Tag Archives: food

What’s On My Plate

January 21, 2024 djarmul 1 Comment

I never ate tacos, ramen or a Cuban sandwich when I was growing up. I didn’t even know what they were.

By contrast, it was unremarkable the other night when Champa and I stopped for dinner and ordered fajitas and enchiladas.

It also felt routine when I cooked Thai food for dinner guests recently: basil chicken with eggplant, Pad Thai with shrimp, coconut-flavored meatballs and sticky rice with mangoes, all served with Singha beer.

Champa and I have sriracha sauce in our cupboard, mango kefir in our refrigerator and phyllo in our freezer. They’re as normal to us as Nepali food is to my sons and their families. When they visit, they look forward to eating curried chicken, lentils, vegetables and rice. The only question is whether Champa will also prepare momos, Nepal’s delicious dumplings (as she’s doing in the photo).

For them, “exotic” might be the meatloaf or chicken with canned fruit cocktail that my mother used to cook for my sisters and me.

Few things have changed as much in my lifetime as what I eat. I grew up in Freeport, Long Island, a suburban town more diverse than most of its richer neighbors. My parents were relatively worldly. Yet we rarely ate “ethnic food” and, when we did, it was pizza or American-style Chinese food. We didn’t go out to dinner much and it was usually at an Italian place where I’d eat spaghetti and meatballs. Quiche and fondue were the height of sophistication.

When I went to college in Rhode Island, my horizons expanded to include quahogs and Portuguese sweet bread. But it was only after graduation in 1975, when I backpacked around the world with a friend, that I truly began to appreciate other cuisines, from pulaos in Afghanistan to shawarma in Egypt. I still remember the Kwality Restaurant in New Delhi where I tried tandoori chicken and naan. They were so good.

My culinary awakening coincided with the broadening of American cuisine generally. From bagels to burritos, foods that were once “ethnic” became widespread. Newer foods like phở and bibimbap entered the mainstream. My daughter-in-law, whose family came from Puerto Rico, introduced me to pasteles and tostones. Now I see these around town, too. Here in Durham, a mid-size city, we have restaurants offering cuisines from Austria to Zimbabwe. Our supermarkets have aisles of international foods. We have several specialty groceries, too.

If you’d told me when I was younger that I’d enjoy khinkali from Georgia and jerk chicken from Jamaica, I might have guessed you were talking about Atlanta and a stop on the Long Island Rail Road. Little did I know that poke, focaccia and macarons would all become part of my vocabulary. I’d witness the rise and fall of pepper-crusted tuna and molten chocolate cake. I’d buy an Instant Pot and an air fryer. I’d fall in love with Moldovan cuisine and crave Carolina barbecue as a local comfort food.

I don’t consider myself a “foodie.” I haven’t yet embraced some trends such as bubble tea and kombucha and I’ve only tried a few vegan recipes. I still enjoy an occasional burger or Subway sandwich. But I plan to keep an open mind (and mouth) about whatever comes next.

Maybe I should offer a toast to this. Maybe even with avocados.

Phnom Penh’s IPAs

March 29, 2023 djarmul 3 Comments

This post is about Southeast Asian cuisine but it’s not what you’re expecting.

Yes, we ate some great meals during our recent trip to Southeast Asia, like at this outdoor market in Laos and a riverside fish lunch in Vietnam.

We saw exotic foods like these fried insects.

We learned to cook Pad Thai, red curry and other traditional Thai dishes.

And we saw bountiful markets, like this one in Ho Chi Minh City.

But those are all things you’d expect in a post about Southeast Asian cuisine.

Well, how about craft beer in Cambodia?

That’s what my friend, Mitch, and I discovered at Prince Brewing in the capital city, Phnom Penh. Their modern brewpub beside Wat Botum Park was a revelation, offering IPAs, Belgian wheat, porter, lager and other beers.

Their taps and cans had beautiful designs. They had a pool table and a foosball table. Their menu offered everything from burgers to fried snake fish. Outside in the park, local teenagers danced to rap music on a boom box.

It was definitely not what we were expecting in Cambodia.

It was only slightly stranger than the craft beer place we tried a few days earlier in Hue, the former imperial capital of Vietnam. That’s Mitch with the owner of Shanti, a bar specializing in Vietnamese craft bottles.

Unfortunately, the owner told us he was about to close his business because he could not compete with neighboring bars selling cheaper mainstream beers. We tried some of those, too, in Vietnam and elsewhere, and he was right: They were fine but not as distinctive as the ones at his bar or in Phnom Penh.

I hope Prince Brewing proves more successful than Shanti. Craft beer is still too expensive for most customers in this part of the world but its emergence felt to me like a frothy symbol of changing times, even though I don’t usually drink much beer.

As an American who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, I’d associated Vietnam and Cambodia with war and genocide, not with IPAs. I was glad to update my perspective.

If I go back, though, I’m still not asking for the fried insects.

Champa’s Full Circle

June 17, 2018 djarmul 4 Comments

Champa is part of an exclusive group: She was taught and inspired by Peace Corps Volunteers long before growing up to become one herself. Among the more than 230,000 Americans who have served since 1961, she has a special perspective on how volunteers can touch lives.

Her identity as a Nepalese-American has made her service — and mine — much richer. On Friday, for instance, we hosted a dinner party for some Moldovan friends, serving them Nepali curries and rice with an American chocolate chip cake and ice cream for dessert. We’ve also made Nepali food several times for our host family, shown below saying “namaste.”

