Phnom Penh; August 3, 20121 The Brassicas – one of the most confusing plant families – are highly lauded for both nutrition and flavor, but good luck trying to categorize the myriad cabbages and mustard greens that comprise the crucifers, as they’re called.  (I have bemoaned the difficulties of the taxonomy of greens on the blog before.) Many of the cruciferous vegetables don’t even belong to that family, but to the Amaranth or Chenopod family....

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Phnom Penh; March 27, 2021: Passover begins today and ends on Easter Sunday. So called “hard-boiled” eggs are central to both religious celebrations. All of us have had trouble perfectly boiling eggs at one time or another. Even the experts such as Harold McGee, who writes about the chemistry of food, admits that there is no surefire method to ensure that the shells won’t crack, the yolks don’t turn grayish-green, and the inner membranes between...

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Our friend Ben is in quarantine after his Home Leave, so I took him some cookies and pasta sauces. He’s lived in Italy, where both coniglio and lepre – rabbit and hare – are consumed with abandon, so one of the sauces was a tomatoey rabbit sauce that he could easily reheat and serve with pasta. I went back through my blog looking for rabbit dishes and found a dozen or more, including this one, which appeared as “Gibelotte” on the blog and as...

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Phnom Penh; September 29, 2020: A friend who has been living in Italy lamented to me the dearth of good Italian wines here. We have – or had, before the pandemic – an amazing array of good French wines available, but that’s to be understood since France has had a profound influence here since French explorers first entered the country in the 1860s. By 1863, Cambodia had become a protectorate under the tricolor flag. The colonial period, from...

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August 25, 2020; Phnom Penh: I have begun writing a short food column for the US Embassy weekly newsletter here. It’s mostly reworked blog articles or Facebook posts that I already had on file, but I try to customize it for cooking here in Cambodia’s capital. A shortened version of this post will appear in the newsletter some time in the future — Scott, the editor, already has a cache of them to draw from.  My dear friend Dana...

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August 6, 2020; Phnom Penh, Cambodia: There over 500 varieties of mangoes. I had had insanely delicious mangoes in the Caribbean, Mexico, Africa, and Sri Lanka before I moved here, but the “off-season mangoes” (svay kraw rdauv) here in Cambodia are perhaps my favorites. Their creamy flesh is not fibrous and they are very sweet, with hints of peach blossoms. If you walk the streets of our neighborhood here, which are lined with many mango trees,...

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