Are My CSA

I have not shared bounty from my parents or the fate of said bounty in while, but I was inspired to do so again by this most recent haul:

All of it was green. All delicious.

From their garden:

• Bitter melon (wrinkly things in the center)
• Limes
• Long bean
• Leaf lettuce (my dad grows impossibly perfect-for-wrapping heads of this lettuce)
• Asian squash (fat smooth green object in the top right)

From the market:

• Mangos 
• Small watermelon

I always take walks around the yard whenever I go home, examining all the different things blossoming and growing and dying back. Their wild tomato plant is starting to die back. The persimmons and guavas and bananas are green and on their way for a fall harvest, and my dad has many more rows of those sweet lettuces and mustard greens sprouting up along with tons of Thai basil. I'm usually wary of taking too much home since I have a hard time cooking and eating everything, but I have help in the form of Vicky, my Vietnamese-American roommate.

It's awesome having a fellow Southeast Asian for a roommate and have an opportunity to bring a taste of home into our kitchen. There is something really special about cooking things that were so much a part of daily life during childhood and which are now so occasional. 

Coming up this week: bitter melon soup and Asian squash stir-fry. 

How My Mother Got Me To Like Walnuts

Out of all the nuts, walnuts have always been one of my least favorite. Okay, my very least favorite. Okay, I actually kind of have an aversion to them, generally. Okay, "aversion" is too strong a word, really. I tend not to really avoid any foods; there are just some foods that I take much, much less pleasure in eating than others.

So you won't find a small pile of raspberry-vinaigrette-doused walnuts left in my plate after eating a salad or anything. I can't make any promises about a can of mixed nuts, though. Something about their bitterness has always turned me off.

Walnuts have never been something I've ever eaten for the mere pleasure of eating them. I devour cashews and chocolate covered walnuts ravenously. Walnuts? No, thank you.

Except, well, my mom. Mothers. They're sneaky.

The Asian Steamed Sticky Rice Burrito

Forgive the less-than-artful title; there just isn't a more illustrative and concise way of describing this Southeast Asian creation. It is almost like an overgrown sushi roll, but I think of it as burrito because of its size. They consist of strips of pork belly, mung bean, and glutinous rice wrapped tightly inside banana leaves and steamed. I've seen ones that are humongous and square-shaped, but most are around eight inches long and two or three inches in diameter, depending on who makes them. (That sounds... funny.)

These "nuhm nsahm" (a phonetic spelling completely of my own fabrication) are ubiquitous on special occasions such as Lunar New Year, weddings, or my aunt's whim.

I don't really like them very much. I find them a bit on the bland side and the sticky twice-cooked texture of the rice doesn't really do anything for me...

Except when the very dense item is sliced and fried on both sides, to be consumed with soy sauce and Sriracha. That, ohhh, that is a completely different animal. Er, food.

Here's how the magic happens: