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Funkytown

Karen — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:06:31 +0000

Would you like guacamole with your dim sum? Tortillas with your hotdogs? Apparently, this place has it all.

We laughed when we spotted the shop while waiting for a red light. But it shouldn’t surprise us—everywhere we look in Albuquerque, we find funky things. We find little shops (like the Dhaka Bazaar) and eateries (like the new Moroccan/Tunisian restaurant on Central or the Mexican/Greek spot I’ve passed a hundred times) that reflect a vibrant, if eclectic, mix of cultures in this town.

For myriad reasons, we are still home, still in New Mexico, still finishing obligatory tasks before embarking on our next travels. But that’s OK. It’s life, and we’re rolling with it. We’ll get there.

Meanwhile, we’re thinking of taking a multi-ethnic tour of home: traveling for a day or two or three through this city, stopping at all the funky little places we’ve passed from the roadside that have sparked a curiosity about what’s inside. I’m certain we could eat for days, just up the road from home, and feel as though we’d traveled across the globe.

I’m reminded of an assignment I gave my class last fall in Missoula. One day, I asked the students to spend a few hours in a situation or place that made them feel uncomfortable, out of sorts, off their beaten path. I asked them to watch and listen, think and write. I’d done the same thing with my class in Burma, a few years earlier. Some students ate new food, others sat at a bar whose clientele was not of their usual style. I think what most of them found was the same sensation I find in travel: a jolt to the senses, a heightened awareness of everything around me. As soon as I land in another country, I walk the streets. I visit the markets. And I sit for a long while with my notebook and pen. I see the world in ways I never could, if I always stuck to the same routines.

We can do that sort of exercise 10,000 miles from home. Or we can do it in our own backyards. The trick is to break the patterns we create in everyday life. I believe we see more that way.

How many places can you find in your neighborhood that don’t fit your usual routines? Where can you go and what can you eat?

Perhaps a plate of tacos served with chopsticks?

Why not.

Insomnia, Nostalgia: Notes on Becoming a Food Writer

Karen — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:46:07 +0000

A sleepless night recently led to reminiscing about becoming a food writer. That story is now in The Faster Times. It recalls my early proposal for an article on a Phnom Penh coffee shop. Gourmet eventually bought that story, but ran only a fraction of the piece as commissioned—all writers understand the constraints of space. The original version of that story is posted here. Click here for a full gallery of Jerry’s photos from the coffee shop.

Ta Rey, a young man with chocolate-brown eyes and a winsome smile, doesn’t just pour coffee each morning — he performs it. He’s perfected a rhythm with kettle and cups, milk and sugar, ice and fire. In an elegant waltz, he streams boiling water through a cloth bag full of fine grind, into an old Chinese pot. Then again and again, with arm raised high, he pours that brew through the bag, building its strength each time. When it’s thick, nearly black, he swirls the coffee over sweetened condensed milk. With a swing of his hips and pinkie finger extended, he sashays the cup to a customer. Then back to his stove to make another round.

Ta Rey caters to a clientele of motorcycle taxi drivers and pedicab cyclists, farmers and veterans, and a fair number of unemployed Cambodian men. They hunch over tiny tables on plastic stools near an old Buddhist wat flanked by tamarind trees. Their wives are at home, or peddling foods in the market, or simply not here. Such is a Southeast Asian morning.

This place has no name; it is one of hundreds typical of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Men sip their drinks of choice — coffee with milk, steamed milk with sugar, ice with either — chased by strong green tea. They smoke and chat over working-man’s fare: packaged ramen seasoned with sharp chile and wedges of lime, topped with shaved beef plunked raw into the simmering broth. Morning-fresh bread, a French colonial leftover, is dunked into shot glasses of milk or tea. The bill at this shop never amounts to a dollar; a cup of coffee, just 12 ½ cents.

A block away, Army generals, politicians and tycoons hobnob on the patio of a fancy new restaurant, their Land Cruisers parked out front, bodyguards standing watch. But here: here is the picture of average life, of average Cambodian men starting their days.

