Stomachs on legs are proud to present

Seriously. That's the name of the song, "ចង់ស្រក់ទឹកមាត់."

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

The 1969-70 "Menu" B-52 bombings of Cambodia's border areas, which American commanders labelled Breakfast, Lunch, Supper, Dinner, Desert and Snack, aimed to destroy the mobile headquarters of the South Vietnamese "Vietcong" and the North Vietnamese Army (VC/NVA) in the Cambodian jungle. However, these and later bombardments forced the Vietnamese communists further west and deeper into Cambodia, and ultimately radicalized Cambodian local people against Lon Nol's regime.

Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen on the similarities between the current war with Afghanistan and the past bombing of Cambodia

Sad coffee music...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi0W2c-RIcM

Sitting in my inbox today an email from a dearest friend who joined me at this lunch a ways back.

Subject: TK!

I will send you photos of Thanksgiving, let me zip them up in a file. We brined the turkey for about 48 hours, including a bottle of white wine. It was the most moist and flavorful turkey we have had. Great!

Guess what??!! I flew from Indiana to San Francisco today and I am with John and Art now. I had to change plans in Chicago and get on the 777 to SF. While waiting to board the plane I saw this guy and knew right away who it was:

Thomas Keller! I was ready to go up and say hello and then they started boarding the plane and he was gone. Got to SF and met John and pointed out Thomas to him. He was looking for his driver but they guy was not there so he went to Starbucks to get something. We went to baggage claim and there was the driver with a sign for Thomas Keller. We told the driver where he was at Starbucks. Cool! I like him.

Bye,

M

There's something very Khmer Rouge about Alice Waters

Anthony Bourdain at the Food for Thought Forum

Bitch fight!

I've been quiet on the blog lately, by my standards I suppose. Thesis deadlines.

But today I post, today Hock sent me a pdf of a honours thesis about American BBQ. Entitled "Why Barbecue Matters in the South" it appears to be written by someone called Anoop Desai as his honours thesis in American Studies. The pdf was wrongly labelled bbqphd.pdf.

Having been grappling with a very long chapter of my thesis now and being thoroughly sick of the sight of it, the topic and of everything I study my surly response was

"it's not a PhD its an honours thesis. The guy from the PhD workshop I attended the other day said that he considers one chapter of a PhD the equivalent to an honours dissertation. Looking at this, I feel like he is right. This is 60 pages. Mine is 300. Fuck, its not a PhD its just BBQ"

so now I go back to staring at my chapter about horticultural development in Cambodia......southern bbq... pft

“When my chickens die, I also use them for cooking,” he said, “because I think my stomach is more important than the influenza virus.”

Source: Ki Media

There are two main categories of restaurant in Sieam Reap, ones that cater to tourists and their predilictions for sushi and Irish pubs and all other manner of highly inappropriate food themes for a Southeast Asian township located inland, and the other is the growing number of stalls, stands, restaurants and noodle carts selling to Siem Reap's rapidly emerging middle class of tourism workers.

We dined at two of these places whilst in SR with the Khmer chefs that Hock used to work with. One for lunch for with staff who had the day off, and one in the evening with the other lot of staff who had the evening off.

Lunch was held at a restaurant located on the outskirts of Siem Reap near the new Apsara Authority's head quarters and near a big field where there is a night market where a lot of families gather in the evening to eat and meet.

The restaurant is a rustic affair, with small bamboo open air huts set up as private dining rooms. Despite its rustic appearances the clientele is decidedly upscale Khmer with land cruisers and women in tight jeans and sparkling jewellery tippy toeing across the sandy earth towards their pre-booked dining hut.

We had beef intestine with kaffir and lemongrass. This was boiled and cold, chewy and not very nice.


Beef with accompanying vegetable and herbs





Chicken stir fried with lemongrass


and samlour machou chaloot prey (wild boar sour soup)


Plus lashings of sugary drinks and angkor beer



Since we left a number of the staff had had babies. Really really cute babies.


There were about 12 people present and the total bill came to much more than I expected. $70 US. I think this must have been either on account of the wild boar or that the price was bumped up due to the presence of barangs (foreigners)


The other place we ate was a Khmer owned pizza restaurant, called Red Pizza. The restaurant is owned by a former waiter at Hock's old work. During the last land price boom in Cambodia, he sold his land on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and made a tidy fortune. With the help of the chefs, he established a pizza restaurant replete with kids play area which is mainly patronised by local Khmers, especially tourism workers who have a newly acquired taste for bread and cheese. Red Pizza also has a pizza truck which sells pizza at the night market near the Apsara Authority



Plus the sell burgers


Pizza


Play area


With KFC planning their first outlet in Siem Reap soon and Pizza Company from Thailand already in operation, Red Pizza seems to be holding its ground. The price was much more reasonable than the lunch restaurant, which was somewhat confusing given that the ingredients for pizza are mainly imported, but I wouldn't want to read too much into this from these two single occasions.

