old friends

This past week I met Sophia, Seiha's baby, for the first time. Seiha was about 6 months pregnant when I left Cambodia; it's quite different seeing her and Pisit with a baby. However, Sophia is so cute...and I'm not even a baby person.

On Saturday Seiha wanted to get togeher with Charles and Crystal. She then invited Christa and myself along for the meal. After several emails back and forth we decided on cooking Khmer food at Charles and Crystal's house; I would buy food at the Vietnamese grocery store (it's bigger than the Khmer shop) and take it up to Red Hill. At the store Saturday morning I bought ingredients for somlaw macheu greung, eggplant for chaa troab, spei cheu (pickled mustard greens) and bitter melon seeds. I personally don't care for spei cheu and detest bitter melon, but I knew Charles would be thrilled... and he was.

However, the plans we made changed. Seiha was feeling ill so she asked us to come to her host family's house and cook there. Christa got a bit lost, but once she arrived, we packed up everything and went to the Hoover's house. Somehow I was elected head chef despite the Cambodians in the house. I started pounding the lemongrass paste for the somlaw, Pisit chopped veggies, Charles starting chopping meat, Christa and Crystal washed trakoun/played with Sophia. After a little while I started the somlaw, only to realize I forgot the tamarind paste at home in the fridge. Pisit thought to use lemon juice and, the soup turned out pretty tasty. As I was starting to fry the pork for the eggplant dish, Seiha's host family came back from a volleyball game. They were all excited to have dinner almost ready for them. Our group of 6 suddenly turned to 10; I thought for sure we wouldn't have enough food. But we stir fried the extra trakoun and prepared the spei cheu with the extra beef. For dessert we had chocolate cake with peanut butter icing for Crystal's birthday, ice cream and tapioca with strawberries. We ended up with quite a feast.

It struck a bunch of us later that night that it all worked out. I didn't plan a meal for 10, but we had plenty of food. We didn't plan to meet at the Hoover's but we did. The night felt so Cambodian in that plans were scattered and no one knew what was going on, but so very American in that we ate at a lovely table, prepared food in a spacious kitchen and weren't sweating like mad.

I'm so thankful I got to spend a wonderful weekend with fantastic friends. It was also good to remember the quite calm when everything works together.