Customers drink casually, reading the morning paper — if they can; many cannot — and talking of politics or the minutiae of life. They nod toward foreign restaurants lining the riverfront nearby and mention an astronomical price, $1 a cup, for a mediocre brew. But the coffee here on the street is robust and zippy, grown in the highlands. It’s much better, they insist.

And they’re right.

Street coffee is ritual, a social imperative, in Southeast Asia. Everywhere — Hanoi, Vientiane, Kota Bharu — sidewalk tables beckon early risers. It’s the interlude between work and home, home and school; or simply, morning and the rest of the day.

My husband, Jerry, and I have frequented this little spot, on and off, for a couple of years. We are the only foreigners; I, the only woman except for Ta Rey’s sister and mother, who work here too. But we’re always welcome. “The Buddha invites you here every day,” a wrinkled old pedicab driver tells us. We oblige, for the conversation, and the spectacular coffee – oily, rich, too bitter without condensed milk, perfect with it. Just a thimble-full could jump-start a car. We always drink two cups each.

Ta Rey’s father, Sam Piseth, started this shop several years ago. He brought his family to Phnom Penh in 1993 from an area of southern Vietnam called Kampuchea Krom. They are not Vietnamese. “I am Cambodian in my mind,” he says. Three hundred years ago, Saigon was a Khmer fishing village and all the land around it belonged to Cambodia. Khmer people today think it should be so again.

Sam Piseth came here, escaping Vietnam “because socialism is very difficult to live under.” This shop offers a meager but sustainable living. He serves no highbrow food, and ambiance is lacking here on an unpaved street with beggars and garbage and sewage back-ups. That’s life for all but the Cambodian elite.

Sam Piseth started his business on the sidewalk beneath trees and umbrellas. Every day a cop would stop by, demanding a 75-cent tithe — typical in a country where a policeman’s monthly salary runs $10 or $20. When Sam Piseth eventually saved enough, he moved across the street, renting a sheet-metal shack with three walls for $80 a month. He bought a TV. And now, an ongoing run of pirated Chinese chop-sockey videos keeps customers coming all day. Most everyone can afford a cup of coffee or bowl of soup. And the tea is free.

“People are very poor,” says a 65-year-old man named Ma Roeun, through a hodgepodge of gold and rotting teeth. “But the government is very rich,” and he pantomimes, stuffing his fingers in his shirt pocket.

It’s a common lament: a government corrupt and negligent. Education, justice, health care, infrastructure — all in tatters, still, since the Khmer Rouge war ended in 1998. And so, it is not surprising to find this morning rendezvous infested with rancorous talk: bad roads, poor harvests, no money, the 2003 election and subsequent political stalemate. And little hope for the future. Case in point: Ma Roeun is past retirement age, driving a motorcycle taxi for about $2 a day. He wants to invite us home, but says his house embarrasses him. Before war, in the late 1950s, the United States Embassy certified him in mechanics, a good job. He lost everything in the 1970s, including the certificate. “Oh, Pol Pot time, very bad, very bad. Just a handful of rice,” he says. “I got very sick.”

It’s the scourge of Cambodian memory, and everyone who lived through it remembers well. Some here even fought as Khmer Rouge soldiers — but the past is past, and everyone sits at the same table these days. “Now we have the peace,” Ma Roeun says.

Peace, born of scars: missing legs, gouges in arms, chests dotted with blurry-blue soldier tattoos thought to ward off bullets and bad luck. Invisible wounds, too. “On the inside, I suffer because I don’t have enough money to feed my family,” says a man named Nat. He supports a wife and five kids on $1.25 a day.

This cafe is Nat’s morning routine. Nothing remarkable, just life, as it is all over Phnom Penh. The TV blares, the kettle steams, the early sun cooks the city.

Young women walk rickety bikes through the street’s messy maze, selling hot bread from rattan baskets. Corner stalls offer grilled chicken over rice, or rice-noodle soup with cilantro and chile sauce. Sidewalk cauldrons bubble with rice porridge, thick with chicken and roasted shallots.

