i'm really missing cooking. atm we live in a college so we get fed most meals, excpet holidays (college/school and public), and Sunday nights. also we share a kitchen, 6 of us altogether with only 1 freezer! plus there is not much kitchen stuff, but i don't really know what is there yet and what isn't , i only find out as i need to use it, which isnt very often
and when i do cook i end up throwing out the rest of the bottle of olives, or the two servves of left overs, as we don't need to eat here much and we don't have much freezer space, so i'm not very inpsired to cook, exp as KS and I don' t have much food we like in common, so i'm mostl cooking for one(without being able to freeze left overs)

but today i did some pototoes in the oven, some bits of chicken in oil (coated in egg, flour and yummy stuff), with some nice raw veg (red caps, beans, carrots)
KS had some, as well as rice and kimchi

part of getting settled in places for me is having a place i can feel comfy cooking in, it was great at our last place to buy mixing bowls, measuring cups etc etc, and know they were mine and i could make my food, i don't have that here

Banana flower - the way L makes it

First we pounded garlic, sugar, salt and peanuts.
We sliced/grated the banana flower into a bowl of water, and washed the fresh herbs (basil, mint, a bitter one with a long leaf that we eat with roast chicken, and the one some call Vietnames herb).

After picking leaves off the herbs stalks we put them in a bowl with the drained banana flower and added the pounded stuff. Also chopped up boiled pork- including the skin and fat.

After mixing it up we added some lime juice.

I think after that all we did was mix and check the taste to see if we needed to add more salt or sugar.

She said you can also make it with cabbage, also other salad veggies like capsicum, carrot and cucumber. KS said if you make it with cucumber its too watery.

Blue Cake

My mum told me not to make blue cake, as blue isn't a food colour. That was just after she gave me a bottle of blue food colouring.

Papaya salad

These photos go with the previous post.

Hot weather, blackouts etc , http://ki-media.blogspot.com/2010/05/hot-weather-lack-of-supply-causes-phnom.html

hmm, can't do links on the blog these days, anyone know how to fix this problem?

Papaya Salad

In English fellowship groups I run we have been doing food words. So now its time to use those words in a real situation. Last week with the girls at Bible school we made papaya salad, and next week we'll be doing it at church.

As I was asking around I found people had lots of different ideas about the right way to make it. Here is one/some of those versions

First into the mortar you put garlic, chili, salt, sugar, shrimp paste and pound for ages. I'm not really sure of the order, but you also put in herbs, such as basil and saw herb, and any other ones the market sellers sell you when you tell them you are going to make this snack. Also dracoon (morning glory?) and beans, and some say cucumbers and salty crab. Also grated papaya and peanuts. Pound all this up together and then you've got a Khmer snack!

The type of papaya used for this is white and not sweet. If I make it for myself I leave out the chili and shrimp paste.
Oh, and i forgot lime juice is important too.
I might come back and fix this up later, after we do it at church.

Cambodian rice noodle salad

Well, that's what I call it anyway, in Khmer its something like "ynoum". We made it last weekend.

We used chicken, which I'd boiled and ripped up (I've also had it with pork, and this weekend we had it at a wedding with beef that was soaked in lime juice rather than cooked) ,
soaked rice noodles (actually they are made of mung beans, not sure why I call them rice noodles, in khmer mee soo-ah),(in the fancy version of this they fried the noodles)
raw veggies such as cucumber and carrot chopped finely, (capsicum,tomato etc)
herbs such as basil and saw herb (tastes like coriander, looks like a saw),
crushed peanuts to sprinkle over at the end,
a sauce (neither of us know how to make it, i think we should ask Soeun's mum before we try again, but its mainly water and sugar, with crushed garlic, some girls told me to use lime juice, some said vinegar)

It's really yummy!