I got a yen for wild betel in Vieng Xay, in a laid-back local market that sold an assortment of lunch pickings—sticky rice, sour bamboo, tangy dollops of jaeow, spicy little meatballs and grilled buffalo (above, middle, left of the balls) that had been mixed with onions and spices, wrapped in betel leaves and grilled over flames. Something happens when wild betel is cooked. It pops with fragrance, in an earthy, minty, almost flowery bouquet. It’s stunningly delicious, and I know of no other leaf that compares. (Plus, it fights atherosclerosis—at least in rabbits.)
In Vietnamese, that leaf is known as la lot. And by the time we were deep inside Vietnam a week later, we’d eaten our way through myriad mixtures of meat cooked in wild betel (usually grilled but sometimes fried). In Sapa, our Hmong friend stuffed a batch of betel leaves with ground pork and spring onion, nothing more, and plopped them into a splattering wok of hot oil. They fried to a beautiful brownish crisp—and tasted heavenly.
We’re back home in New Mexico now, but we’re blessed with a great Asian market. I found betel (it’s sold on the stem; if packaged neatly on a tray with stems removed, it’s probably the chewing betel —not what you want for this dish). Using Andrea Nguyen’s recipe as a guide, and recalling the flavors we’d had in Vieng Xay, this is the recipe that emerged:
Ingredients:
1 lb ground beef
1 package wild betel (about 25 leaves)
1 stalk lemongrass
several cloves green garlic
salt and pepper to taste
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon curry powder (I used Penzeys Maharajah)
Method:
1. Soak several bamboo skewers in water.
2. Mince one stalk lemongrass (tender insides only) and a few cloves of fresh green garlic (or ordinary garlic, small fragrant cloves preferred for a sweeter, less biting flavor)
3. Mix ground beef (I used lean grass-fed, which tended toward the dry side; I might add a bit of minced pork next time) with lemongrass, garlic, salt and black pepper to taste, a few squirts of fish sauce and 1 tablespoon Penzeys Maharajah curry powder. (My brother and sister-in-law had given us a whole box of Penzeys curries just before we left the country. We’d hardly had a chance to use them; this was a perfect excuse). Let sit at least one hour.
4. Clean the leaves and flatten, placing shiny side down on the counter and stem pointing toward you. Fill each leaf with a small, long strip of meat mixture. Roll the leaf lengthwise around the meat and skewer. The skewer will hold the leaves in place. It’s OK to leave a little extra space around the ends of the meat, but don’t overfill the leaves.
5. Drizzle the skewers with oil and grill over medium heat with vents open until leaves are slightly charred (but don’t burn). Serve with your favorite spicy sauce. I made a Lao-style jaeow with smoked morita chiles pounded with garlic, galangal and fish sauce.
It was an easy, extraordinarily delicious success—thanks to those ambrosial leaves. Some recipes call for grape leaves as substitutes, but I’m with Andrea on this: grape leaves offer none of the fragrance. HOWEVER, I’ve been thinking of using grape leaves (since we have ginormous quantities growing in the backyard) in a different sort of way—stuffed with ground lamb, perhaps, and Mediterranean spices? Dolmas with just the meat and spice, minus the rice? Drizzled with lemon and olive oil, served with hummus and olives? Just a thought….
En route to Boualapha recently, we stopped for a light roadside lunch of sour pickled fish (som paa) and sour pickled pork (som muu), both of which had been grilled in banana leaves. Each little packet opened to the most potent pate-like wedges (white fish, pink pork) with a firm consistency and an incredibly sour kick in the tongue. Just a little bit of som mixed with a ball of sticky rice, alternated with an accompanying jaeow: delicious! The jaeow maengda came in little plastic cups from Thailand–so the label actually had the Thai name, nam prik maengda, though this same variety is made and eaten on this side of the river, too. It was a particularly dry and crumbly style, slightly sweet, with the consistency of pork flossy. Its ingredient of note was a water cockroach that lives in the countryside.
The shop owner told us she makes som every day with nothing more than fermented fish (or fermented pork), garlic (and lots of it), cooked sticky rice, salt and MSG.
