Just a summer plum on the kitchen counter. Taken by Jerry in New Mexico while I’m here in Boulder….

Nary and Toot in their Battambang kitchen

Meet Nuon Nary and Keo “Toot” Touch. They’re your hosts for an enlightening cooking class in Battambang. You can read about this lovely couple and their modest little venture in my latest post for The Faster Times. Then take a spin through the photos here and consider booking a class on your next trip through the country. Toot will take you through the local market. Ask questions. Ask him anything you want to know about Khmer food and culture. Tell him you want to know the truth. Tell him you’re not afraid of prahok. And he’ll share his world with you—not a sanitized, tourist version. But the gritty down-to-earth realities of everyday life for Khmers, past and present. Then head to the kitchen with Nary at your side, and make yourself the most fragrant batch of amok you’ve ever had.

It just might be the best 6 bucks you spend in Cambodia.

Nary Kitchen Cooking Class
Battambang (two blocks off Psa Nath)
855-12-763-950
navuthk@yahoo.com
$6, half-day class

Produce in the Battambang market

A Battambang vendor with water grass (trou kuon) used in sour soup

Ingredients used in Khmer curry paste (kreung)

A Battambang vendor guts and chops her fish.

Shaving lemongrass in the Battambang market

Nary chops lemongrass in her kitchen.

Nary cooks a batch of sour fish soup.

If you’ve read my previous post — a 9-day diary of Lao village food — you’ll fully understand the importance of chile in every Lao meal. And you’ll recognize that chile takes the form of jaeow, a paste that’s pounded with mortar and pestle.

One morning, I follow Huang and Louen, the two cooks, into their thatch hut to see just what sort of magic happens in there. I expect a simple process—but not quite as simple as this: Huang peels the skin off a clump of fresh garlic, the homegrown type with tiny cloves and purplish stems. Into the mortar they go. Meanwhile, Louen de-stems about 25 hot little red chiles that have been cooked in ash. She pats them twice (to remove the ash), then into the mortar they go. So, too, do a few teaspoons of salt and copious amounts of MSG (common in Lao food). Louen pounds the mix on the packed mud floor while the fire burns hot in the corner.

That’s it. It takes 30 seconds. So simple. Louen rinses the mortar with river water and tosses all that extra essence of the pounded ingredients into a wok atop the fire. Then she adds that cooked water into the jaeow, and we have our mealtime companion.

Garlic, chiles, salt and MSG–four ingredients, yet the flavor is so much more dynamic than that. The secret is a combination of smoky chile and fresh, young local garlic (as opposed to big cloves from China, which are popping up all over the region, particularly in Thailand—but not here… another story, another day).

In Laos, there is a name for every type of chile paste. I’ve decided to call this one Yum! jaeow.

Sokheng is 16. She grew up in Prey Veng province but left home to work in a bread factory, cooking meals for 20 or 30 sweaty, hungry young men who make the little baguettes sold everywhere on Phnom Penh’s streets. She tends the charcoal fires in a dark nook beside the blazing ovens that inspire magic: several times a day, steaming, crackling, hot loaves of bread tumble from those ovens in a gush of heat. Though everyone here makes bread, no one really eats it. They eat the food that brought them through childhood on the farm: rice, fish, soup, curry. “That’s bread, this is rice. I don’t eat bread. I eat rice. Everyone here does,” Sokheng tells me.

Check back later this week for a story on this factory, a photographic miracle of light. Such a striking place with such tough stories (and such a luscious scent of fresh-baked bread). But first, I wanted to run this little snippet of Sokheng’s life because Monday is International Women’s Day, a holiday recognized and celebrated far more openly in Asia than it is back home in the States. Barely a woman herself, Sokheng, like so many others, has pretty much skipped adolescence and jumped straight into the rigors of the adult working world.

In this way, she differs from the global norm. She lives and works on site and gets paid a daily wage. She does not work in the field or the shop or the office, then return to her family to work her second job at home. Worldwide, women make up 46 percent of the statistically recognized workforce (a.k.a. paid labor). We’ve all heard about the wage-related gender gap—women get paid 16 percent less than men—but of equal concern is what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls the “invisible and unmeasured” work for which women get little or no recognition. We’re talking cooking, cleaning, caregiving and all the other household chores that deprive women of education, sleep, and outside jobs that pay (and subject women to the increased risks of respiratory illness, thanks to indoor air pollution). This issue is not confined to the developing world. By some estimates, European women spend twice as many hours doing household chores than their male partners. Take a look at a survey of American time use, and you’ll see the same holds true across the Atlantic, too.

So here’s something to note. This is a blog about food, with a great many pages devoted to the wonderful stuff I find in the market, cook in my kitchen and put in my mouth. True, I do spend a lot of time examining other corners of life, and I admittedly find food stories far more fascinating when coupled with the people behind them. But when I sit down to dinner (and Jerry can vouch), I’m savoring flavors and dissecting recipes and examining all the mysteries that mingle with my mouth. And that’s a luxury—to spend so much time and brainpower thinking, researching and dwelling on food because that is what I choose.

I say this because the vast majority of people I interview about food cook because they must. It’s a chore, it’s what they do, and despite my fascination with their creations, they frequently find nothing remarkable about them. My mother has cooked through her entire married life, and she’d rather not. Certainly, there are chefs and “foodies” and plenty of people I meet who share my obsessions with all things edible. But the Khmer woman who fries her fish and serves it with green mango? The Kuy villager who tromps through fields and returns home with a bundle of bitter greens? The Naga woman who cooks her chiles in ash and makes tree-tomato chutney? The Timorese fisherman who grills giant tunas with garlic? Inevitably, when I start asking questions, the answer is: “It’s normal, it’s “everyday food,” it’s what they do—and they eye me in a way that says they’re unaccustomed to such attention to their work. Though a little bit mystified, they are pleased with my interest in what they perceive to be, simply, life.

So this is what I’m thinking about on International Women’s Day 2010: all the women, all the world over, who cook our food for work, not pleasure. The women who tend the fires and clean the stoves and turn out nourishing things to eat, day after day, because cooking is what they do—and they have never really envisioned another life. Thank you for your work. You have fed me fully, and fed me well.

Mother of Vietnam, at the Vietnam Women’s Museum in Hanoi. The statue, nearly 12 feet tall, represents strength and beauty among Vietnamese women. She supports her child on the left shoulder and stands as a symbol of motherly love for the country.

Happy Thanksgiving, the day after. I had not a moment to post yesterday. Our holiday began before the day’s light, up in time for an annual fun run/walk organized by Michael Thomas Coffee (next to the great little yoga studio I recently joined), with proceeds benefiting the Roadrunner Food Bank. We trotted through the frosty streets of Albuquerque’s Ridgecrest neighborhood, just as the sun began to warm the west side of the Sandias.

Then home—quickly!—to the kitchen, where everything soon blurred. But I do remember every little thing that went into the menu. Thankgsiving, of course, is not about gluttonous excess; but about about family and friends, giving and sharing, and gratitude for everything we have—right? But food fosters that. Food is a catalyst for wonder. It brings disparate ideas and far-flung relatives to the same table, to indulge in an edible peace.

When the Redferns arrived yesterday afternoon, we nibbled on pickled herring (Coates family tradition), smoked Gruyere, raw-milk Swiss cheese, a marbled brick of Irish porter cheddar. And those pecans, of course, followed by a classic recipe I’d wanted to try, the bagna cauda featured in the Times a few weeks back. Our guests brought the veggies, and we dipped to our mouths’ content.

That miso-butter bird? Oh, wow, did it work. And it did take nearly an hour to rub the whole thing. I slowly pushed through slick spoonfuls of the mixture, which warmed in my hands. I’m fascinated by the physics, as fingers massaged the outside while little pockets of butter and air moved like bubbles across the turkey, beneath the skin. I don’t know how long it took to cook the 15-pounder; it seemed hours longer than the recipe had said. We kept waiting for that thermometer to rise to 170; in the end, we cranked up the heat to 400, removed the foil “tent,” and let the bird brown to a crispy finish. Inside: succulent meat, not a bit overdone. Yum.

What else? Too much, really. Joanna brought her classic citrus cranberries, Jenny did her famous stuffing (for the gluten-eating crowd). We made a mountain of wild rice, Jerry’s jubilation cornbread with melted cheese and hot chipotles, nutmeg butter greens from the Silk Road Gourmet, and sautéed green beans and Brussels sprouts with chile and mint, a recipe from the last-ever issue of Gourmet. Even the Brussels sprout haters found this one edible.