And everywhere, men relish their coffee, fingers gripping little cups with pinkies extended in a fashionably Asian way.

Pretty in Purple

Karen — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:36:04 +0000

This is far prettier than the previous pictures, isn’t it? Tasty, too. It’s simple: purée 1 cup frozen blueberries, 1 pear or apple, 1 heaping tablespoon of almond butter and a drizzle of warm water. It makes a great, quick topping for pancakes or breakfast breads (not too sweet; add honey if desired). Note, if you use chunky almond butter, the spread will have a grainy texture. I like that nutty feel. Use creamy almond butter if you prefer an ultra-smooth version.

Why, Sometimes, I Eat Bacon Truffle Fries…

Karen — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:32:26 +0000

…with blue cheese.

It was just a little bump, just a little buckle in the flooring near the washing machine. That’s how it started. Jerry figured he better check it out, so he pried open the crawl space door and snaked his way into the deep, dark cavern beneath our house. And there was mud.

Mud is not what you want in your crawl space.

He asked me to run the washer on a rinse cycle, then drain it immediately. Water dumped straight on Jerry’s head.

A lot of water.

In our crawl space.

That wasn’t good.

So we began an investigation, which quickly turned into a deconstruction. We turned off the water, pulled out the washer and yanked up the floor. An ecosystem was growing down there! A pond of molds and mildews, and little funnel-like mushrooms sticking to the wall.

We have (I think) awesome cork flooring that stays warm and soft on our feet. It showed nothing on the surface. But everything beneath was black and damp. So we started to take things apart, piece by piece.

The more we wrecked, the more surprises we found. The side of our cabinet had mold. So did everything beneath.

Jerry cut a hole in the wall. Actually, it crumbled in his hands. He pawed through the muck, tossing soggy drywall into the garbage, slowly exposing the inner workings of our house.

The house bowels—rusty, clogged and improperly vented.

A previous owner of mysterious vintage had re-jiggered the plumbing. He (I’m certain the culprit was a he) had capped off the old iron piping and inserted PVC. But it wasn’t the right PVC, and it wasn’t vented. Somehow, at some unknown time (weeks ago? months ago?), our washing machine came loose from the pipe. And all its water spewed straight into the wall.

The more Jerry poked around, the more surprises he found inside. A primary load-bearing support, for example, had been sliced and gouged so the old iron pipe could run right through it. A new support of dubious strength and quality was built behind it. And here we are now, with at least three known critical issues: the leakage (which could have caused the floor to cave), the improper venting (which could have led to a gaseous buildup) and a possibly untrustworthy post holding up the house (which could…. never mind; we don’t want to speculate until it’s fixed).

I admit to a morbid fascination with all of this—with all that happens inside a house, and all that’s revealed when the walls come down and the floors come up. It’s akin to a human body, with so much going on internally, so much potential for things that could go drastically wrong. On the surface, we might look fine. But how do we look inside?

That is ample reason to take good care of the foods we eat and the way we treat our bodies. I try to do that. Really, I do. I want good plumbing and strong support.

But that night, Saturday, the night we found the mess: I didn’t eat a damn good thing for me. We went to Chama. Jerry drank beer and I drank wine. He ordered fish and chips, battered and fried, with fries on the side. I ordered a small salad smothered in all sorts of nasty-for-you things that totally canceled any benefits of lettuce. And I ordered a giant cone of truffle fries with blue cheese, bacon and scallions (they’re gluten-free, straight off the Chama gluten-free menu).

I ordered those fries because I could, because I wanted them right then, that night. And because sometimes, on really crap days, people should be able to eat big, greasy servings of crap if they so desire. (Not crappy in taste, just crappy for health.)

My fingers were all slick from the oil on those fries. They were salty, cheesy, oniony and bacony—all mixed together. I washed them down with gulps of a big-bodied red zin.

