Hi everyone,
Thought I'd tell you a little bit about the food we are eating. First, no one has gotten sick from the unclean iced coffees and tea I told you about. PTL!! Three young ladies from the church have been deligently preparing meals for us at the seminar. We are buying the groceries from our team budget. Since several have traveled far for the seminar and are sleeping at the church, the least we could do was feed everyone.
Our first seminar meal was lunch on Wed. That was a purchased box lunch of rice with pork over it. Very tasty. Of course everything comes with an extra sauce to use if so desired. I think the smell alone from this chili sauce could have burned my nose. I did not even try that one. In fact they have made a similar sauce for each meal so far. For mild flavors of there food it surprises me they like chili sauce.
Dinner Wed was the whole communal fish I told you about. Of course we had white rice too! Then just some cut up veggies and greens.
This morning was my first taste of a traditional Khmer breakfast. Rice poridge with pork in it. Then they had a plate of bean sprouts and cilantro you could add to it. Then they brought out a plate of some kind of fried pastry bits. I can't even describe then. They or small pieces of this fried dough, round but flat and had a hole in them. They tasted like fried flour. No real flavor to them. Any way you were supposed to add them to the poridge as well. Again the chili sauce. The poridge was really quite good. Finally my curiosity got the best of me and I added just a very small dab of the chilli sauce (it is thick with minced chilis). What I added was just enough. It really was good but any more and it would have been too hot. Jillian and Mark are adding 1 - 1 1/2 tsp. to there meals! Too hot for my taste buds.
Lunch today was interesting. And yes mom, I ate it! We had a soup of chinese seaweed and tofu. There was a small amount of seafood in it though I don't know exactly what kind. I saw a very small piece of shrimp and a piece of something else I couldn't recognize. I did leave that in my bowl! Amazingly it was quite good. I guess Mom's right you never know what you'll like until you try it. With that we had stir fried beef with some sort of cooked celery/spinach stalk. They were separate so I did not partake of the celery thingy. And you guessed it white rice.
Dinner tonight was also very good but different. We had another soup. It was a dark broth with green grass like stalks. They reminded me of french cut green beans but you could tell it was grasslike. It had small pieces of meat (of unknown origin!) It was very good. I asked pastor Po what the dish was called. Appropriately - "grass water." It was flavored with tamarin. I never thought I'd eat grass and enjoy it! Along with it we had a sweet and sour vegetable dish. A mix of cooked onion, green, yellow and red bell pepper, and pineapple. And it would not be a meal with out rice!
We have commented how lucky we have been with the traditional food prepared for us. Nothing too weird or completely inedible. On the way home though Matt took us to a convience store for snacks. We got some vanilla ice cream to bring back and share with Steve and Carolyn. I got some M&M's to top it. Carolyn already had chocolate sauce. Great ending to the day.
So the foods so far have been different but not to far out of our comfort zone. Even with those stairs, I don't think I'll lose any weight. Especially with all the rice.
