Worldwide Kitchen - Cambodian Carnivores

Classroom! It is time to hit our next letter, and if you are paying attention at home, we are on the letter "C." As we sailed the "C's" for something different and new (how could it not be?), we decided to go with Cambodia. We considered the Czech Republic, Columbia and Chile, but since I am already Czech and we have already done South American fare with Brazil, we decided to be daring and original and opt for a little Asian zing...

Once again, Lauri and I raided the internet menus for recipes and we were not disappointed. The website we found had more recipes than Raul Julia Childs. If you are interested in trying some of them out, you can go here: http://www.khmerkromrecipes.com/

In any event, it took us several nights to land on a four course menu that we both agreed would be tasty and non-tragic in its end-results. We landed on a salad, a soup, a main meat course and of course, the dreaded dessert. This time, however, we fixed our gaze on a dessert that gave us a fighting chance at success. We also learned that if you want to do these recipes right, ya gotta run out to a real Ethnic grocery store and leave the HyVee for stuff like cheese and soda.

Our menu consisted of the following:

Chrout Carrot nung thay-thao (Carrot with Daikon relish)
Salor d'um-lon twea (Purple yam soup)
Sach moan ang (Bake plum chicken)
Num tirk doung (Coconut pound cake)

Try ordering that at Eggroll House. FAIL.

Shopping: As I mentioned above, there was no way in Cambodian hell that we were going to find the majority of the ingredients we needed at the local supermarket. What we needed was a road trip to Coralville to the Asian market on the Strip. This was very exciting, as we have never been to this store, and we really wanted to bask in the experience. The items we needed for our feast included a daikon, which is like a giant radish-like root. It is very fibrous, but much milder tasting than a regular radish. Yes, I realize you can get them at the boring old local grocer, but what fun is that?

We also needed purple yams, which are purple on the inside, not the outside. They look like regular sweet potatoes from a distance, but once you peel that bad boy, you got our hands on an exact replica of Grimace from the McDonald's stable of influential characters.

Next on the shopping list was fish sauce and plum sauce. If you know how fish sauce is made, you would run, not walk to get away from this stuff. However, it is very tasty when combined with other scrumptious morsels. We also picked up some Coconut milk for the cake. There were 90 brands of coconut milk.

When we found the items we were looking for, we celebrated by stuffing our shopping baskets with a bunch more crap that looked interesting and whimsical. As you can see in the enclosed exhibit, we were obviously captivated by the bright, shiny colors and the pulse-pounding graphics on the labels. Marketing Genius! To be honest, I don't know what half the stuff is, but I have a feeling that I will find out some day.

The rest of the stuff we obtained at the HyVee, like chicken, shrimp, coconut, green onions, sugar and flour.

Prep: Once again, it made sense for us to tag team and prep all this stuff together. I handled the Carrot and Daichon salad, as well as the Plum Chicken. Lauri handled the Purple Yam Soup and of course, the Coconut Poundcake dessert.

The Carrots and Daichon needed to be cut in julienne strips, so my knife work was put to the test. Actually, I tried to cheat and use the food processor and that turned out to be a royal mistake. Julienne and Shred are NOT the same thing. I cut the veggies into small strips, and as I did so, I kept thinking about Chef Ann Burrell, the spikey-haired blonde from "Worst Cooks in America". I was imagining her slamming me with a profanity-laced tirade to be consistent with my knife cuts. After cutting for what seemed like hours, it was time to mix the veggies with white rice vinegar, sugar and salt. Completed the task, covered and stuck it in the fridge to chill.

In the meantime, Lauri had started on the purple yam peeling. Once we saw the colors, we knew this soup would be ugly, but would probably taste good. The yams needed to be shredded into bits, but again the food processor was not up to task, so she hand-shredded them with one of those old metal torture devices for vegetables (and knuckles). The soup also called for fresh shrimp, which also needed to be ground up. I was thinking "shrimp-burger!" This time the processor got its chance to do some damage and it pummeled those sea-monkeys into oblivion. We added the other ingredients to the shrimp (green onion, basil, salt and pepper) and stuck that in the fridge until it was time to add to the soup.
The next two items (the Plum Chicken and Coconut Cake) were a piece of uhhh cake. You could use any chicken pieces you wanted, so we had three chicken breasts (bone-in). The obnoxiously large chicken breasts were the size of pterodactyls, which will cause pain and suffering later on (you'll see!). At any rate, the chicken just need to marinate in the plum sauce, soy sauce and other herbs/spices.

As Lauri finished up prepping the batter for the cake, it was time to start cooking.

Cooking: We were getting the hang of doing really good and thorough prep work on the stuff before cooking it, which made things much easier for cooking. The shredded purple yams went into a pot of water to boil. Once the poached Grimace was soft, it was time to add the shrimp mixture and polish off with delectable fish sauce.

As the taters were boiling, we noted that the chicken could probably go in the oven (for 45 minutes) at 400 degrees. But then to our horror, we saw that we also needed the oven for baking that coconut cake. The real dilemma was that the cake was to be in the oven for an hour at 350 degrees. Woe is us!!! Our initial solution to have everything done at roughly the same time (by this time, it was already around 7:30 PM), was to have the two items share the oven and set it to 375. Well, it was much too late in the process do cook them separately, so we went that direction with dubious high hopes.

Folks, this where it gets sideways. After an hour at 375, the stuff looked good. The cake was done and the chicken looked good and felt firm. I took the temp of the yard-bird and it read 180, so I assumed it was done.

In the meantime, back to the Purple Rain soup... it was time to add the shrimp and let it cook til pink. We also threw in some fish sauce and topped it with more green onions and parsley. It looked frightful, but smelled delightful.

So everything was done. Or so we thought.

Eating: We took the chilled daikon/carrot salad out of the fridge and served it up first. Very pickly and vinegary, but had a nice sugary sweetness to compliment the sour. The daichon had almost no flavor, but had a good bite and texture to it. Overall, it was a good dish, and I hope Ann Burrell is proud of my knife cuts.
The purple yam soup... This eyesore of a stew was unappetizing to look at, but boy did it smell great. The aroma of potatoes and shrimp filled the room and made our mouths water. We dug in and ladled the soup over some rice. The taste was phenomenal. Surprisingly, the purple yams tasted more like regular baked potatoes and the little ground up shrimp pieces added some nice texture. It was like a baked potato soup/shrimp chowder combo, and it rocked.

And now the Plum Chicken... Looks great. Smells great. First layer of meat - GREAT. The rest of the hormone/steroid chicken breast--UNDERCOOKED. Of course, I blame HyVee's Poultry wrangler. No chicken breasts should be this ridiculously colossal. Ohhh the disappointment of having our first all-around successful dinner, ruined by some pink white meat. I threw them back in the oven, but it was too late... We were full up on Grimace Soup.

Yessir... the ugliest soup in the world was the hit of the evening. I would make this again in a heartbeat. And psssst... this just in: The dessert turned out to be a winner, winner, NO chicken for dinner! The Coconut cake was fan-freaking-tastic.

So although we failed on the clucker, we rose to the occasion on the other three courses. Lessons learned: Give yourself enough time to prep and cook the dessert prior to everything else. Ovens are not made to share or compromise their temperature settings to average things out. We are smarter and better people because of this erroneous error in judgment.

So that does it for the C word... C is for Cambodia and Colossal Chickens. It also stands for Can't Cook Chicken/Cake Coexistently.

Next stop around the world kitchens is D... and D is for Denmark... Stay tuned!