One night, the lights go out in Battambang, and we are presented with the prospect of candlelight dining. This is a throwback to years past, when generators rumbled through the dark and electricity flickered on and off. We planned a patio dinner anyway; a few flames in the breeze would add ambiance to the meal.
Chicken. I thought about it all day, picturing an evening array of rotisserie carts stationed beside the market. This is new (relatively so). I remember Battambang years ago, when the city died down shortly after dark. Families turned in early, and few creatures traipsed through the downtown night—just howling dogs and street children huffing glue. Dinner wasn’t always easy to find back then. But now, we have whole chickens turning over flames. We have pots of soups and curries, salads and banana-leaf parcels of steamed fish. We take our loot back to the hotel, to the fourth-floor patio overlooking the cityscape.
We purchase half a chicken (a small hen, free-range of course) and a slice of grilled pork. It’s so very thin, like Canadian bacon, and deliciously caramelized. I imagine grilling something similar next summer in our backyard: thin pork and palm sugar, perhaps with a drizzle of green Battambang orange—if only such fruits of unbelievable sweetness were available in New Mexico.
We add to the table a packet of steamed amok; a plate of chicken fried with the most tender and gentle shavings of ginger; a mound of prahok, which lends the richness and potency of a good, stinky French cheese, paired with crisp, fresh vegetables.
We take, too, a serving of sour fish soup, a combination of samlor machou kreung (made with green Khmer curry paste, which derives its beautiful color from lemongrass leaves) and the Vietnamese-style of sour soup employing a contrast of tomato and pineapple.
And rice, of course—no Khmer meal is complete without it (unless you are a young female student concerned about her waistline… but that’s a story for another day).
We eat beside dancing flames in a darkened city alive with New Year firecrackers. We dine on a stone-hard table among pots of night-blooming jasmine, bougainvillea and little lime trees. Have you ever smelled a lime flower in full fragrance? Lush with citrus and perfume, a hint of mint, evocative of ice. I think of lime sorbet. I think I am ever so happy to eat dinners like these.
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.
A lot, in terms of health. Fire by far constitutes Asia’s most popular cooking method, and with good and practical reason. Smoked foods taste great. Fire is easy and accessible. But the long-term health and environmental effects are vast. A massive “brown cloud” covers much of Asia, and researchers are struggling to find solutions. No simple answer exists. Read the story here.
BBQ chicken at a roadside restaurant in Chiang Mai.
Traffic rolls by in the background as a street vendor grills meats along Bangkok’s Phra-A-Thit Road. Such carts—and their remarkable arrays of food—are ubiquitous in Thailand.
Coffee brews over a wood-burning stove at a streetside coffee stall in Phnom Penh.
A man makes pakoras at a wood-fired streetside stall in Kuresong, India.
A man bakes chapatis over an open coal fire at a bus-stop restaurant in Siliguri, India.
Teenagers bake bread in a wood-fired factory oven in Phnom Penh.
An ethnic Tibetan woman cooks over a wood fire in her home in rural Yunan province, China.
A woman grills chicken and fish at a food stall along the Mekong River in Vientiane, Laos. Everyday, small restaurants pop up along the riverfront, selling grilled foods and beer, drawing hundreds of locals and foreigners to watch evening fall over the Laotian capital.
A restaurant cooking fire along the Mekong River in Luang Prabang, Laos.
A legless former soldier cooks his lunch over a wood fire beneath his home on stilts in rural Cambodia.
An ethnic Tibetan man warms himself near a wood fire in his home in rural Yunan province, China.
An elderly woman stokes a fire with a bamboo tube in remote Shan State, Burma.*
*Now here’s a side note to the story, which coincides with the Sept. 11 anniversary. This particular picture was taken in 2002 during a trekking trip through Shan State, where we stayed in village homes. One friendly family fed us their fresh homegrown vegetables and beans, and after dinner we warmed ourselves by the fire. They asked many questions about our country, and somehow the conversation turned to Sept. 11. They had not heard of the attacks the previous year. And when we tried to describe what had happened, the family struggled to imagine buildings so tall and airplanes big enough to hold their entire village. They offered sympathy, but amazement at the enormity of this world and the disparate lives people lead. Yet somehow, we all ended up in that same smoky kitchen together, sharing food and conversation—and understanding each other.
