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. 

Late-Blooming Peanut Butter Sandwich Love

In the last year, I've come to enjoy nut butter more than I ever did as a kid. I thought peanut butter & banana sandwiches were weird then. In college, I enjoyed the Nutella & banana combination, but I was always just as pleased without the banana.

Now, I can go through a jar of peanut butter in two weeks.

I think there's some correlation with the amount of time I've been spending outdoors, rock climbing and car camping. And because one of my friends has been arriving at our web series film shoots with a snack of peanut butter and celery. Peanut butter is easy. It feels healthy. In addition to its sweet and snacky uses, it can also be used for savory dishes like gado-gado.

My favorite variation on the PB&J lately is this:

Plump blueberries up close.

Eastern Sierra in the background.

Something I've always found irksome about the PB&J is how the jelly or jam or banana tends to make the sandwich slide apart. During my last camping trip, I inadvertently resolved this issue for myself: I didn't have any jam, but I wanted a fruity element, so I threw on some of the dried blueberries I'd brought for my oatmeal. The slivered almonds were unnecessary ('twas an experiment). I would have used a slightly thicker layer of peanut butter if this hadn't been the very last that I could scrape out of the jar.

Advantages of using dried blueberries instead of jam or jelly in a peanut butter sandwich:

1. The chewiness of the dried fruit gave me more to sink my teeth into, which made the 'wich more satisfying.
2. Dried fruit is lighter than a jar of jam and can also be used in oatmeal or as a snack in itself. Scooping up a handful of jam when you need a sugar boost is not very convenient.
3. No need to worry about getting peanut butter in your jam or vice-versa.
4. The sandwich does not slip apart. 
5. Nothing got drippy. 

I imagine this would be just as good with most other dried berries, but I'll probably stick to these dried wild blueberries from Trader Joe's. A dash of cinnamon is always a good idea. 

Leftover Salmon? Avocado? Bread?

Avo-toast with extra protein. Salmon is great cold, so it's worth making more than you can eat in one sitting-- as long as you don't over cook it. Just-done-enough salmon tastes much better (I think), and will taste better the next day if you decide to re-heat it. 

Lots of freshly ground black pepper, a pinch of salt, and a squeeze of lemon.

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.

Honeycrisp Surprise

I bought Honeycrisp apples this week instead of my usual Granny Smiths, mostly because (I admit) I like the name. It's cute.

I'm generally wary of produce with names like this, but I decided to take a chance on these (because, you know, the name is cute).

Chocolate and Summer

...don't go well together. My poor tin of chocolate wedges:


Trader Joe's used to sell Traveler's Chocolates, but like so many products, TJ began producing and selling its own version in its own packaging. Personally, I don't think they are quite as good as the original, but they're much better than Hershey's for the serious chocoholic.

Snack Attack: Marcona Almonds

I was first introduced to these Spanish Marcona Almonds a last by a friend who included them in a gorgeous cheese platter. They are addictive, amazing, and expensive. I had to ration out the eight ounce, six-dollar package to avoid eating them all in a single sitting.

These came from Whole Foods toasted and lightly salted-- I usually try to avoid pre-salted nuts, but these were just irresistible. They were too good to even use for a recipe. I eat them one at a time, savoring the snappy crunch that other almonds do not have. These flat, nearly-unrecognizable-as-almonds almonds are worth the indulgence if you're able.

As I am currently gravely underemployed, I've not indulged yet this year though memories of my past Marcona almond experiences fill me with longing. Now that I've written this, though, it may not be long before I crack.