Festival Food!

As promised, here is a post about some of the festival food my friends and I ate at the Setsubun Festival the other week. First off is some corn on the cob. Usually a fairly difficult item to find in standard Japanese restaurants/convenience stores, yet tasty nonetheless. Imagine if convenience stores sold corn on the cob, I would totally buy that all the time. This also reminded me of my days in Cambodia (see older posts) when we would snack on corn on the cob from street carts for like 20 cents or something amazing like that. Speaking of southeast Asia, I just made plans with some friends to go to Vietnam for Spring break in TWO weeks! I'm super excited, but still have a LOT of planning to do.


CORN!

Next up are some ginormous takoyaki dumplings. Usually made about a quarter of this size, these octopus-filled dumplings are standard street and party food (playing a central role in the "round things" party my friends and I threw in which we made and ate lots of round foods). Other ingredients in takoyaki include cabbage, ginger, egg, and flour. I didn't buy any of these, but they're usually pretty good so I can only imagine how delicious these giant ones are.


Mammoth Takoyaki (Octopus Dumplings)

More griddle-fried goodies, here a variation on Okonomiyaki, sometimes erroneously called Japanese pizza. Perhaps it could be better thought of as a combination omelet and pancake covered in tasty sauce and in this case, egg, bacon, and fishcake. Okonomiyaki seems to have evolved sometime in the Showa period after a long evolution beginning around the 16th century and through several eras and permutations before it reached its present form. This particular style of okonomiyaki also has noodles in it, a characteristic of Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki. Don't worry about the raw egg, as they crack it over the okonomiyaki right when you order that gives birth to gourmet gooey goodness.

Okonomiyaki

Finally, here's what I bought: Ayu, a.k.a. Japanese Sweetfish, skewered and roasted to crispy, salted perfection. Ayu is typically a summer food, but luckily for me, they had it here. It was pretty good, not the best I've ever had, which was probably either in Nagoya or Yamaguchi, but tasty nevertheless for being out of season. Its crispy texture, salty flavor, and sweet (not fishy) meat were just what I wanted after a freezing fire festival.


Roasted Salted Ayu (Sweetfish)

Culinary Capers

So today was the grad students' last day with us. Kurt left early in the morning and Terri, Kevin, and Juenan left after lunch. We had a farewell lunch for them at Romdeng (all thanks to Bill!) and didn't hold back on ordering every delicious dish they had. One of the highlights was the fried tarantulas. I had a leg and then sampled the head, fangs and all. It tasted fine, more texture than taste with the same texture as soft-shell crab, which is pretty much what it is. I also had a set meal for $6.50, a lot of food for such a great deal, including soup, a main dish, and a dessert (banana crepes with coconut gelato!).


Tarantulas, yummmm!

After lunch we all went back home for a final farewell to the grad students. Once they and Toon (?), our driver, left the compound everyone headed back inside and we spent the next hour and a half or so rearranging the office. The current arrangement is much less cluttered and more organized. In the afternoon Nancy and I went to Beautiful Shoes to get some custom shoes made. They only cost $30 for custom-made leather shoes in any design and color/pattern you want. All you have to do is take a picture of the shoes to them and they'll be ready in a week or so.


The VM Project Team minus Kurt, Yaro, and Yasemin

Sokly took Nancy, Steve, Ed, and I to the National Stadium where we took a brief tour of the complex in the fading twilight. Rows of Cambodians lined the top area of around the stadium track doing various forms of aerobic exercises. It was amazing to see the stadium and the huge concrete cantilevers that Vann Molyvann employed in the prodigiously throughout the complex. After watching the National Swimming Team practice in the Olympic pool, we watched the national basketball team scrimmage in the almost abandoned stadium and walked around to some fruit stands on the street. We stopped at one because Sokly said it had the best fruit and bought dragonfruit, longan, and oranges. The longan are from Takaman (?) where Leakhena's (finally learned how to spell her name) house is and they are some of the best longan I've had, despite their extremely large seeds. If it weren't for the size of the seed, the longan might be comparable to a lychee.