I didn’t tell you the whole story when I posted the latest Rosi Recipes. That evening, we also ate another David Thompson-inspired recipe for Thai grilled chicken with a marinade heavy on coriander (cilantro) root. This is a critical ingredient of many Thai recipes; how frustrating to find only the leaves in markets around here! Where do all the roots go? It’s like missing socks. Somebody, somewhere, is hoarding a huge stash of roots and socks.
Anyway, I’ve been known to buy potted cilantro plants when I need the roots. I do the same with dill when mine isn’t faring well in the garden; the price of a small bunch of dill in the market often exceeds the price of a whole plant. On this particular night, I had five ailing cilantro plants (they didn’t like the giant toad who had taken up residence in their territory), so I decided to harvest the roots and pound them into a chicken marinade. Here’s what happened:
Thai grilled chicken
(Inspired by David Thompson’s recipe in Thai Food)
Ingredients:
2 small heads of small, local garlic
3 small coriander roots
13 black peppercorns (strong, from Kampot)
pinch of sea salt
pinch of turmeric
1 lemongrass stalk, chopped
5 hot Thai bird’s eye chiles
Method:
Rub marinade under and over chicken skin. Refrigerate a couple of hours, then grill to desired taste.
Ingredients:
2 tsp white peppercorns
2 tsp salt
2 tsp chopped coriander root
1 tsp Maggi seasoning sauce(now, obviously this isn’t as old as the recipe; for a wheat-free version, substitute fish sauce or tamari)
a whole mess of ribs
garlic oil
Method:
Pound together all ingredients and smother the ribs. Let sit overnight (or at least several hours). Make the garlic oil by pounding a handful of small garlic cloves, peels and all. Fry until golden (but not burnt or bitter). Reserve the oil for frying; use the garlic for the ribs or anything else you desire.
After the ribs are infused with the marinade, heat several inches of the garlic oil in a large wok. Add the ribs and fry until crispy and dark. Top with garlic if desired.
“Sunny is known in his village for making this one the best,” Andy said while we cooked the ribs. “It’s gonna be a good breakfast.” He was right. Fried Thai pork ribs does a great morning make!
We went camping. I LOVE camping. We don’t do it often enough. I suppose it would be something of a strange concept to many of the people we meet in our Asian travels—they already live in bamboo homes with breezes sneaking through cracks in the walls and creatures of the night prowling outside. The stars hang bright overhead. Crickets sing and dogs howl. Why would they want, or need, a tent?
Once, many years ago, we hauled our little Sierra Designs tent to a tiny island in the river just across from the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. The Leonid meteor shower was scheduled to perform that night, so we left the city lights and camped in sand. (That was back in a time when the Phnom Penh riverfront went black by 9 p.m. and barely a light flickered across the bridge.) People came up to us throughout the night—thoroughly curious and substantially confused. What in the world were we doing? We explained, they accepted, and we all sat around chatting. Then we heard a large boom across the river (on the rural side), which our companions told us was most likely a cow stepping on a landmine. That was many years ago.
Anyway, this time we camped at City of Rocks, one of the finest state parks I have ever discovered. From a distance, this perplexing spot indeed looks like a city of giant rocks standing stately over a vast desert of cacti…
… with coyotes, jack rabbits and bunnies jumping about. And glittery insects…
…plus a few critters not to be stepped upon:
This one rattled its warning as I lay our ground sheet on a rock to dry, disturbing its personal space. Sorry, Mr. Snake. I meant no harm.
For three nights, we were the only people in our section of desert. We had a commanding view of the scenery, with daily metamorphosis come sunset.
When nature called, we had perfectly clean (scrubbed each morning by a park ranger) amenities just down the hill.
Even better: the visitor center offered hot showers so that we could bike all day through the nearby Gila National Forest (big ponderosas, blooming wildflowers, steep mountains and rocky Forest Service roads surpassing 9,000 feet in height). This was luxury. Bike by day, wash the sweat away, then settle into dinner amid the sweet smells of the desert night.