One of my favourite movie lines of all time is "don't fuck with the wongs", a nice variant of which is "don't fuck with the Hmongs". I would like to now introduce a new addition to this phraseology - Cambodian edition 2009 - "don't fuck with Miss Wong"

Miss Wong is the latest and might I add coolest new addition to Siem Reap's night scene. Located down a small quiet laneway, across from the Silk Garden and taking inspiration from 1920s Shanghai the small, intimate and classy bar is dressed to the nines as any petite flower girl of "Shanghai Grand" would be. Draped in deep red with, gold pagoda ceiling, every nook and cranny contains unique and elaborate objet d'art, lamps and paintings.









Even the ashtrays are fabulous. New York Times reporters, of outstanding taste agree... as do all but a few curmudgeonly passé expats



Miss Wong's cocktails are more than worthy of the decor with many of the ingredients made from fresh tropical fruits and home made vodka infusions



Miss Wong's proprietor is Dean Williams, ex-radio host and ex-Auckland NZ personality/ boy about town. He dropped by in Cambodia in our final days in the country in 2006 and liked it so much he decided to stay.



If you're a kiwi pop in and say "hullo"

Miss Wong
The Opposite Laneway to the "Passage" on the opposite side of Pub Street
Siem Reap, Cambodia

What happens when two of Siem Reap's sexiest and hospitable French expats join forces to open a restaurant and bar?

Owners and very good friends of ours, Renaud Fichet (front of house) and Pascal Schmit (chef) are famous in our books for their great wine, excellent food (especially the foie gras), and great service. Most locals and tourists agree.

Menu


Well priced French wines


Amuse Chilled Potato Soup with Salmon Caviar


Foie Gras


My Fresh Sea Bass with vegetable risotto and spinach


yup Siem Reap has come a long way from the days when you couldn't even get fresh cream

Hock's extremely large t-bone steak

note: not all portions are this big Pascal was trying to show off

Le Cheque


After dinner wander over to the garden bar, say hello to Oscar the friendly dog/wolf and have a drink at the bar. Hang around long enough and you'll usually get lots of inside temple tips, generous pours and maybe even a good night kiss.

Abacus
Garden Restaurant and Bar
BP 93108, Route 6 to the Airport
1st Turn after Angkor Hotel (near western union sign)
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Phone 012644 286
cafeabacus.com

Noodles are serious business...



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVKUHfwhi3U

This snippit is from Ly Bun Yim's classic 1972 film អន​អើយ​ស្រី​អន ("An Ey Srey An"), and has been cited by Loakruu Frank Smith in comments to posts here and here as being possible inspiration for the noodlefight video by Preap Sovath.

Deathpower already pointed this out and posted the two videos side-by-side, but I thought it worth posting again here just because the clip is so awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOsvbCR-rBs

Thanks to Al for the tip!

Update: I was so delighted by the video itself that I nearly overlooked Alison in Cambodia's tasty post on cooking nom banchok!

Working for three years in Cambodia can leave you feeling a little detached from the outside world.

When it comes to your own growth as a professional chef I can’t stress enough how important the inspiration that you receive from your fellow peers is.

Simple things that you might take for granted when living in a more developed country did not exist for me in Cambodia when I worked there. Taking the time to visit suppliers (local markets were awesome in their own right but I am talking more about the more modern food movement) or reading food magazines were pretty much out for me. Parcels from my folks via the Khmer mailing system would take months to arrive, so a glossy magazine with pretty pictures of food were out too. You could pretty much forget about attending food expos and dining at others restaurants. Let alone the simple pleasure of meeting up with like minded cooks at a local bar after a difficult days service and drinking the night away while discussing the differences in an egg cooked at 63°C versus one cooked at 64.5°C. All very exciting and important stuff but an after work conversation was more likely to be on the lines of “Hey Pascal where the fuck can I get some butter? You got any butter? Don’t lie to me now, Sophea said you had some”

Luckily I was surrounded by a few (read two other chefs) and I was lucky enough to work with one of them . The French national "Jo". (check out his second cook book here his first is only available in French)




Sure we created some cool stuff, that we are both still proud of.


That both didn't stop us at the time from wanting to know how did that crazy little fucking Spanish chef do that?

While valium, xanax, heroin and mangosteens were readily available to us, Iota, xanthan or methocellulose was not.

My only real contact with the international cooking scene was through a very slow slow and unreliable internet connection (Think $300 USD a month for a service barely faster than dial up).

That’s when I came across Ideas in Food.

Thankfully because of Aki’s and Alex’s generous sharing of ideas via their blog from early ‘05 until now it has allowed me to feel as though I might be able have a small understanding of the latest techniques floating around the culinary world.

So whilst in NYC, why not take the F train from Manhattan and spend a day catching up on some new techniques?

So it came to pass that when Maytel and I decided to go to New York for a holiday I would take a day off from eating oysters, hamburgers and the likes and spend the day in Queens.

So like a true fanboy, I found myself mid morning inside the cutest little house on the sweetest little street about million miles away from the complete normaility of life in Bangkok, the city that I currently call home. I spent an amazing, eye-opening six hours with two extremely lovely and passionate people.