Fruit stall streetside

For dinner, Sokly and Darren (Sokly's best friend) took us to a Chinese place for some local Chinese food. I already wrote about the large population of Chinese here, so this was some pretty authentic stuff. I ordered "Black Chicken Soup" while the others had bitter-melon soup and duck soup. I figured the black chicken soup would be basic broth with pieces of chicken and veggies in it, or perhaps like congee porridge with chicken in it. When the food arrived to my great surprise I found a bowl of black soup with an ENTIRE CHICKEN in it. All they did was strip its feathers and plop it into a bowl of soup seasoned with various strange ingredients such as ginseng, longan, some fungus, roots, black lumpy things, livers, and pig intestines among other unidentifiable things. Luckily Ed ordered the same thing as I did, so we shared the experience of "Black Chicken Soup" together. Also, the chicken was ACTUALLY BLACK. Darren explained that the chicken is a particular type that is black, even the meat was black in some places.


Black Chicken Soup

As of now, we're planning the trip to Kep this weekend and I'm really excited!

Working through the Weekend

The Facade of IFL Building E including the area that we're making a detail model of

So this weekend wasn't too exciting because we had to work on Saturday and Sunday to make up for the long weekend we took when we went to Siem Reap last week. I was working on the south elevations of the VM house but am waiting for the plans to finish them. We've also started work on a small detailed section model of the IFL (Institute for Foreign Languages) Building E. We're making it out of basswood and it's pretty challenging to cut everything by hand (oh laser cutter how I miss thee!) and I had to remake a piece like 4 times. It's good for my craft skills and nice to be able to concentrate on producing a well-crafted model without feeling a lot of pressure to finish like I did back in studio at school.


Another shot of IFL Building E with the pond to collect runoff rainwater and to help keep the area cooler

On Saturday Nancy and I went with Sokly to two of his friends' birthday parties. While waiting for him to get ready at his house, his mom showed us the photo album from Sokly's sister's wedding. It was really thick and kind of funny to look at all the pictures of the bride and groom in at least 5 different outfits. The groom never smiled in any of the pictures, but the bride always did. There were also pictures of some kind of ritual involving passing fruit between the two families. Another popular memento seemed to be portraits of the bride and groom in prom-like poses in front of various backgrounds including in front of a Little Mermaid-esque underwater castle, in an ideal home complete with a portrait of another of their wedding pictures on the shelf with a portrait of the bride in the background of that portrait, and in many of the shots the happy couple was standing on a 101 Dalmatians rug. The wedding was right when the grad students arrived earlier in July so they had the chance to experience that cultural extravaganza complete with Cambodian party dancing.

I also met Sokly's little nephew who is adorable and about 2 years old, I think. He was studying Chinese for his Chinese school, which is apparently very popular for the large population of Chinese living in Phnom Penh. We even drove through the area of town where the Chinese live (a kind of China Town) complete with a Chinese temple. I'm not sure, but it seems like there is some tension between the ethnic Chinese and Khmer but it isn't really something that is talked about much. The Chinese were apparently harshly oppressed under the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese rule. According to Wikipedia, Chinese New Year was only celebrated again for the first time in 1991 since before the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

Last night after work in the office, Lekina and her brother took Nancy and I to a "Suki Soup" place. Suki Soup is basically the Cambodian version of Hot Pot and derives apparently from the Japanese "sukiyaki". The place we went to was called City Suki Soup and it was really really delicious. Unlike traditional sukiyaki, a common suki soup ingredient are various types of meatballs with fish, shellfish, chicken, and combination. They even had a special type called "millionaire balls" with mushroom, shrimp, and either chicken or fish. They also cook the beef slices by placing them in a ladle with holes in it and letting it boil in the water. I guess it's to stop the meat from getting lost and over cooked in the hot pot. Hopefully we'll get to go there again because it was a really nice place and the whole meal was only $22 to feed 4 people a huge and filling meal!