Here’s the beauty of car camping: a big cooler packed with everything that tastes great at home, and ten times better around a tent. Don’t get me wrong; I love to backpack, too. But you can’t beat the sweet treat of a bottle of red wine, a trunk full of goodies, a Coleman stove for pots of beans, and a live fire for all-natural chicken/red bell pepper/pinenut sausages (Trader Joe’s):
We ate pinto beans, black beans, canned organic tomatoes, fresh tomatoes, fresh green chile, black-bean dip, blue corn chips, hummus, wild cucumber pickles, Swiss cheese, chicken-cheese-mushroom sausages (more Trader Joe’s), sauerkraut (a jar from a previous trip to a Wisconsin farmers’ market), smoked Great Lakes trout (same WI farmers’ market). We drank red wine, and Bass in a can. We ate dark chocolate for dessert. For breakfast, we fired up our little stovetop espresso maker and drank rich black sludge with oodles of caffeine. We ate mango. We drank apple cider. We ate fresh tortillas (Albuquerque Tortilla Company) with melted cheese, onions and Prosciutto. We gobbled up peanuts, raisins and dried fruit mix to power us through our sweat-laden rides.
And then we returned to our camp, our showers, our fire and dinner all over again.
Summer comes this weekend, at least to our brains if not our skies (thunderstorms passing through New Mexico this week!). Memorial Day weekend—time to reinstate the grill and pull out that warm-weather attitude.
I’ll keep this quick and to the point: three easy, zippy recipes for a Southeast Asian-style grilled dinner (with a hint of the Southwest) that will dazzle your guests. Not for weak stomachs.
Southeast Asian Curry Burgers Ingredients:
1 lb high-quality grass-fed ground beef*
2-3 stalks fresh lemongrass, peeled and sliced thinly
large chunk of ginger, peeled and sliced thinly
2-3 dried anchos**
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp cumin
drizzle of fish sauce
1/2 head garlic, minced
3 small shallots, finely chopped
* Good meat is key to re-creating Asian flavors. If you’re in the Albuquerque area, check Keller’s. Grass-fed beef will be lean. Try adding a dollop of butter or ghee if you want super richness. Or, try it with ground pork for burgers reminiscent of a Lao wonder I had for breakfast one morning, of all places, at the Luang Prabang bus station. (Lao bus stations sell some of the tastiest food.)
** Here’s the Southwest connection. Ancho chiles (dried poblanos) lend a rich, smoky aroma that pairs very well with these Asian flavors.
Method:
Pound ginger, lemongrass and all spices using a mortar and pestle (or toss into a food processor to save time). Mix with meat, shallots, garlic and fish sauce. Form into patties. You’re good to go! Grill as you would any ordinary hamburger.
Southeast Asian Grilled Veggies Ingredients:
your choice of vegetables, sliced as you like
several garlic cloves, minced
pinch of sliced ginger (optional)
glug of fish sauce
drizzle of sesame oil
Method:
Mix vegetables with other ingredients in a bowl and let sit half an hour. Wrap everything in foil for grilling. (I made two separate packets: one with whole tomatoes; another with sliced onion and eggplant.) Grill until vegetables are tender.
Lao Jaew (with hints of Mexico) Ingredients:
1 or more ancho chiles
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 small piece of ginger, minced or pounded
glug of fish sauce
drizzle of vegetable oil
juice of one large lime or two small limes
pinch of sugar (I used shaved piloncillo; palm sugar also would work)
Method:
Break the dried ancho into small pieces (smash it or crumble it in your hands). Mix with other ingredients and let sit until ancho pieces turn soft. Taste and add more of any ingredient, as desired. This is a great chile sauce to keep on hand in the fridge. Plus, it has a beautiful orange-red color.
Enjoy! Serve with rice. Or whatever you want. I particularly love the way Southeast and Southwest flavors cooperate in these dishes.
…. otherwise known as jaew mak len. You already know about jaew, and this is a definite favorite of mine. Fresh, healthy, easy. Just get the grill fired up, and you’re on your way.
