A funny thing about our coffee friends (see previous post): They understand what we’re doing. For weeks, I’ve tried to explain to people that we are NOT moving back to the US, per se. We’re investing in a house, then returning to Asia for the bulk of our work. We will juggle time between two continents. (I prefer to think of myself as a nomad.) But that’s a difficult concept for many Westerners to understand – you either live in a place or you don’t; the transient way of life falls outside the boundaries of acceptable or understandable.
But our coffee shop friends understand perfectly. This is a gathering place for men from faraway provinces who make the long trek to Phnom Penh in order to rent a cyclo, peddle a few people around town for a week or two or three, then return home to family and farm with (they hope) a small bundle of riel in their pockets. Cambodia is, after all, a country whose people understand the necessity of movement. Work and home often do not converge.
What our friends perhaps don’t understand is that Jerry and I pick this lot in life. In Cambodia, transience is born of necessity but rarely choice.
Jasmine menu. (Photos a team effort between Andy Bronson and Jerry Redfern)
Valentine’s Day came and went, and this is well overdue, but so be it. I want to tell you about Jasmine and her red romantic dinner.
Jasmine is a lovely young woman who, with her husband, Mark Norris, recently opened a restaurant by her name on the Kampot riverfront. They converted their beautiful old shophouse into a high-ceilinged elegant spot for French food, Khmer food, or something special if the day warrants it. (Mark was, in a previous Cambodian life, a photojournalist. I remembered his face from the olden days.)
Jasmine is a talker, soft-spoken as she is, and it’s hard to refuse her polite invitations. When she’s not busy with customers, she invariably has her nose stuck into a French cookbook.
Raspberry margarita
So on Valentine’s Day, our threesome (Jerry, our Oregon pal Andy, and I) sauntered into the dimly lit dining room for Jasmine’s set-menu dinner in Red: watermelong martinis, raspberry margaritas, fresh shrimp with red sauce, red veg springrolls, pumpkin soup, cashew chicken with pineapple rice, crab with red curry and tomato, and a yummy banana cake served with a rose.
Jasmine’s springrolls
They’re still working out the quirks at Jasmine – I don’t think she was ready for such a crowd with so many courses to cook, and it was nearly midnight before we’d finished eating – but the next time you’re in Kampot, I recommend a visit: Jasmine Restaurant, House 25, Riverside Road, Kampot, 855-092963264.
You have to understand, I have a thing about spiders. I’ve become much better with age. I no longer scream at a daddy long legs in the bathroom. I even admire the fist-sized monsters of an Asian jungle, and I neve intentionally kill them – not as I did in my childhood when all I wanted was to squash any and every creepy leggy thing out of existence.
But furry spiders on my plate? Deep-fried tarantulas doused in pepper-lime?
Spiders at Romdeng Restaurant. (Photo courtesy of Andy Bronson)
There they were, on the table before us at Romdeng. This was the dinner I had offered, for a superb cause, and this was the dish my dear guest, Yvonne, and our Oregon buddy, Andy, had talked me into ordering.
Deep-fried spiders – a dish for which the town of Skuon is famous. One of those dishes foreigners love to belabor, fixating on the exotic and weird. Yvonne – a French woman who studied in America, now lives in Japan and came to visit her Cambodian Chinese relatives on the outskirts of Phnom Penh – had long heard of this delicacy but never tried it. None of us at the table had eaten spiders before, so why not? Yvonne didn’t expect them to be so big, and I simply couldn’t believe I was lifting the hairy leg of an arachnid to my lips. Andy, who has a peculiar description for everything, decided: crunchy paper straw. “It’s flexible, that you can eat it, and it’s chewy, but it still has that hard paper feel. But that very lime and pepper flavor (from the sauce).”
Well said, Andy.
Andy, Yvonne and spider legs.
Alas, much more arrived at the table: banana flower salad with pork fat, three types of prahok (Andy could shove a whole spider body into his mouth but prahok he couldn’t do), fish and eggplant dip, pork and taro springrolls, fish stew with tomato and galangal, sweet rice-flour dumplings for dessert and two orders of mango with sticky rice.
And: fine conversation with Yvonne, who studies language development among youngsters, a topic which led to lengthy talk on speech and thought processes under the large umbrella of culture.
Thank you, Yvonne, for a lovely night out. My apologies to your relatives for keeping you out so late. And my apologies to the gracious Romdeng staff, as we shut down the restaurant well beyond closing time.
Some days in Cambodia are like the soup. Some days I wake to a thick, rich bowl of rice porridge, lots of flavor, creamy in a buttery sort of way. But some mornings, it’s a thin bowl of rice and water, thoroughly uninspiring and an ominous start to the day.
Like today. Today begins with such a soup (even though the same soup at the same restaurant two days earlier was the thick and creamy type I love). I should have known it was coming, should have felt it in the air – you can sense goodness or badness approaching on a Cambodian breeze. This morning, annoyingly broiling already by 8, a good friend pulls up on his moto. “Do you have any money for breakfast?” He shows his wallet, just 1,000 riel (25 cents). He asks if we have any work for him. He’s a friend, he’s a driver, he’s a translator and general fixer. But today, we don’t have anything for him to do. Jerry hands him money for breakfast and lunch.