Champa especially remembers two volunteers, Susan Gibson and Janet Moss, who taught at her school in Ilam, the town in eastern Nepal where much of her family still lives. Another mentor was Dorothee Goldman, a PCV who befriended Champa at a training workshop after Champa became a teacher herself. Susan, Janet and Dorothee all taught Champa new skills and encouraged her to keep moving forward, helping her become the excellent teacher I encountered when I was posted as a volunteer to Ilam a few years later.

After Champa and I got married and moved to the Washington, D.C., area to start our lives together, Dorothee reappeared in Champa’s life. The two of us were invited to a reception at the Nepalese embassy. We were dressed up and chatting politely with people when I noticed Champa staring at a young woman across the room. She went up to her and said, “Dorothee, what are you doing here?” Dorothee gasped and replied, “What am I doing here? Champa, what are you doing here?” The two of them embraced tightly, introductions followed and Dorothee and her husband, Mel, who also served in Nepal, became our dear friends. That’s them in the photo below, at their vineyard in upstate New York.

With almost everyone in Moldova, Champa is the first person from Nepal they’ve ever met. Only a handful of other people from Nepal live here, one of whom married a Moldovan woman and now runs a restaurant, Himalayan Kitchen, that has become popular among PCVs looking for a change from the food served by their host families. The photos below show why they keep coming back.

Moldovans know almost nothing about Nepal but, then again, neither do most Americans. As people here have gotten to know Champa, they’ve asked about how she grew up, how Nepal compares to Moldova or whether she can see Mount Everest from her house. (Answer: No.)

If we serve them Nepali food, we make it mild and they generally like it — although not always. We bought most of our spices, and the chocolate chips and brown sugar, when we visited home last summer. One of our guests on Friday was surprised we didn’t serve bread, a staple of every meal here. We hadn’t included chapatis, naan or puris on our menu, just rice.

Champa and I gave the Ganesh statue you see here to our host family and a few other local friends. He’s a symbol of good fortune with new ventures. We also brought some other Nepalese handicrafts, which have made great gifts.

The two of us are obviously foreigners but our unusual marriage has made us stand out even more in Moldova. “Diversity” here means someone is from, say, Ukraine instead of Moldova, or primarily speaks Russian instead of Romanian. There is a small Roma population but almost no people of African, Asian or Hispanic heritage. Moldovans are familiar with American diversity, such as from our music videos, but Champa and I are the first interracial couple many have ever seen, much less gotten to know. We’ve been aware from the beginning that our very presence would be as impactful in some ways as our teaching or projects.

Peace Corps has come full circle for Champa, who remains grateful to Susan, Janet and Dorothee for helping to change the path of her life. As she now prepares to return to her adopted homeland, she’s hoping she may have done the same with someone here.

Buying Groceries

April 5, 2017 djarmul 12 Comments

Shopping in Moldova can include Heinz ketchup, Lay’s potato chips, Tide detergent, Nescafe and a Coke. Add a bag of Skittles, too, if you want.

When Champa and I shop for groceries in Ialoveni, however, we usually buy products made in Moldova or in nearby countries such as Ukraine, Russia or Romania.

We cook our own food, a mixture of Nepalese, American and Moldovan dishes. There’s no doubt we eat better than some other Peace Corps volunteers around the world, especially since we live in a small city, but we always stay within our official food budget. Our daily diet is more modest than some of these photos suggest.

The local bread comes in many forms and is cheap and delicious. Cheeses are great, too. As you see, they come in many varieties. Salami is a local favorite. We love the fresh chicken and pork, which is much tastier than our supermarkets sell back in Durham. (Yes, that’s a pig’s head in the photo.)

Moldova is famous for wine and, as I’ve noted previously, its grocery shelves are stocked with local merlots, cabernet sauvignon, chardonnay and more, as well as cognacs, brandies and sparkling wines. The Ialoveni Winery is just up the street from us.

Our neighborhood markets also offer cakes from local bakeries, noodles from local pasta makers, candies from local confectioners and, of course, local fruits and vegetables that will soon be abundant and delicious. No surprise, we eat a lot of rice. We also can enjoy cheeses from Holland, persimmons from Israel and beer from Germany. One block from our house is the Sandra ice cream factory, with flags from both France and Moldova.

Champa and I have become regular customers at all of Ialoveni’s grocery stores, including two Victoria Markets and a UniMarket. We also shop at the Casa Cărnii store shown above, where I shot many of the photos in this post, and at some of the kiosk shops we pass on the main street as we walk home. Local farmers and vendors sell goods along the sidewalk, too.

Just up the street is an apartment complex with a corner market where we often buy groceries. If you look carefully at the photo, to the left of the door, you’ll see it also offers an ATM machine for our bank. The “Farmacie” to the right of the door is actually a separate shop. Downstairs, by the yellow brick, is another shop, selling meat. The windows to the right are yet another shop, selling soaps and toiletries.

In other words, shopping in Ialoveni is a mixture of small grocery stores, neighborhood shops resembling bodegas and smaller shops specializing in certain kinds of products. At the other end of the spectrum is Moldova’s “super store,” Metro, which resembles Costco. We’ll visit there in a future post. Right now, I’m hungry.

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