Jaew Mak Len
For grilling:
10 medium tomatoes
1 head of garlic
1 large shallot
chiles (your preference)
For mixing:
1 large bunch of cilantro, chopped
1 large handful of green onions, chopped
a glug of fish sauce
squeezed lime juice to taste
pinch of salt
Instructions:
First grill the vegetables, skins on, until blackened. (Laos traditionally cook over an open flame, not gas.) Peel off garlic and shallot skins, as well as the most blackened parts of tomato and chile skin. Pound the vegetables in a mortar with a pinch of salt. Add chopped cilantro, green onion and fish sauce; pound a bit more. Taste. Add more of anything needed. If it is too sour or bitter, add a pinch of sugar. Serve with sticky rice. Or, use the dip with chips instead of Mexican salsa.
Now here’s what happened: I weasled my way into the in-laws’ kitchen, extracting knives from their block and banging pans in a frenetic fit to find the right size. Chop, chop; pound, pound — so happy to work with food again! I employed the use of several large, green jalapenos, which my father-in-law had bought before our arrival. The chiles grilled up beautifully, and I couldn’t help but adore them.
But I have this bad habit of pounding and squashing, mixing and stirring, adding a pinch of this, a guzzle of that, tasting all the while, getting lost in the preparations, forgetting my whereabouts. I cook by the whims of my mouth, but that doesn’t work very well when the crowd around me shares little of my crazy fondness for spice.
And so we had a flaming jaew, ever more fiery with every minute it sat. Too hot. Not for me, but for most everyone else at the table. So know this: the Laos love their jaew hot, hot, hot. (Don’t believe anyone who tells you Lao food ain’t spicy, because they’re wrong, wrong, wrong!) But know your chile, know your audience, and choose accordingly. This is one great beauty of Lao cuisine: there are no concrete rules. People cook according to preference and practicality. Use what you have, eat what you like. And always enjoy.
We’re getting there, inch by inch, nail by nail. I sit in the stupor of a still afternoon—no rain, no wind, just heat in the shade of this mulberry tree. A brilliant swallowtail floats by. Jerry swears at the floor as he installs T moulding while I write.
We have progressed to the finishing touches, and we are fried. Burnt. Drained of domestic duties, eagerly awaiting our flight to Singapore in a few weeks. We love this little hacienda, and we will welcome its needs again, in time. But our minds are ready for a shift again—back to work, the kind that pays the mortgage and keeps us well-fed.
We wouldn’t even be this far, had it not been for an exceptionally generous gift—the gift of time. A few weeks ago, my brother arrived with nothing in his hands (lost luggage) but the utter will to work. On our house! Four days, he pounded nails, shopped for trim, sawed wood, drilled new holes into my newly painted kitchen walls and installed a new outlet for the fridge
Had my brother not come, we’d still have an untrimmed front door with sickly green foam fill oozing from the space between wall and door jam. Had my brother not come, I would have no shelf in the pots-n-pans cabinet, nor a book nook in the old closet by the back door.
We threw a barbecue, Thai-style. I got down on my little rattan stool and used my special papaya-salad mortar and pestle to pound a spicy mean som tam. And we grilled pork, over mesquite charcoal, the kind that comes in little logs, as though straight from the earthen pit where it’s made. Grilled pork is a recent obsession of ours, ever since we discovered the fabulous, succulent rolls of meat sold by El Mezquite Market down the road. If you’ve been to a Redcoates dinner lately, we’ve probably fed you pig.
But pig has treated us well in this house, on this patio, and I think it’s the perfect thing to share. Good food serves as a language all its own: Welcome. Thank you. Come again.
We’ve prepared our pig several ways, but we generally do some variation of this Thai-style marinade. Very simple, very tasty:
lots of garlic, minced
fish sauce, a healthy dose
plenty of lime, squeezed
hot roasted chili flakes, your preference on quantity
cilantro, chopped
a pinch of turmeric
coriander seeds, crushed
palm sugar, just a touch, shaved
coconut milk, enough to cover the meat
Cut your pork into nicely sized grilling pieces. Mix all ingredients, setting some aside. Cover the meat generously with marinade and let stand a few hours to soak up those juices. Use remaining marinade to baste meat while grilling. Don’t overcook. Serve and enjoy!
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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….
and installed a new outlet for the fridge 
My books:
