Aha Tngai Trong } aka Lunch

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Making Lunch.

The other day we finally got set up enough to make our own lunch. We had negotiated with the host family that we would make our own breakfasts and lunches, but have the family make us dinner so we can socialize and practice the language with them. PC has given us a gas burning stove (mostly so we can boil water with ease) which is nice (also because we don’t have to cook over the fire) ~ and the tank isn’t terribly expensive to replace.

The one catch about this whole cooking for ourselves is I’ll admit- it’s much harder to predict how much food to make when you know you don’t have a fridge for the leftovers and don’t currently own a cooler to keep things cold in.

Most people here (even if they have electricity) do not own refrigerators. They just go to the market in the morning, buy fresh meat and vegetables and cook it. It’s how they do it every day. No fridge to the meat in for a few days- or no freezer to freeze meat and let it sit out and thaw. You just need to get the appropriate amount, cook it and hope that you didn’t grab too much – or else the dog or the cats are going to be benefit from you over guessing the amount of food you can eat; and eventually get the better end of the deal.

So since we have yet to purchase a frying pan, and all we have is a huge pot to boil our water in, and more recently purchased a small pot to cook rice in – we decided to go with the easy staple of rice and beans. We were able to buy black beans for a fairly decent price. And I decided we could make some sort of make shift salsa. SO I went to the market and reminded myself to ‘think small’. I bought one small bunch of green onions, some garlic, 3 very small tomatoes, one small onion, a small cucumber, a small lime and 2 small green peppers.

I slowly learned as I was chopping up the veggies that that was twice as much as I needed. Who knew? Like—the green peppers were really small – smaller than the size of a baseball. The tomatoes were just a little bigger than a golfball, and the cucumber was the size of a large pickle. I even picked a very, very small hot pepper to throw in.

But when I sat down and started chopping everything up, (which I did one vegetable at a time to see just how much was going to be enough) I realized that this was toooo much food for what we could sit down and eat at this lunch time meal. No fridge to put the leftovers in. We simply had to eat it all. Which we slowly did – and sure enough we were very full; and to say the least we learned a lesson.
Oh well… nonetheless if I do say so myself, it turned out really pretty good. Too bad we couldn’t have our staple of cheese and sour cream and a tortilla to put it all on.

Oh well. ------ We do plan to purchase some baking powder in the big town of Siem Reap this weekend. (They don’t sell that stuff in our local markets, and we’re lucky because we’re so close to 2nd largest provincial town in the country) and we’re going to make an attempt at making homemade flour tortillas. I’ll let you know how that goes. AND when we purchase a frying pan – I’ll let you know how the rest of the cooking adventures go. Maybe by the end of this all, we’ll be able to prepare some of the delicious Khmer dishes for all of you. (But in the meantime we’ll try to make a few American meals as best we can without milk, cheese and butter to quiet our yearning stomachs).

Until next time… bon appetite.