We had curried red cabbage slaw, which I’m calling my Jewish mistake. I had selected the slaw from my Jewish cookbook, and in the heat of the moment I inadvertently started cooking the book’s recipe for sweet-and-sour cabbage. The two dishes share similar ingredients, so I combined them, and made something perhaps even better—red cabbage, onion, raisins, red wine, a little sugar, powdered Burmese curry and yogurt to set the dish as it cooled in the fridge.

Lately our friend Jon has been experimenting with soup, and when he served us his latest concoction last week, I had to have the recipe for Thanksgiving. It involves steaming red onion and zucchini, then blending with roasted garlic, avocado, a bit of tamari and olive oil, salt and pepper. I also added a few spoonfuls of the bagna cauda dip. Try it.

For dessert, Jerry baked Karina’s flourless chocolate cake, a favorite in this house. To that, Joanna added her homemade pumpkin ice cream, a David Lebovitz recipe that paired exceptionally well with the cake.

Drinks? I started with a good glass of Vouvray, Jerry with the New Belgium 2 Below Ale. From there, we went local: Gruet’s Blanc de Blancs, followed by a New Mexico Imperial Kir.

Whew. I am thoroughly stuffed, even as I eat leftover cornbread with cranberry relish for breakfast this morning.

And would you believe Jerry didn’t take a single photo last night? Some nights are like that, moments we live with only the pictures in our minds for later recollection.

I am reminded my first Thanksgiving in Asia, in 1996, when I spent a semester in Hanoi, studying and working with the Vietnam Women’s Union. Part of that job entailed teaching English to guides at the Vietnam Women’s Museum, the Bao Tang Phu Nu Viet Nam. For four months, the seven of us from the University of Oregon plunged into Vietnamese life, led by friends who showed us their world. On Thanksgiving, we wanted to give them a piece of America. Together, we cooked Thanksgiving dinner—not the traditional turkey, but some of our very favorite dishes—and we served it to 60 people packed inside the Women’s Museum, beside that golden statue of Mother Vietnam, pictured above.

Somehow, I ended up with no photos from that evening, either. But not long ago, I came across the journal I kept during my semester in Hanoi. This is what I wrote after that other, extraordinary Thanksgiving (with a few random scenes of Hanoi tossed in for good measure):

The view through my window overlooking Le Thanh Tong Street

We came together at 8:30 that morning for an entire day of chopping, stirring, dicing and frying. We made spaghetti, chile, tabouli, salad, punch and a whole lot of peace over sips of wine and dancing cleavers.

The women at the museum—we owe the night to them. We hired two to help through the day, and they worked from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., for $5. Yet we could not pay them more when the head of museum displays makes $25 a month after 10 years with the Women’s Union.

Van and Tuyet, our colleagues, were right there with us, dodging sparks from an uproarious fire and setting flowers ever so daintily on dozens of tables. And immediately after our draining day, they began cleaning and preparing the dining room for a wedding that would take place the next morning. Van planned to stay the night along with other women squatting in the kitchen, plucking birds for the boiling pots and stuffing shrimp paste into mushrooms.

I don’t know how we could have prepared dinner for 60 without all these fingers in the action. We couldn’t have, just as we couldn’t have done it without Ha’s expert tanslations. She joined us in the morning as Karen (the other Karen) and I gave our ingredient list to two women who would shop for us in the market. Miraculously, an hour or so later, a man on a motorcycle arrived with a crate of papayas, 2 kilos of tomatoes, 8 large onions, 1/2 a kilo of raisins, 1/2 kilo of cashews, 3 mangoes, big bunches of fresh herbs, a kilo of garlic, 5 kilos of beef, 5 cucumbers, 1/2 kilo of shredded carrots, 1/2 kilo of shiitake mushrooms, 1 kilo of limes, 4 pineapples and 5 logs of cinnamon—all for $30. Yes, logs of cinnamon (this was before I knew the histories and origins of cinnamon and I was surprised by the size). We asked for sticks and instead got branches two feet long and several inches thick.

