Life

Dessert ingredient: Taro

8 March 2014 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

We mark our 10th anniversary this year (wow). It was a small wedding; we chartered a yacht and a live jazz trio for a brunch cruise around New York Harbor with just our closest friends and family. Great memory. Our wedding cake (first photo above) got rave reviews. And now I want to recreate it, but I’ll have to experiment a bit because I lost our records.

I wasn’t a cake fan. We considered doing without one but we found a pastry chef who, back then, was still practicing and perfecting her craft, so she was open to ideas. The typical western cake flavors weren’t very inspiring. I wanted tropical mixes – using real fruits and roots, not powdered versions or syrup flavoring or extracts. She was quite accommodating, and agreed to experiment with the ingredient mix I wanted even though she hadn’t worked with them before. Coconut icing? Mango or passion fruit cream filling? Taro cake? Even though it wasn’t widely used, she agreed that coconut and mango would complement each other in a cake. But taro? We had several conversations about that.

I love taro. While in grad school in New Orleans I frequented a bubble tea shop. This shop was there way before the bubble tea trend took off. The Vietnamese couple who ran the place used real fruits and vegetables in their drinks, and one day they suggested I try the purple root. I thought they were nuts. I go out of my way to avoid potatoes and anything remotely related or similar in consistency. But I was game, and thereafter I was hooked.

So taro made it into our cake. It became my all time favorite flavor in ice cream, shakes and other sweets. It’s popular in Asia because its natural sugars and nutty flavor complements other ingredients well. In Cambodia it’s used as a filling in all sorts of foods – fried spring rolls, dumplings, steamed buns, pastries. They mash it up (much like mashed potatoes) and mix it with palm fruit, chopped steamed pumpkin, jelly and shaved ice, then top it with a dollop of sweet or evaporated milk – much like halo-halo in the Philippines.

I would never have thought of this root as a dessert ingredient. Would you? The photo above is from a blog post by Ayesha Hak. If you want to know more about taro, she has a very informative post on the origins and uses of taro root around the world.

Now to experiment in these coming months, recreating that awesome cake :-)

Khmer food: Svay bok Trai cha-aa

8 March 2014 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

(Smashed grilled fish) I’m always discovering new Khmer dishes I haven’t tried yet. My colleague brought some of this the other day for her lunch. The photo doesn’t capture it well, but it’s a very tasty dish (for those not turned off by pungency, that is)!

It’s made of fish (grilled river catfish was used here), smashed in a mortar and pestle with grated green mango and spices. I asked Sopheap to make it and watched. Into the mortar with the mango went chopped red and white onion, a little garlic, salt, peanuts, some fish sauce and herbs that they call chee (gee?), for which I don’t know the English names. (I’ll add to this post when I find out.)

Similar to it is the more famous green papaya/mango salad. This salad has river crab, often added raw then smashed into the other ingredients. But svay bok trai cha-aa uses fish. They lend a lot of pungency to the already multiple layers of flavor. It won’t go into the family’s recipe rotation very often, because the flavors are a bit strong for the kids right now. But it’s definitely a good lunch option! (I just have to make sure to stock Menthos in my desk!)

maintaining a multilingual environment if we move back to the US

23 February 2014 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

One of the things I appreciate about expatriate life is its cultural exposure, especially in a city like Phnom Penh. The kids are exposed to so many languages on any given day. Contrast this with my early years back home. I only realized after many years in the system that a multilingual upbringing wasn’t normal in the US (I went to school in Spanish Harlem). I’m the only one in my family who knew just two languages. That was bad enough – I certainly didn’t want my kids limited to English. So we put our little boy in a French immersion program. His teacher is a creative, gentle Frenchwoman. He’s been in her class just four weeks and already he’s counting, singing and carrying on conversations in French. Their absorptive capacity at this age is incredible isn’t it?

Why French? I try to expose my kids to tagalog, but it just isn’t strong enough (there’s little opportunity to hear conversation so they won’t get a contextual enough grasp of it). They know Khmer, but with just 14 million people in the world who speak it, how useful will it be outside Cambodia..? Our preferences are Spanish and Mandarin. But the preschool happened to offer French so we went with that. French is fairly prevalent here in SE Asia and in Africa, many countries being former french colonies. And it’s a second language for a large part of Europe and throughout the world. Plus it’s one of the main working or procedural languages in many global institutions. It could come in handy someday. Even if hubby and I don’t speak it, it’ll be easy enough anywhere in world we end up to sustain their fluency in it, right?

We were pretty excited about it, until I started looking into maintaining it if we moved back to the US. (Who knows what the future will bring?) I looked into the NYC school system. Naturally a strong curriculum is important, so I next inquired specifically about language and music programs.

