We did something the other day that we hadn’t done in ages: we became tourists for a day. Just as the morning sun cast its butter-colored rays across Siem Reap, we caught a tuk-tuk to the temples. With one-day passes in our pockets, we joined the throngs at Angkor (my, how things have changed!). I’ve heard others say they tire of the temples; a couple of days, and they’ve had enough. Not I. I could spend weeks analyzing the carvings and searching for little corners I hadn’t noticed before. Every time I visit, I find the temples mean something new to me. I see through different eyes, depending on my experiences between trips (for example, I hadn’t actually seen Angkor Wat since we did a story on the birds at Tmatboey; this time, I spotted numerous giant birds in the bas reliefs running along the temple walls).
One of the things I love best about the ruins is their ancient record of modern life. The outer wall of the Bayon, a late 12th-century temple built during the reign of King Jayavarman VII, is covered in some 1,200 meters of bas reliefs depicting thousands of battle scenes interspersed with everyday occurrences. You find historical references to gruesome war between the Khmers and Chams. But you also see the same scenes found today on the streets of Siem Reap or the waters of the Tonle Sap: cooking, fishing, hunting, cockfighting, the slaying of wild animals, even dancing around a massive jar of wine. People sit around fires, grilling fish between strips of bamboo. I particularly like a scene win which a man bends at the knees, blowing on a cooking fire beneath a clay pot.
It is, in some ways, as homes and markets across Cambodia appear today. Through centuries of change, some things stay the same.
So you’re a young Khmer guy in the big town of Siem Reap, and you’re out for dinner—alone. But your honey is on the phone, and your grin gives that fact away. You chat and chat with that grin real wide until the fried rice comes to the table. Then you wield the little black phone with the left hand, and a spoon with the right, devoting half your attention to each task in each hand. Neither the grin nor the conversation falters. You don’t even notice the barang sitting across from you, snapping your picture again and again and again, in quick succession. You pile the rice into your mouth, still talking and grinning, eyes cast downward, focused on rice—but every other bit of your being so obviously concentrating on the sweet sounds coming through that little black phone.
Then suddenly, inexplicably—though not unpleasantly, because the grin continues—the conversation ends and you can attend to your dinner with two hands. Fork in the left, spoon in the right; zip bang boom, the plate is clear, the bill is paid, and you’re off. You strut down the street with a little jig in your hips—and a big grin still carved in your face.
(Here’s a perk to sometimes serving as photo assistant: the dude with the flaming candles in his mouth performed his powers on me when we met him last year. With one giant breath, he blew the bad spirits out of my ear.)
This is not the fish we had for breakfast. This happens to be a fish we had for lunch last year in a village along the Mekong. It was a big meaty snakehead, straight from the river, and our host, Monin, paid a pretty price for it. The fish above was not farmed. It had swum freely through the river.
What we had the other morning for breakfast was a big steaming tureen of sour fish soup, fragrant with all the lemon-balmy goodness of paddy herbs, and a slightly green tint to the broth with copious amounts of morning glory. Whole garlic cloves and chunks of galangal simmered in the soup, over a candle flame. But the fish? Tiny, bony, sad. We slurped the broth, devoured the herbs and left the bones on the side.
Ten years ago, that fish would not have been served in that soup in that way. Ten years ago, Khmer sour fish soup routinely came with thick, fleshy slices of fish that had been caught from the river or lake that morning. Times have changed.
You might recall last spring my post on the demise of Cambodia’s great staple, its freshwater fish, upon which this culture thrives. What we’re seeing today on restaurant tables is the picture of decline. I’ve said it before (and I know some people disagree), but I stand by my interviews and observations: Cambodians are losing their lake and river fish. Talk to Tonle Sap fishermen and their wives. Read the reports. Visit with market vendors and household cooks and the owners of aquatic farms, where the fish are raised in pens and fed diets of meal mixed with large portions of rice waste. It’s no simple task for the average shopper to find big, healthy freshwater fish for sale in the morning market. With combined pollution, population increases, changes in seasonal flooding, and reports of illegal overfishing—there simply aren’t as many fish to feed the Cambodian family anymore. Gone are the days of ubiquitous fish-dominant dinners. In fact, they may be gone entirely if and when China’s many plans for upstream dams go through.
The other night, we ate a streetside meal of ginger fried chicken and sour soup (another type, with tomatoes and pineapple). Fish wasn’t even an option. The smiling old Khmer woman had none to sell at her stall—only chicken, beef and pork.
And just now, as I type in a pleasant Siem Reap restaurant with WiFi, the Khmer couple beside me tried to order a plate of fish. The answer? “Mien moan, ch’hrouk,” the waiter said. We have chicken, pork. “Awt mien trei.”
At approximately 3:45 p.m. Siem Reap time, on Friday, Jan. 29, 2010, one banana flower salad was consumed in your honor, birthday boy. Shaved carrots, fresh mint, shrimp, peanuts, onion, lime and chile; all mixed with tiny curls of crisp banana flower… all for you, Andy. May you have an auspicious year.
One day last week, with a hunger in our bellies, we set off for Bumrungrad. The hospital, a popular medical tourism destination, sponsored a celebration of healthy foods under the title, “World Famous Flavors of Thailand.” By its own accounts, some 500,000 foreign patient/tourists check into the hospital each year. (Medical tourism is a big, booming industry for Asia’s more developed cities.) The Bumrungrad PR department wants to get the word out: they don’t serve any old hospital food. They serve upscale, beautiful and healthy delights created by some of the city’s best restaurant chefs.
So off we went, to check out the goodies. What you see above are teensy-weensy laap burgers on a bun of sticky rice, topped with mint and chile.
The entire Bumrungrad lobby was stuffed with activity. Swarms of people ogling exquisite arrays of miniature foods. Big lenses, tiny phones—everywhere people jostled for a look and a sniff.
There were steamed rice crepes with herbs and minced chicken, shaped like little birds. Cucumbers carved into minuscule baskets; vegetables made to look like oysters holding healthy Thai herbal mousse. Rice crackers topped with green curried beef, strawberries wrapped in betel leaves.
Sausage burgers (not sure how healthy those were), salmon steak, and the most brilliant purple anchan flowers (butterfly pea) with coconut jelly and fresh fruit balls.
Job’s tears in coconut milk, little paper-wrapped cones of yam nua yang. Traditional Thai jingles played in the background, and a roving puppet kissed visitors on the cheek. So much food, so much commotion.
How did it all taste? I have no freakin’ idea. We left more than an hour later, tummies rumbling. All these artistic edibles, and not a single thing was available to eat. It was all for show until after 3 p.m., long after our appetites grew impatient. So we escaped to a Bangladeshi restaurant up the street and tanked up on curry.
If you happen to be in the vicinity, please join us this Saturday at 4Faces Gallery in Siem Reap, Cambodia, for the opening of Jerry’s new photo exhibit. “Be Unscared: A Glimpse of the Cambodian Spirit World in the Everyday,” explores the many ways in which Cambodians look to their guardians for good health, safety and prosperity. You’ll find 4Faces, run by photographer Eric de Vries, right in the Old Market area—perfect for a Saturday night out. We hope to see you there.
In just a few weeks, a very important man will return to Laos. His name is Jim Harris. He’s a retired school principal from rural Wisconsin. He’s the only American working in the field to clear U.S. bombs from the soil in Laos. That’s Jim in the picture above. He’s standing among his boxes and bins full of Lao artifacts, all part of his living museum (currently homeless, aside from this basement storage room) depicting daily life in Laos.
