Everybody, meet my friends, The Pestle and Mortar

I grew up without a blender and food processor. Those items were just props on Full House in the endless hours of time I spent watching Uncle Joey cook. The pestle and mortar, on the other hand, was my kind of normal and I was shocked to find out that a lot of households didn’t even own one. Of course, I grew up, learned the ins and outs of the kitchen and realized I was the weird one with a batch of stones as normal cookware.

When I thought the grass was greener on the more technological advanced side of things, I put down the pestle and mortar for a shiny new blender and processor in hopes of getting with the program. Little did I realize, nothing could ever replace the magic of my former sous chefs. Maybe it was how finely the pestle hit the mortar in its goal of finely combining the spices for the soup, or how perfectly the two were able to mince together the perfect consistency of fishball but nothing can compare to how much the quality of my meals increased because of the duo.

The picture boasts a shelf full of mortars and pestles at a market. My grandma currently uses a pretty sturdy stone one. The same one she’s had for nearly 30 years since coming to America. I realize that this will be the same one passed down to me when times permits. No matter what new gizmo and gadget comes out in the future, it can’t compete against it’s ancient and jaded predecessor.

And this little piggy went to the market

If it’s one thing I hate more than trying to find parking in a crowded Asian market, it’s the idea of shopping in one. Let’s face it, I had my fair share of elbows pushed to my sides, rude service, and lets not forget the odor of miles and miles of fresh fish. The markets around my house are usually concentrated with produce from the northern Asian countries so finding actual Cambodian ingredients is quite the struggle.

So what do we do in dire times as these? With the help of cultural enclaves, my grandma insists on going to every Cambodian’s home away from home: Long Beach.

There are a few markets that my grandma prefers to shop at while in Long Beach, each specializing in their own imports and goods.

On this day, she decides to go to “Kon Heng” supermarket, also methodically called KH Supermarket.

What usually makes a Cambodian market unique is the plethora of food, ingredients, and items that you wouldn’t find elsewhere.

A medley of nameless vegetables (The shoppers here know what they want).

Miles and miles of fish

Fresh Butchers meat

...And more fish!

...And fish heads!

Delicious cookies and treats in flavors you didn't even knew existed.

We don’t come down here much, so when we do, it’s a Costco field day. My grandma usually stalks down every aisle clearing the shelves of her homeland goods hungrily grabbing from the deli section as well.

At the end of her market sprees, my grandma is usually short on her bill by a five or so dollars but today, she under calculated a thirty dollar excess. Of course my broke college self has to pay for it, but the cost of making my grandma happy is priceless.

Why I hate Cambodian kitchens

Years and years of living with my grandma (twenty one to be exact), have created a lot of tension when it comes to a common ground on how to operate our kitchen. For one, I was born and raised in a Western culture where Martha Stewart’s diction over homemaking was the holy word and grandma comes from a society that exists on the other end of the spectrum. After researching roots of Cambodian food and culture, I came to an appalling conclusion of why grandma has so many “bad” habits.

1.There are no ovens.

I can’t even explain how many times my grandma begins to get a heart attack every time I start to bake something in the oven. In her mind, she envisions the sound of gas seeping from the oven doors with a loud hiss as an explosion blows the house to pieces. It’s a thorn to my side that I can’t rid but something I have a better understanding of now. Cambodian food is either in the form of a soup, fried, or grilled. The idea of an oven or even the familiarity of one is obsolete. This is one of the reasons why many Cambodian’s assimilation to the U.S. is a bit hard to grasp at first and why the oven is used to store your pots and pans.

2.MSG is the way to be.

There are many reasons why MSG is preferred over Mrs. Dash when seasoning food. It’s fast, cheap, and will never fail you. Though modern day health warnings liken us to cringe at it, history explains the reasons behind the food and its infamous seasoning. For one, Cambodia was and still is haunted by the Khmer Rouge that left 2 million murdered, thousands dead through starvation, and many scarred about the genocide. My grandma often tells me stories about not having anything to eat and how she sacrificed her meals to feed her children. With that in mind, the idea of cooking doesn’t really focus on creating cuisine, but rather a meal to fill the gnawing pain of hunger. Now that I’ve scared you, it would be wise to add that my grandma does not cook with MSG anymore. Instead, she opts for the MSG-free seasoning that I force her to buy.