After the market delivery was checked and double-checked, a girl rode up to the museum door with two huge hunks of ice strapped to her bike—half of our order. She returned half an hour later with the remainder, and we all took turns whacking it to pieces, which we threw into a 15-gallon pail of beer.

It was a beautiful day, down to the last minutes of sudsy water and many hands flailing about in a rush to clean the kitchen. Each of us had stood and spoken to our guests during dinner. I told the crowd I had never been so far from family and friends on Thanksgiving. Yet I’d never felt so close to home, either.

The Turtle Tower in Hanoi’s Ho Hoan Kiem

Co Phuong in her coffee shop, our favorite place for cafe sua or nuoc chanh da

Bicycle vendor

Reading while waiting

The women around the corner

A friend’s aunt, making her amazing peanut-fried beef

I spent almost all of last weekend cleaning and cutting the apples from our tree

and cooking them and blending them

into a variety of sauces—primarily, apple-grape (grapes off the vine) and apple-onion (sweet little onions from the farmers market). I’ve given some away, we’ve eaten a lot with cornbread and fruit for breakfast, and the rest went into the freezer for a later month.

I’ve eaten bunches of grapes while standing over the sink. I’ve made juice, so sweet we had to temper it with water. The rest I froze with hopes of pulling out in an off-season and remembering the scent of these fruits in the end-of-summer air.

But that’s not all. For days, our kitchen table lay buried in tomatoes. And eggplants. And arugula. And basil.

I’ve made tomato soup and zesty tomato sauce. I’ve parboiled whole tomatoes and frozen them for the future. I’ve eaten more arugula salads than even my green-loving gut prefers (arugula-apple pesto, too).

Roasted, salted, drizzled with olive oil. This house is full of tomatoes.

Last night, we shared a wonderful Thai soup and cornbread (yes!) dinner with friends. We got to talking about markets, and I mentioned I had not visited our local Asian market in quite some time. Why? For weeks now, the story remains the same. After a walk through our backyard, a weekly trip to the farmers market and the grateful acceptance of our friends’ super-juicy homegrown yellow melons—we need little else in terms of food. This is enough to keep us in the kitchen with a bountiful table.

This is what we’d imagined months ago when we planted. It’s what we’d envisioned two summers ago when we bought this house. The pomegranates are yet to come. And I haven’t even told you about all those onions and herbs….

Roasting chiles for market, Bangkok.

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.

So Karen went and left me for 10 days to gallivant about Costa Rica, and I remembered what happens when guys are left alone in a house for a few days:

But I did manage to get a hammock up in the back yard. It’s a matter of priorities.

And, yes, I did clean the kitchen before she returned last night, bearing coffee.

Final post by Jerry, covering for the real Rambling Spoon…

I’m working on my own kitchen library, but I doubt it will ever match this mighty impressive collection of culinary reads (and what you see here is only half of it—the rest is stacked upon office shelves upstairs). I suppose such an achievement is to be expected when you bring together the food and drink editor of this informative group and the editor of this fine site, eating and cooking and living tastefully under one roof.

Lucky us—we got to be guests in this dynamic household! We took the long route home from Asia, with a four-day stop in London. We’d met Him and Her for dinner on our last trip through, in October. When we came through this time, They generously offered their guestroom as a halfway stay between continents. We couldn’t have asked for better hosts and guides, who welcomed us with a full-on home-cooked Burmese meal made from the recipes of this grand book (to which She recently gave a big thumbs up).

Nor could two fans of Indian food have asked for a better halfway house location. She and He live in Tooting, which offers one of the world’s best assemblies of Indian and Sri Lankan eats. Next up: touring London with two of the city’s most refined palates.

This, by the way, is the disaster we faced after 8 months away. Everything needed a thorough spring cleaning.

We’d been gone so long, neither of us could remember which drawers held the towels, which cabinets the measuring cups. We’d lost our kitchen instincts. It would take a few days to find our way again.

In order to avert a repeat of The Mouse Problem, we had packed all salvageable spices and dry goods into a tightly sealed metal trunk.

I returned home with so many new spices and condiments and no proper place to put them. Our counters remain cluttered with homeless bags and jars. It might take me another 8 months to get everything back in order.

But that sweet basil plant on the far right, above? It’s now in the ground, growing nicely, along with two others just like it.