And then we went to the theater next door to see The Descendants—the sort of movie that allows, on icky days, for the audience to get lost in the story and remember all the things in life that are really, truly important.

In the greater scheme of things, washing machine disasters are not.

(But blue cheese bacon truffle fries might be. If they have onions.)

(Come back in a day or two and I’ll show you a picture of something really pretty; something else entirely, a really beautiful thing that captured the light this weekend.)

The Pineapple Lady

Karen — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:13:13 +0000

It’s amazing the space certain people occupy in our minds and memories. It’s remarkable how our thoughts can capture those same people so vividly, though we don’t even know their names or stories.

This is The Pineapple Lady at Phnom Penh’s Boeung Keng Kong Market, circa 1998. We bought a pineapple from her just about every other day. She carved it the beautiful, logical way—first she sheared off the rough outer skin; then she gouged out the eyes by making big, diagonal grooves around the whole fruit. It is, really, the only reasonable way to cut a pineapple, which I hadn’t known until she showed us how. (These days, you can get your pineapple-carving lessons on YouTube.)

I haven’t visited the Boeung Keng Kong Market in years (though I recently came across a 2008 blog whose photos tell me not a whole lot has changed). And I hadn’t thought of The Pineapple Lady in quite some time, until Jerry pulled out a stash of old negatives while searching for a particular set of 1998 photos from Laos. When he told me he found The Pineapple Lady, I knew immediately what he meant.

I still don’t know her name, but I remember her smile as though we’d met again this morning. And I remember the taste of her pineapples, an epiphany of sweetness and juice that told me I’d never really eaten a pineapple before I bit into hers.

It’s actually not uncommon in Cambodia to greet a person day after day and never know her name. Sometimes, the terms for “sister,” “brother,” “teacher” or “loved one” are used more often than people’s proper names. I’m sure she called me “Madame” and I’m sure I called her “Aunty.” But far more important than a name was the bond we shared through something so simple as a pineapple.

New Year’s Buckwheat Breakfast Galettes (Gluten-Free!)

Karen — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 23:14:45 +0000

Not every meal can be as rich as this. But most days, the things we eat carry their own stories. Here’s to a New Year filled with good foods and the conversations around them.

This is how we started Christmas Day: with a mound of gluten-free buckwheat galettes filled with olives, prosciutto, gruyere, onions, rosemary and more. I highly recommend them as the beginning to 2012.

To find the recipe, and the story of my previous encounters with galettes—first on the Cambodian coast, then in Paris—read my latest post in the The Faster Times.

Beyond all, have an extraordinarily healthy, happy and prosperous New Year!

Morning Coffee, Winter Dark

Karen — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:56:28 +0000

Cold kitchen, hot kettle, northern light.

I move with the light. December slows me down, and I feel like the distant sun: barely rising on these short, dim days before falling out of view again. I haven’t spent the 12th month so far north in such a long time. The alarm pries me from a thick, warm comforter to the cold, dark air. The stars twinkle in the wintry sky as I head to the street for the morning paper (yes, in print, still). I set the kettle to boil, and when it’s done, it whistles like a train. (Really; it’s made to sound that way.)

My body doesn’t like the cold, but I can appreciate what happens at this latitude. I am always amazed at the light—the way it shuffles through time; the way the sky changes visibly in a matter of days or weeks. When we arrived in Montana in late July, the sun fell on the Clark Fork past 10 p.m. But every day since has lost a few moments of light.

That doesn’t happen in the tropics, in places far south where the sun rises and falls around the 6th hour of every morning and night. At 0 degrees latitude, the days and nights stay the same.

A couple of my students will experience that soon. As I write, they’re on a plane for Nicaragua, where they will meet and interview the farmers who grow coffee sold at shops here in the North and West. They will breathe warm, humid air while we shiver in the snow. They will watch the sun rise high overhead in a routine that never really changes. And they will drink their morning coffee in a light they can’t yet imagine.

