Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

Easy-peasy plain yogurt recipe my Bengali neighbor taught me

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No thermometer, no measuring cups, no heating pads, no double-boiling appartus! Of course, we’re in the tropics so it’s easier to do here than if we were back home in the temperate zone.

I love plain yogurt but for a long time the most common yogurt in Phnom Penh were the sweet flavored ones from Thailand and Vietnam. Thankfully our friend and neighbor Kishore from Bangladesh taught me how. It’s so simple, with everything just eyeballed and estimated.

Easy plain yogurt recipe:

  • ~1/2 cup plain yogurt as a starter – I use the Garden Center Cafe’s probiotic yogurt. It’s a natural probiotic yogurt with active cultures. I hear Stoneyfield is a good starter. You can use the yogurt you make as starter in future batches.
  • ~1 box of milk – The 1 liter box milk is what you usually find here, although organic and natural labels are starting to make appearances at the natural food grocery stores.

Directions:

  1. Heat the milk on the stove, med-high, until small bubbles start to form and it starts frothing. I don’t stir it, so that film forms on top. See the pic below. Turn the burner off.
  2. Let it sit and cool until the milk is about lukewarm, ~20 minutes. Again that film is on top, hardening. I don’t touch it.
  3. When the milk is lukewarm, add about 1/2 or 3/4 cup of your starter yogurt. Mix it all gently in a glass bowl.
  4. Cover the bowl and place in a warm spot, like in an oven which you aren’t going to be using, where it will be not be bumped, moved or otherwise disturbed for around 12 hours.
  5. Let sit overnight.
  6. When it has reached a solid state, it is ready. Place in containers and stick them in the refrigerator.
Heat the milk on med-high heat
Turn the burner off when the milk starts to bubble and froth a bit
Guesstimate about 1/2 or 2/3 cup plain yogurt as starter
After mixing your starter yogurt into the milk which has cooled to lukewarm, put in a warm spot

Dried freshwater clams anyone?

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It’s like some form of neurotoxic shellfish poisoning is gleefully calling my name whenever I see these big aluminum trays of clams. They get pushed around Phnom Penh’s busy streets all day under the hot sun. Photos courtesy of Keith Kelly.

My Khmer colleague calls these freshwater clams “liah”. She and others at the office love it, and whenever we go to the Ministry of Health on Kampuchea Krom Blvd we’re asked to buy some of this stuff from a particular stall a block away from the Ministry that supposedly sells the tastiest, freshest liahs in town. They’re more expensive at $1 a can than the ones sold by the pushcart sellers (I think their clams are 1500riel/$0.38 a can). I’m not much of a risk-taker in general, and with Tristan around my decisions now seem governed by a near-obsessive-compulsive level of risk-mitigation. But my colleagues rave so much about these things I had to try it.

Contrary to what I previously thought, they aren’t raw. These clams are coated in salt for an extended period and boiled. That kills off most of the e. coli and other toxins. Whew. Cuz Tristan, who wants a piece of whatever people around him are eating, managed to snag one and suck the meat out! Check out this short video made by a Khmer media student, dmcsamadee, about them:

Scene in Sihanoukville

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I was browsing through Keith’s photos of Sihanoukville (the above are cropped by me). I’m not much of a beachgoer, and dislike the in-your-face sexpat scene on the most touristed beaches on this coast (thanks to tightened regional visa restrictions). But if you avoid Serendipity and move farther east along Ochheuteal Beach there are less sexpats and more local crowds, so it can be a nice day trip from Phnom Penh for the family. Most of the other beaches have been / are being privatized, with fees to enter those areas. They’re nice and quiet if you really want to get away from people.

Top regrets at the end of life..

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From The Guardian, Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a piece written by a palliative care nurse, Susie Steiner, who worked with people in the last 12 weeks of their lives (published Feb 01 2012)

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

“This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.”

2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.

“This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret, but as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.”

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

“Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result.”

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

“Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying.”

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

“This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content, when deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again.”

What’s your greatest regret so far, and what will you set out to achieve or change before you die?

ifttt: such a simple app, so useful

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Some privacy concerns I have with it are mentioned at the bottom of this post, but for the most part I’ve found ifttt to be a very handy web app. It solved one of the problems Google created when they revamped Reader several months ago.

Like many users, I was very unhappy with the Google Reader changes. I subscribe to hundreds of columns, blogs and alerts via RSS, then scan the headlines in GR for items I want to read in full. GR allowed me to mark articles I found interesting (from my RSS feeds or from anywhere on the web) and post it to my feed/page with just one click. Also through the GR interface I was able to share and see/comment on (or vice versa) items that friends marked interesting in their feeds, so I got exposed to a range of interest areas.

But after carefully building up this content chugging service and community – which was different from my twitter, facebook or bookmarking networks – Google killed it without notice!, presumably to force users into sharing on their G+ platform.

There are probably myriad ways to recreate the above setup. Unfortunately most are beyond my tech-unsavvy abilities, especially since the baby allows me much less time these days to tinker on the web. I still miss those lost GR functionalities though (sharing articles with friends and having an RSS feed for the posts I found interesting), so this weekend I dedicated some time to investigate options.

On the first problem I simply lost that network and slowly had to migrate back to Twitter – not ideal since now my attention is divided between two services instead of GR being my one go-to platform for consuming media. On the second problem I now use Tumblr to get an RSS feed of my collection of posts; there’s a “Send To” feature from GR which sends articles to Tumblr. But some mobile devices don’t allow this.

Enter the handy tool ifttt.com. So simple it’s incredibly useful. It allows you to write macros across different web apps in this format: If This Then That. Given certain triggers on your specified channels, a set of actions can be activated by ifttt on other channel(s). In my case, when I mark an article interesting (eg star it in Google Reader), ifttt grabs that article and posts it to my Tumbler. There are hundreds of formulas, with many pre-made on the site. It’s a great tool, and I’m playing with it a lot right now.

  • If there’s snow in the forecast, send a text to my phone.
  • If someone tags me in a Facebook photo, call me plus download that photo to a dropbox file (helps you track and keep your image clean)
  • If I favorite a tweet, send it to Evernote.
  • Apartment Therapy illustrates how ifttt can help jobseekers scour jobs sites for relevant posts.

Note on privacy concerns, though: I don’t know how much data ifttt can mine when it’s allowed access to, say, your Google and Tumblr accounts. Plus, the more channels you give ifttt access to, the better you’re centralizing a data trove of your life!