Stomachs on legs are proud to present

One of my favorite Chinese contributions to Khmer food is cha kvai (ឆាវខ្វៃ). Cha kvai are fried dough sticks, more like crullers than churros. They are sold in pairs, for dipping in or adding to your noodle soup. I got hooked on them in Phnom Penh. But I would bet that they, like the Teochew people, may be found throughout Southeast Asia. In Cambodia, they are most commonly found on restaurant tables alongside the condiments in the morning, and any given restaurant's supply is usually all eaten up by noon. Initially, I had assumed that each restaurant made their own. But after long hours of observation (lots of mornings sitting eating my soup and taking my coffee), I realized that they seemed to be produced elsewhere and either delivered to restaurants in the mornings by courier or picked up by restaurant employees. I stumbled upon one of these cha kvai production facilities one morning near Psah Kandaal.

During business hours, it is just an unassuming moto parts shop.


But early in the early morning, it is a bustling hub of fried dough production!





If you want to make your own: http://lilyng2000.blogspot.com/2007/05/yau-char-kway-ii.html

In Korean street-food of the week, I am feeling the wintery sweet vs savoury bomb that is Hoddeok. Basically it is a dumpling, flattened to a crunchy pancake but the star if its show is the cinnamon sugar centre. You can get 3 for 2000 WON (NZ $2). They are dangerously delicious. Here is a great recipe c/o Last Appetite


Hoddeok

Ingredients – Makes 5

1 1/4 cups plain flour
6 tbsp milk
Pinch of salt

To start the yeast:
1/4 tsp dry yeast
1/4 tsp white sugar
2 tbsp water

Stuffing
1/4 tsp cinnamon
5 tbsp brown sugar

Mix the yeast, white sugar and water and leave in a warm place to ferment for 15 minutes. Sieve the flour into a bowl, add the salt, milk and yeasty water. Mix well, cover and leave to rise for two hours. Go see a movie or something.

Mix the cinnamon and brown sugar together for stuffing. Oil up your hands (if not sufficiently oiled from movie popcorn) and take about 1/5 of the dough, flatten into a thick disk and place a tablespoon of stuffing inside. Seal like a dumpling.

Add oil to frypan and heat. Place your sugar filled dumpling into the oil. When brown, turn over and flatten the dumpling into a disk with a spatula. Cook until browned.

In other news I am obsessed with Chilsing Cider, cider here means lemonade. This is the boring english side of the can, how colonial of me.


Here is my cute kid of the week Alan.
He wears this tae kwon doe outfit 24-7 and whenever he is in trouble can charm me out of it in 5 seconds. Sitting under his desk to meditate during a test searching for answers was a definite highlight. This whole class is adorable and showers me in candy for some reason, thats a culinary post for another time.

Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany is currently showing off its new collection of found art: street food vendor stalls from around the world. I love the look of delectation on the curator's face when he says "It is so dirty".

If you happen to be in Canberra on the 19th of January, then you may be interested in this.

Thai fresh markets to Tai hypermarkets: new class based consumption in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Increasing attention is being given in academic and policy research to the rise of TNCs supermarkets in the Global South but few cultural analyses or ethnographic investigations of this 'supermarket revolution' are yet available (Coe and Wrigley 2007). This research uses ethnographic study in Chiang Mai, Thailand to reveal how European supermarkets are integrated into national and local level modernities, histories and narratives, and used by local subjects to define class differences and create middle class identities around notions of cleanliness, leisure and development. In particular, this paper examines how Chiang Mai hypermarkets transfer agency away from the consumer as they present themselves as new spiritual and cuisine authorities, rendering fresh markets as nostalgic motifs of obsolete Thai tradition. The research also explores the possibility of local circumvention and resistance of global markets by considering Chiang Mai consumers' parallel participation in the relational economies of local fresh markets.

Australian National University Human Geography Seminar
Monday, 19 January 2009, 3.30pm - 5.00pm, Seminar Room C, Coombs Building

Bronwyn Isaacs
Geography Honours Student (University of Sydney)
ANU Summer Research Scholar

Question? Are Thai hypermarts "red" or "yellow". Personally I prefer to shop at Wealthy Mart in Siem Reap in Cambodia to affirm my class status.



