The glorious food! Part 1

One thing's for sure, if you are on a Cambodia mission trip with DUMC, your stomaches will be satisfied to the full because CMS (Cambodia Methodist Services) has a great cook!!



In fact, haha, you guys are going to say that we get pampered and are super spoilt, because if you go out on village outreaches for the whole day.......

.....guess what, your cook travels with you!!! The cook would bring her pots and pans and ingredients, load it on the van...and stop at a church member's place in the village to cook. Once your outreach is done, you just go to the house to enjoy your hot lunch. Then, everyone will pack up and move on to the next village in the afternoon.....HOW COOL is that???

Another highlight for me on this trip is trying out the different kinds of Cambodian food...
You can be sure the food served is 100% fresh...because outside the city, there's no electricity except generators. This means, there's no fridges so everything cooked is bought fresh from the market everyday!

Fresh water fish soup which has a sourish taste to make you hungry...and ginger chicken plus veggies. The fish is very fresh and has a sliky texture; though the small bones can be a problem.

Cambodians love their port (curuck), their vegetables and their soups! We had soup for almost every meal. Yummy, especially with white rice and....chili! The chili there is very hot, perfect when a slice of chili is dipped in soya sauce and paired with a slice of pork......wahaha!

Cambodian curry: Not too spicy, with a mix of sweet & spicy taste, very fragrant too...it's so good we lapped it up, and ate rounds and rounds of rice. Imagine, curry with white steaming rice!!!!!! One of the best dishes!

Sorry for the pic quality...this is fried chicken with a special fish sauce+pepper+soya sauce dip. Nice nice nice.


This is what our cook cooked during our outreach from her mobile kitchen. The soup is kind of like our salted veg soup with pork and short, juicy taugeh with pork again. The taugeh are like those from Ipoh.

Ok, a pause first: let me teach you a Khmer phrase, hok bai is eat rice in Khmer.

This is one of the best dinners we had. We ate with all our 10 Cambodian pastors and their wives. The top dish is some kind of vege dish with pinapples and tomatoes. The one with the leafy green is pork...the supposedly star dish & highlight for everyone. The soup is good!!! Chicken soup with don't know what vege. Oh and desert was sweet dragon fruit! The food's so good that you'd jsut eat and eat and eat, only to realize you've consumed 2-3 plates of rice.
For the people there, this is considered a feast. In fact the things we eat everyday is a feast to the average Cambodian. Most of the people only eat vegetables and rice, the poorer ones rice and salty fish sauce only.

I don't have a better picture of this but must put it up....cuz the joke among us was that we were drinking detergen. Seriously, look at the colour!!! And oh yea, it was also the one and only time we drank ice in the village, because we were warned not to drink ice anywhere else except in CMS because of hygeine purposes.

Yea looks gross?? But nice! Guess why it's green? It's actually kangkung soup...boiled until it disintergrates into this colour. Another soup that's very deliciousssss there is seaweed soup. It's also a local soup...I didn't know Cambodians used seaweed in their cooking. It's gooood!

I know you'd say we were spoilt AGAIN. We were in a village for outreach when they noticed we were thristy. So on the spot they got down some coconuts from the tree, cut it, for us!!! Truly in Cambodia I felt I was being blessed far far more than blessing the people there.