When I arrived we chatted over donuts and coffee about this and that, then Alex plated up an incredibly pure tasting artichoke dish that he had been working on, this set the tune for what really was an amazing day.



From this tiny, but crazily-equipped, kitchen we ran through the topics that I really wanted to become more familair with.









Some whipped products. No, those are not egg whites.





To some fruit glueing.











Like all good chefs they offered the perfect lunch.



Then we ended the day with some other variations on pectin.



What I loved about watching Alex work was other than the fact that he was mad excitable, he also couldn't help but let his true chefiness slip out. Although we both tried to be on our best behaviour as this was the first time we had met face to face Alex was swearing like a trooper towards the end of our session. I have worked in four different countries and all chefs seem to behave the same way if not for swearing then maybe a good dick joke, why is that?

Alex and Aki were right. After the days class was through my way of thinking about food would be different. They could not have been more right.

The days experimenting wasn't perfect mind you.

After not allowing the above pectin bath to cool properly the little sauce orbs didn't come out the way they should have. "Don't do that, wait for the bath to cool" was Alex's advice.

"Do you make many mistakes or have many failures?" I asked.

"I fuck up all the time" he replied.

I personally hope to be fucking up over the next two months and have high hopes for next year too.

Here is the shopping list that I am currently working on.

Activa YG
Liquid Nitrogen local supply?
Liquid Nitrogen Dewar small shallow dish
Liquid Nitrogen Dewar holding 25 - 30 ltrs
Pacojet coup Blade set
New and larger chamber vacuum machine
Plastic acetate strips
Pectin LM
Pectin LMA
Fruit powders
Methocel A15C
Methocel F50 
Maltrin M100 Maltodextrin
Calcium Lactate
Locust Bean Gum
Calcium Glunconate
Calcium Lactate
Carrageenan (Iota)
Carrageenan (Kappa)
Konjac
Kelcogel Gellan Lt-100 (elastic)
Kelcogel Gellan F (Firm)

My littlest sister recently came to visit. She was only here for ten days so in order to lure her away from spending all her time in a mall we hired a car and drove to Trat for two nights. We found an excellent cheap hotel deal on Agoda. So for $70 bucks a night we went to stay at a Centara resort half way between Trat and the Cambodian border. All the rooms are suites so include bedroom and living area. But what's best is that it is soooo quiet. I've always loved this area of Thailand, while all the knobs and Aussie brawlers hang out down in over crowded beaches of Phuket and Samui, the beaches in Trat are basically empty.





If you drive further down the coast near the Cambodian border you can find empty beaches with Thai style salas made for lounging and snacking in the shade. The one draw back of the resort however is that because it is sooo quiet there are not many tasty local vendors. If you are going to stay here I suggest renting a car to explore the area, also because the food at the hotel is not very nice at all. So, after one bad meal there we hopped in our rental and found our way to Phu Nim - translation "Soft shell crab"

Phuu Nim

This restaurant reminded me very much of a Khmer restaurant, maybe it was the way they wrapped the cutlery in pink toilet paper, or maybe it was the heavy wooden furniture everywhere?



The soft shell crab we ordered wasn't great, the old tasted stale and overall it just wasn't very well executed


Tom yum po taek, was ok, except I put too much extra chili in it and made it a bit too spicy for everyone at the table


We ordered a large fried rice, for comfort mostly I suppose, it was enormous. The restaurant seems to be a family style place for banqueting by locals above all else. Thankfully my sister's boyfriend who just turned 21 has the appetite of a 21 year old male


The crab egg dip with crudite, I think it's called Phuu Lon??? if anyone would like to correct me, was nice-ish but had a slightly bitter flavour


Fish, thumbs up...but accompanying sauce was a horrible chinese style sweet and sour sauce that came with the owners recommendation


The best dish was the fresh mud crab we picked out ourselves from the live tanks. I managed to negotiate my way through my terrible Thai tonal ability to ask for it steamed. It was meaty, sweet and delicious. And even though the meal wasn't great it was still much better and cheaper than the hotel could offer. Phu Nim is a little hard to find though, but it's the first decent looking restaurant overlooking the sea on the way to the Cambodian border after Centara. There are no signs in English, just look for a typical Thai seafood restaurant with lots of wooden furniture


Baan Phuu
Before we headed back to Bangkok we had to stop at Baan Phuu for lunch again.




And we had to order the wing bean salad again, which tasted even better than I remembered it



Plus two plates of soft shell crab that were basically inhaled on arrival


Crab egg dip again, which was sooo good compared with the previous evening, it was difficult to stop eating it and meang made with fresh chopped up shrimp


Finally, for something different I ordered a green curry with shrimp. I don't often order green curries because they are such a standard Thai dish that is so often disappointing, but this one was quite possibly the best Thai green curry I have ever tasted, hands on my heart. I don't know who the cook at Baan Phu is but may he/she live long and prosper