3.No storage

If the image of a group of Westerners bustling out of Costco with a load of food is what you’re used to, you won’t find that in Cambodia. In fact, the average Cambodian only buys enough food for the day, making no need for a pantry in the kitchen. Hoarding is not a common cultural trait and many only make enough for a days worth of meals. Though my grandma has been in the U.S. for nearly thirty years now, I still find myself taking her to the market four times a week. She’ll get the hand of it eventually.

4.No technology
Want to know a secret? Cambodians still prepare their meals with a pestle and mortar. Y’know the same on Jesus himself probably used. The lack of technological advance and progress can attribute to this. Even if I brought home a food processor, my grandma would still use a pestle and mortar. In reality, it is quite a handy tool to have in the kitchen. It grinds up your solids, crushes peanuts, mixes ingredients together, creates purees, you name it, it probably does it.

I understand that grandma has been in the U.S for nearly thirty years but her cooking and kitchen habits have remained unchanged. These aren’t really bad habits but a way of culture that sets a foundation for the story behind the meals, MSG or not ;).

Noodle Soup

It’s one thing to grab a seat at the kitchen and indulge in mama’s cooking, but another to take her grocery shopping and actually help her prepare the food. Saturday morning started off with a trip to the much dreaded grocery market (a packed parking lot filled with a bunch of Asian drivers is not the business) to buy ingredients for Catheew Tuk, which literally translates to noodles in water. It’s essentially a potpourri of noodles, bean sprouts, and a variety of vegetables, cradled in a pot of homemade pork broth. When we arrived home, I laid out the ingredients like she asked and was off to start my first attempt at cooking a Cambodian meal. After carefully boiling the pork bones to prepare the broth, I set off to peel the vegetables while the latter was simmering. I thought that the broth came out really well for my first time trying it and my grandma couldn’t have agreed any less… Okay, fantasies aside, this is what really happened: We got back home and I started to prepare for my first blog post. After scavenging the house for pleasing cookware to photograph the food in (Cambodians win the award for worst homemakers), I asked my grandma what the first step was. Before I even had my camera ready, she already plopped the pork bones into the boiling pot of water before I even had a chance to snap a picture of it! That’s fine, I told myself, I’ll just omit that initial photo. After many language barrier issues and failing to understand what she was trying to explain to me in Khmer, I threw in the towel, grabbed a chair, and sat there eating cookies, while watching her cook. All the while I was contemplating if I should change my blog topic to “knitting sweaters” instead. My first time in the kitchen was horrendous, to say the least. I was in the way, had no idea what I was doing, and wasn’t peeling the jicama correctly, according to her. To top it off, I was yelled at for opening the blinds too wide in the kitchen, and letting too much sun in. Letting too much sun in?! I was naive to think that cooking with this grumpy old lady would be a walk in the park. I have a lot of things to learn, one of which includes knowing where to stand in a crowded kitchen with a fast paced chef on the loose and learning proper terminology in Khmer. Luckily for us, this is a common dish in my household and there will be more opportunity to document this in the near future. After it was all said and done, grandma brought me over a bowl of the noodles, hot, fresh, and hearty, the way I was supposed to make it.

Firsts

For years I’ve wanted to start up a blog, with many, many, failed attempts, but finally decided to commit and hone in on something that was quite obvious for me to document on: Cambodian cooking. After twenty-one years of living with the old lady, I tend to take for granted how lucky I have it to be eating home-cooked, made-from-scratch meals that a majority never get to experience. As an Asian American solely exposed to the greasy goodies of burgers and fries, this will be my journey into taking hold of the pestle and mortar and entering the kitchen. After all, if grandma can do it, so can I. So here it is, an ode to the old lady, universally known to everyone as mama.