Meanwhile, Jerry and I will pack the car and begin the long drive south, toward home. We will watch the days grow longer, the sky a little brighter, the sun at a different slant. I’m looking forward to our kitchen, its windows and the strong, steady rays that hit our table in the dead of a Southwest winter.

The Climate Change Egg

Karen — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 05:07:19 +0000

As many of you undoubtedly know, world leaders are meeting this week in Durban, South Africa, in another round of climate talks. Meanwhile, last week, Yale Environment 360 reported on the deaths of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a climate change problem. As humanity pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the oceans take about 30 percent it. When CO2 mixes with water, it forms carbonic acid—just like bubbly soda. Acids cause calcium carbonate, the key component of seashells and coral, to dissolve.

CO2 + H20 = bye bye oysters, clams, mussels, lobsters

So I did an experiment, and I wrote about it for The Faster Times. I took all of the lovely items above—two chicken eggs, four clams, four mussels—and divided them between two glass jars. I filled one jar with vinegar, the other with club soda (both acids). And I watched. Jerry set up a camera, and it took a picture a minute all through the day and night.

I included chicken eggs because they have thin shells with lots of calcium carbonate. Amazing things happened. You can see the video here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re really interested in this stuff, please do read the full explanation over at The Faster Times. When I pulled the items out of the jars, they were slippery, gooey and gross. Especially the shells soaked in vinegar.

In fact, the egg no longer really had a protective shell. It was little more than a membrane keeping the innards intact. I pushed on the egg, and my fingers left deep impressions.

When I rubbed the clams, a slick layer of brown gunk coated my fingers. Actually, the remainder of the shell beneath looked kind of pretty—porcelain white and blue. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for a clam in the ocean.

The seashells in both jars had opened. They were closed when the experiment began. What does it all mean? As I pointed out in the article, this was far from a strict scientific study. I did it mostly for visual effect. But lots of scientists have followed procedure and come to the same conclusion: ocean acidification jeopardizes the creatures that inhabit our seas.

Hope in a Coffee Mug

Karen — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:31:02 +0000

It’s my favorite mug every morning (thanks, Aye!), but especially during this historic week. It gets me going. It starts the day with a dose of hope.

Gratitude: A Work in Progress

Karen — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 20:37:36 +0000

Thanksgiving Day brunch bread made with the Good Food Store’s gluten-free mix (sold in bulk), topped with drunken tangerines swimming in honey, Amish butter and week-old Rex-Goliath Chardonnay saved for cooking.

More often than not, Thanksgiving catches us mid-stream, mid-life. We have spent far more Thanksgivings away from home than in our own kitchen. In fact, only once have we cooked a Thanksgiving meal in the house we own. Many years, we traveled south to see family in California. Many other years, we spent the day in foreign places where the holiday wasn’t recognized. One Thanksgiving morning, we rose before dawn to ride an elephant through tall grasses to a spot where endangered rhinos fed their young. The next year, we toured an organic farm in northern Thailand. Perhaps most memorable was the Thanksgiving we spent in Cambodia, following street sweepers through Phnom Penh as they hauled the city’s mess to the dump. That day showed us exactly how much we have in life to make us thankful. The list is long, and it continues to grow:

~The big stuff: family, friends, good health, daily meals and shelter from the rain and cold.
~Peace and security
~A homeland that remains intact (even when it doesn’t appear to be so)
~Political change in places that need it
~A planet that never ceases to amaze
~All the creatures that share this world—birds in the trees, squirrels on the roof, deer in the yard
~A job that teaches me new things every day
~The freedom to pursue those lessons
~A fertile landscape that feeds us
~Oceans, lakes and rivers that quench our thirst and that of the land
~The physics of weather, to keep this Earth functional
~Sunrise and sunset
~The night sky
~Kitchens and everything they offer
~Books, the people who write them, the people who publish them, the people who read them
~Music and all the ways humanity has invented it
~Art and all the ways it makes us think
~A life in which cultures continually change
~A list like this, with the eternal capacity to expand

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!