If you’ve been following the Rambling Spoon for a while, you’ll know that we’ve been documenting the effects of unexploded ordnance (UXO) remaining since the U.S. bombing campaign 40 years ago. It’s a grim situation. We met Jim a couple of years ago in Khammouane province, where he worked with a clearance team that went out every day to investigate bombs found by local villagers. (Most of those villagers are farmers, and most of the bombs were found while working in the field.) You might recall my post about a couple of phosphorous bombs that Jim’s team destroyed after local kids pointed them out in the field. Once again, here’s a photo of that detonation:
We had a chance to see Jim again a few weeks ago while investigating Hmong food on his home turf in Wausau, Wisconsin. He updated us on his plans. When Jim gets back to Laos this time, he’ll be heading into the far north, into territory where other clearance groups won’t work. In theory, Phongsali wasn’t bombed enough to warrant clearance. It’s true, just a small portion of the overall area of the province was bombed. But that southern stretch suffered a torrent of explosives that continue to hurt and kill people today. Jim’s going out there to remove the problem.
For the past several months, Jim knocked on American doors and traveled the country looking for donations to fund his work. He’s been on TV, radio and in print. He’s hoping his fellow Americans will feel moved to give since it was the U.S. government that dropped the bombs on Laos in a secret, unauthorized war decades ago. He’s raised enough money to fund a month in Laos—but not the two additional months he hopes to work.
“You don’t get up day after day and go off to do bomb removal unless you are either suicidal or unrealistically optimistic,” he recently wrote to me. “I love life. I guess that makes me unrealistically optimistic. A blessing or a curse?”
Egyptian wall art, outside the Tutankhamun exhibit at San Francisco’s de Young Museum
Actually, it was Amenhotep II’s pomegranate. But it was the de Young Museum’s Tutankhamun exhibit at which I learned of the ancient Egyptian practice of burying the elite with model fruits. (We had a quick few hours to take in a San Francisco museum before departing for Asia.) The artifact displayed was a little round faience pomegranate. (Many of the pieces were made of faience in the most fetching turquoise, the sort of blue that stops the feet and turns the head.)
“Egyptians often included miniature foodstuffs in their tombs in the belief that they could become real if required.” I never knew that—how fascinating. Amenhotep II’s tomb contained more than 50 such items. “These model fruits could magically provide refreshment, medicine, and aphrodisiacs in the Afterlife.”
If only we humans could turn ceramics into sustenance.
This is how it is. You land in Bangkok one afternoon when your head and stomach think it’s midnight the night before, and your internal thermometer goes nutso, rising precipitously, quickly, because it’s accustomed to frigid climes. Your ankles swell. Your clothes grow itchy, your hands and feet sweaty, your skin glistened from a damp it hasn’t felt in months (it thinks you’re still in the high, dry desert). Thus, you stumble through the motions to lug bag after bag from airport to taxi to hotel. You’re in a daze as you sign your name and show your passport and pay for the room. A quiet young man brings you a glass of frothy pineapple juice, freshly squeezed. It’s the first thing to hit your tongue.
Mmmmm mmmmm! Yes, you are back in Asia, and it’s all right there in that little glass: pure, fresh pineapple, so sweet without a hint of pucker. And so it begins.
A nap. A pot of coffee. A tasty $2 Indian dinner at a food stall up the road. A whole platter of fresh fruit the next morning—no cardboard papayas, no starchy green bananas with origins 2,000 miles from home. Lunch is what you see above, a fine pork green curry, a spicy Issan-style pounded fish dip with chile and green onion, a plate of fresh vegetables, and later, a grilled chicken. Eaten beneath a clear blue sky (in Bangkok!) with mynas hopping about. Street food at its best: great taste, cheap price, friendly service.
You’re on a mission now. You’re off to find the world’s best ice cream, the thing you’ve been craving for ages. It’s there, of course, right where you left it many months before. You order the beloved black sesame, plus a pert green scoop of pandanus, and it’s gone too fast. Your husband gets the passionfruit sorbet and declares his undying love (for the sorbet, not for you). Then both of you grab a charcoal-roasted coffee at the bright little cafe beside Kinokuniya books before donning a pair of 3D glasses and slinking into the comfy Cineplex seats to see the best movie of the year.
That’s the first 24 hours….
(It isn’t always this way. I’ve been working ever since. Really.)
Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
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