Source

Sometimes I feel like the parallels between class and food is overstated and somewhat boring, especially in places like Thailand where even the "middle class" love to eat at shabby noodle shacks. Indeed, the princess of Thailand is rumoured to eat at a number of famed street noodle stands. And if supermarkets are all about development and supply chain domination then perhaps its only a matter of time before every poor man/ woman and their dog is sourcing their cheap eats from sterile isles?

We slipped in early to Momofuko with pal Ms Q in our whirlwind tour of NYC landmark eating. So no queue. We quickly decided what to eat and informed our extremely surly dragon lady waitress of our preferences

To start, hamachi with beet and apple, then some of the famous steamed buns, two pork, and one shitake for me which engendered funny looks from Hock and Ms Q. One bowl of the supposedly famous ramen and the skate to finish. A few "artisinal" beers which Hock chose.

Sashimi with beet and apple


This dish arrived as a painfully small portion of sashimi of a generally low grade. Words cannot fully describe the disappointment I felt over this fish. It could have, should have been lush thick pieces, with tart crisp apple playing off against a sweet beet flavour. Instead I felt like I was being fed left overs from a diners' meal at David Chang's more upscale Ko. Left over sashimi at a $16 US price point or there abouts.

Pork Buns


Shitake Buns


The buns arrived and offered a brief moment of reprieve. They were pretty good, but considering the price, (if memory serves they were around $9 for two) and the hyperbole, you'd hope for something decent. Especially given that it is still just a steamed bun - street food in most places in East Asia that can be had for a mere dollar or two - with much more succulent pork, speedier, sweeter service and less fuss. Such as this one, had in Japan for a quick bite (and created by someone who appears to be the Japanese "elvis" of pork buns)





But I digress....next arrived the ramen

Ramen


This was a major disappointment. With all the fuss that surrounds momofuku I half expected it to be the best bowl of ramen I have ever eaten. Alas it was at this point that Hock and I turned to each other in agreement and said "the emperor has no clothes". The broth lacked depth of flavour, the pork was like a dry Chinese char sui rather than a succulent fatty ramen pork. The noodles were definitely edible, but again at 16 USD for a bowl I felt as though David Chang had personally sucker punched me in the wallet.

With a single bite into the dry unmalleable pork, both Hock and I began to pine for "our" ramen guy on Thonglor, Bangkok. A simple ramen shop that serves the most unbelievably tender and delicious pork, with a dollop of homemade miso chili paste for the modest price of 80 baht. Or 2.50 USD. Now I know that labour costs and rents are higher in New York than Thailand, but you'd expect that labour perhaps to be more skilled or at least capable of preparing ramen of equal if not superior quality......but no the "labour" in question, standing behind the "noodle bar" seemed more concerned with the placement of his hispter head band and iphone communications than the succulence of our porky noodles. And certainly there was no appreciative yelling of "thank you very much for your custom" that cheers me to no end after eating at family style ramen joints.

Skate with brussel sprouts and kochujiang style sauce


The skate was fresh. And that about sums up all I have to say about this dish.

The beer was good, if not again a little over priced....aahh what a funky label and the words artisinal will do for prices these days




The total price of the meal USD$150 plus tips.....my Chinese grandmother would turn in her grave if she knew what we paid for a bowl of noodles and some pork buns.

Afterwards we headed to Chickalicious for a quick and reasonably price dessert

thumbs up...



it was good to see the original chef still working at her kitchen

Afterwards we landed at a bar in the lower east side that is reached by walking through a Japanese noodle bar. I walked in and half heartedly wished we had eaten here. We had a few whiskys chatted and Hock talked to the Japanese barmen. He told them we had just eaten at momofuko and how bad it was. They nodded in agreement and proclaimed it odd that "white people just love it there"




Which is exactly what momofuko is, it is gentrified "Asian" food cleaned up for a primarily white clientele who will unwittingly pay three times the price for an average bowl of noodles for the privilege and convenience of not having to navigate unfathomable menus and dirty toilets. "Eating the other, without meeting the other" is a term I recall being used once, which is odd, as I thought Japanese street foods like ramen and steamed buns had already been demystified to the general populous, and certainly a Japanese toilet is often far preferable to a western one...and here I was thinking that "Asian" is the new "White"....and that the time for repackaging a steamed bun and selling it for three times the price to scared white folks were over...how wrong I was.....David Chang may not be the greatest chef in the world but he certainly isn't the stupidest either.

So in the end we too had to come to the same general conclusion as David Chang himself conceded when interviewed about being given the James Beard award - confusion and general bewilderment that such praise is utterly undeserved.