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.