What a disappointment! Of all places, I expected NYC to be teeming with dual-language curriculums and immersion programs in the world’s top languages. Top-tier academies offer it (and for ~$30,000/yr preschool fees they better!), but it’s sparse in the rest of the system. How odd that in this day and age where bi-/multilingualism is a tremendous asset for tomorrow’s global workforce, there are such few opportunities to take it that schools which offer it are so competitive to get into!

Well, NYC parents are taking matters into their own hands, organizing fundraisers to get or keep language programming in the education system. This inspired a piece in the NY Times on France’s initiative to fund French bilingual programs in NYC public schools (“A Big Advocate of French in New York’s Schools: France”, by Kirk Semple). This isn’t a new concept, as the French actively promote their language and culture across the world, making it accessible to many income levels. But this notion of the French government promoting their culture in America? Lively debate is an understatement. Articles include John McWorther’s “Let’s stop pretending that French is an important language” in The New Republic.

The prevailing (recent!) cultural attitude stateside towards the French aside, from my initial research it looks like NYC’s school system needs all the help it can get. It’s a win-win for France and for the US, so I hope the initiative works out. I also hope that if and when we have to move back that those programs will be up and running.

a story from hummingbird banding in Louisiana

8 February 2014 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

http://woodsywisdom.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/ontario-hummingbird-festival-at-the-wye-marsh/

I came across a banding blog post that brought back memories. Hubby and I banded hummingbirds in Louisiana years ago, to help our friends Olga and Walter at their (bird-friendly!) property. A lot of early mornings were spent at our friends’ house, just sitting by the pond or by the side of the house to watch birds. Over the many decades that they owned the property their love of birds drove the property’s design. It was overgrown to begin with, but every year they cleared and planted the varieties that were the most attractive to birds. By the time we met them and visited this bird paradise, hundreds of winged creatures already called their place home. You can sit on their property on any given day and spot a huge variety of species. All manner of bird behavior could be observed very easily in plain sight.

Louisiana is situated on a migration route. Hummingbirds range from Prince Edward Island to Manitoba in Canada and they fly down to Central America when the daylight begins to get shorter. They stop along the coastal states to bulk up 20-40% of their body weight, then these tiny creatures fly across the Gulf of Mexico!

We came to know one ruby-throated female because she stopped by this particular property every year on her way south, and again on her way back to Manitoba. She was a regular there twice a year. We were also able to follow her migration stopovers because banders who trapped her also updated the registry. It was an incredible coordination by volunteers and hobbyists across North America.

Olga called her Mama for her matronly ways. This bird was particular to and claimed one specific feeder and tree during her visits. She was very aggressive in defending “her” food supply. No other bird, even bigger species, could perch at that tree during the 3-4 days she was there. But she tolerated the juveniles, allowing them at “her” feeder and letting them perch close by. As a result her territory, when she visited, became busy. The last time we saw her she was 8yrs old, before we moved to Virginia (their life span in the wild is 5-9 years).

Such a big personality from a creature just 7cm/2.8in long. From that time on, we were hooked on birds.

It’s an incredible thing to be part of that effort. I hope we get to join a banding when we visit home this year, so we can teach the kids a little about hummingbirds.

Google doodle statement for Russia

7 February 2014 by Nathalie Abejero Leave a Comment

Props to google for the rainbow doodle, to kick off the Sochi Winter Olympics! Nice statement against Moscow’s anti-gay laws.

Phnom Tamao Wildlife Center for a birthday party

2 February 2014 by Nathalie Abejero 2 Comments

We’ve been to Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Center several times and I’m always impressed with it. The grounds are large – it’s certainly possible to walk from one exhibit to the next, but a vehicle would be useful. They have many exhibits. I still haven’t seen all of them. Most animals have a fairly wide area to roam (they aren’t confined to small concrete cages as I expected). They’re rescued from accidents or illegal wildlife trade, and rehabilitated. Those that can’t be released back to the wild stay on the grounds. The center is staffed by dedicated conservationists, and they’re routinely visited by experts in specific species.

Our little boy and his friend celebrated their birthday together, so we took them to the Rescue Center with their closest friends. Our friend who’s Cambodia’s very own ‘Steve Irwin Crocodile Hunter’ organized a fantastic day – we brought 20kg of meat for the crocodiles and tigers so we can see them up close. We ran into Lucky the elephant who was taking a stroll with her handler, so we fed her some of her favorite treats, coconuts and sugar cane. These huge creatures would crush the coconuts under their foot like it was an egg!

We also stopped by the breeding pen for Siamese crocodiles that continually releases juveniles back to the wild. Siamese are rare, as most of them have been hunted or are bred with other species of crocodiles to make better handbags. (Adam is a conservationist and as a crocodile expert made it an informative outing for all of us.)

This is the first time the kids ever saw a piñata too, so that was quite entertaining! They’re pretty lucky they have parents who’ll spend quite a bit of time making piñatas for them, one a stegosaurus and the other a chicken.