This is followed by the blaaa soup, and in turn followed by a meeting with another friend, an intelligent smartly dressed man who used to work for an NGO. But he lost that job four years ago when the NGO’s funding ran out. NGOs do that: they leave countries like Cambodia – piles of aid money, massive corruption and little to show – for newer hot spots such as Afghanistan or Iraq. Our friend works now, occasionally, as a freelance translator. He would like to work for another company, but private enterprises shudder to look at a man with a limp leg and two crutches. That’s life for a disabled Cambodian with a university degree. As we say good-bye, he suggests we stay in touch through email. He didn’t have money for his phone, so the company cut him off.
There’s more. We have two more friends, a woman and her husband, who lost a leg and half his face to a landmine several years ago. He was a soldier, forced to fight. The government abandoned him when he hit the mine. They moved to a rural village a few years ago, cleared their own land, built their own house, grew their own food (on three legs between them). When our friends grew sick with malaria last year, they sold their plot for a small sum and moved to the city for a while. That didn’t work either, so they returned to the village, where they now live on the edge of a mean old woman’s property. They want their own land again, their own farm to work. But things have changed. Land speculation and land-grabbing schemes have taken over the countryside. Since Khmer Rouge times, millions of Cambodians have lived on land without official deeds or titles. And now, the rich are buying up vast tracts of the country, kicking out the poor and raking in the money. Our friends present us with a proposal. Price of a farm field and land title: $3,000. Two cows: $1,200. Ten chickens: $50. Homemade house: $150. Happiness in Cambodia: Priceless. All told, it would cost our friends $4,400 for a new life, though there’s no guarantee a new life will succeed. We do not have that kind of cash to give. Nonetheless, they ask us for help, hoping some kind donor will come our way.
Oy.
From there, I hop online, trying to track a package I had sent from Bangkok to New York more than a week ago. It’s sitting in a NY FedEx facility, God knows why. I call five times, the line drops four of those times, and on the fifth try I’m told it will take up to 48 further hours for the package to be delivered.
I’m frustrated. But then I read a front-page story in The Cambodia Daily about the World Food Programme’s $10 million shortfall in this neck of the woods. Unless the money suddenly appears, more than 700,000 Cambodians will go hungry in the next six months – mostly school children, and patients with AIDS and tuberculosis. And even if the money is pledged, it will take until May to feed the people (administrative stuff). Yes, this is the same WFP for which we food bloggers and you readers so generously raised a heap of money two months ago. But that heap of money is but a tiny drop in the starving bucket of the world.
Oy.
So you see, some days are like soup. Some days in Cambodia are rich and fulfilling, evocative and enticing – genuine feel-good days. Other days: nothing but a crap bowl of gruel.
Then: Jerry’s digital camera quits. And he finds out his grandfather is dying.
Yes, we’re here in Phnom Penh, where we finally had the pleasure of meeting Cambodia’s Number One fan in person. If you know Cambodia, chances are you know Andy Brouwer. I learned last night that the man, for all his love of this country, doesn’t eat fish — the staple diet of 13 million people. But he did have a lovely experience with a chicken, racing around the yard one minute, cooked on the plate 40 minutes later, thanks to his generous Khmer hosts in the boonies.
Stay tuned for more Cambodia tales (intermittent as they may be). We have friends coming from hither and yon, and a trip to Preah Vihear in the works.
For three years, I’ve had a nose for it. I’d been searching for a local chicken soup recipe all that time, though I didn’t know it.
In 2004, on a trip through Kota Bharu in the Malaysian state of Kelantan, Jerry and I met a Muslim man from Ghana who showed us around. We met the mufti, visited a madrassa (where we happened to find an Islamic scholar from Idaho), and sat down to a home-cooked lunch prepared by our guide’s wife. She made the most incredibly aromatic soup, a soup that left me puzzling over flavors for years. I eventually learned it was no singular spice that caught my attention, but something in the combination of ingredients that made my mouth go, “Wow!”
Well, we had it again in Pattani at a Muslim restaurant called Arine. Chicken soup. What kind of chicken soup? Local chicken soup. “Soup gai baan.” It’s really very simple, but the flavors, oh the flavors, you’ll just have to make the soup for yourself to understand. Here’s how, courtesy of Khun Wilaiwan and the Arine Restaurant:
Ingredients
1 local chicken (a.k.a. free-range)
2 lemongrass stalks
Healthy wedge of galangal
Healthy wedge of fresh turmeric (or substitute powdered)
Garlic
Tablespoon of coriander seeds
Water
A few pinches of salt
Fish sauce
Lime juice
Sugar
Slightly pounded bird chilies
Sliced green onion
Fried sliced shallot
Method:
Slightly pound lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, garlic and coriander using mortar and pestle. Chop the local chicken into bite-sized pieces and place in a pot of boiling water. When the chicken is cooked, add lemongrass, galangal, turmeric and garlic followed by salt. When all ingredients are cooked, season the soup with fish sauce, sugar and lime juice to taste. Put the soup into a bowl. Top it with slightly pounded bird chilies, sliced green onion and fried sliced shallot. Serve hot.
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for February, 2007.
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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