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Published: November 30th 2014
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I've made it to the inner sanctum, where gustatory delights are birthed in a small smokey womb--the kitchen. My Cambodian son Savin and his wife Srey Mom resisted my previous requests to help prepare food. But I finally triumphed, and now I sit on the slatted wood floor, peeling the crusts away from bongaong, river lobster.
The small village of Chi Phat hugs the Piphot River. Fisherman harvest river lobsters from its placid waters at night when the water is lowest, using the light of a head lamp and a small pitch fork-like spear called a s'naw.
I've cleaned shrimp at home, but these critters are several times larger and have beady big eyes and long stiff legs. Srey Mom shows me how to pull the shell away from the head, remove a pea sized organ of black waste, peel around the tail, and pull out the long thin veins on both sides. The head and tail are supposed to remain. However, I manage to massacre all of my lobsters, decapitating and whittling them down to just the tail. Retaining the beady eyes and vacant head does not appeal to me. I also scrape away the yellowish fatty looking
deposits. I think that is another mistake, for it seems to be a tasty delicacy greedily slurped after cooking.
Srey Mom cleans five for every one that I clean. I feel very inadequate here in this dark sanctuary. She smiles at my efforts, and diplomatically removes bits of shell and debris that I miss. I'm relieved when we empty the bowl. Then she pulls another handful from a bucket nearby and I sigh.
Finally we have a mound of lobster debris and a bowl of cleaned wormy lobster bodies. Srey Mom places a small cooking range on the floor in front of her. She moves her ingredients next to her--spices, fish and oyster sauces, pots, and bowls of onions and cucumber chopped by Savin.
I watch as this young cook confidently fries and mixes the fresh ingredients. In 15 minutes, bowls of lobster soup, rice, sliced mangos, and fried lobster and cucumbers are arranged on the porch where we sit and eat. We contentedly smack, slurp, suck, and sigh.
"Is the food tasty?" asks Savin in Khmer."It is very tasty," I reply.
Dirty dishes are whisked away. Savin is in the yard now. He holds
a long stick from which dangles a snake that he has pulled from a tree. I rush over with a camera. This "gecko snake" has squeezed a beautiful spotted gecko lizard to death. It lies now, defending its prey from the human children and me. Its green mottled skin camouflages it perfectly for life in a tree.
We watch until Savin nudges it with a stick, forcing it to abandon its prey and slither up a tree. I feel sorry for this snake, who was cheated from its hard earned meal.
Then Srey Mom gets on her motorbike. Her daughter stands in front, her niece sits behind, and her two year old son behind her. Four people, three of them children, are ready to zoom off. But then Srey mom's sister completes the party of five on the motorcycle bus. They motor away.
A pile of dirty dishes remains.
"We should do the dishes," I tell Savin."No, my wife will do them later." His white teeth gleam.
I look at him in a disapproving manner. He just smiles broadly, and I feel happy with a belly full of lobster and having shared the kitchen with
my Cambodian family.
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