Spaghetti Success! - it's the small things

So we just had my co-teacher, his wife and three children over for a spaghetti dinner. I don't remember if I've written about my previous Khmer/American cultural food exchanges in regards to spaghetti; but tonight was a SUCCESS! They ALL liked it (including the two-year old), they all asked for seconds AND no one put soy sauce on top of it, used chop-sticks OR asked for rice. I was so pleased, you have NO idea. It was such a pleasure.

. . .

Let me take a step back in time and talk a little bit about our previous encounters with Cambodians and Spaghetti.

The first spaghetti exchange happened with our training host family. They were receptive to the idea, and tried it (or at least put a few bites down) and then the host father made the first move to put it over rice. Fair enough... pretty much the same thing........ I guess. Buddha forbid you eat a meal without rice in this country!!! ;-)

Then, the next encounter occurred when we made it for our current host family. I had the table set and everything ready to go and called them over to sit down. I noticed when they came walking to our side of the house, they had made and brought over a few Khmer dishes, (which the flavors wouldn't have really meshed with Italian very well). Nonetheless, I suppose they were just trying to be nice; however, I have a sneaking suspicion that they truly brought the extra grub over in case they didn't like the American food we had prepared. (As the boyscouts say, always be prepared, right?) - Well - our host dad liked it (but preferred to eat it with chopsticks, most noodle-dishes are eaten with chopsticks here, and our brother liked it; but our host mother wants nothing to do with American food we quickly found out that evening. hA. Oh well... we tried.

And then a few months back our school director hinted at wanting to try some American food. So we invited him and his family over. The director liked it well enough, and took seconds (don't know if he was being polite or not); but his wife said it'd be more delicious with soy sauce on top of it. (insert moment when heart sinks and you think to yourself, "what? you really want to put soy sauce on top of this?")- And then proceeded to eat the rest of the sauce on top of some rice (which we had prepared 'just in case' someone didn't like the noodles,...after learning from our previous experiences).

Sigh.
Oh well. There are many types of food out there and I do have to say I have yet to taking a liking to 'prahok' (fish paste) that is used in so many dishes here.
. .. .

Anyway, Will and I were very pleased with how dinner went tonight and found it quite nice to know that at least some Cambodians are open to trying, and might actually even like food that we crazy Americans prepare.