Some Things I’ve Made Recently

I’ve retested so many of my Cambodian recipes this year while finalizing my cookbook manuscript. There were a few I didn’t feel completely confident about, so I wanted to double, triple, and quadruple-check them one last time.

At some point, though, I had to let go and trust myself. Recipes don’t have to be perfect. Everyone has different tastes, and people will naturally tweak and adjust a recipe to make it their own. Perfect is subjective, and my own tastes have changed over the years. So have my mother’s, which makes me especially glad I worked on this cookbook when I did.

As a soon-to-be self-published cookbook author, am I allowed to admit that I’m a little tired of cooking? 😂

I really do love cooking, but it’s a lot of work when you’re doing everything yourself. In my kitchen, there’s no dishwasher and barely any counter space. Every recipe has to be measured, documented, photographed, and tested, and then there’s all the mess to clean up. And all of this work is just for one person. Me.

I freeze a lot of leftovers, which is actually one of my favorite parts. There’s something pretty nice about pulling a homemade meal out of the freezer on a day when I don’t feel like cooking. These days, I keep things simple most of the time. I can’t make elaborate meals every day, but when everything comes together and I make something really good, it makes it all worth it.

So here’s a little collection of things I’ve retested this year, along with a few things I’ve made that aren’t part of the cookbook at all. They’re not always the prettiest because, this time around, I was cooking for the recipe, not for the aesthetic. Maybe these photos will inspire you to make something new in your own kitchen.

I’m curious: Do you recognize any of these dishes?

And does anyone know what I want for dinner tonight?

Happy 2021!

Happy NEW Year! I had been meaning to check in on the blog but then chaos ensued after only a few days into the new year. The riots at the Capitol were so upsetting. I had a lot of feelings and needed some time to process. I’m deeply saddened by the acts of ignorance, hate, racism, and white supremacy in our country. I can’t help but feel a little scared and nervous about the future with everything happening right now. While I think that having new leadership will help, as a country, we still have a long way to go and so much to learn.

Here in Los Angeles, we are still in a lockdown. I survived the holidays. It was a little lonely and isolating but I bounced back quicker than I thought I would. People all around me are still traveling and seeing their friends and carrying on as normal (or close to normal) and I’m wondering if I should be doing the same? I haven’t seen my family in a year and a half. I haven’t been on a plane in a year. I do see people occasionally for social distant hangs, walks, and hikes but probably not as regularly as I should to maintain my mental health.

I was starting to feel the isolation creeping in on me again as we entered the new year. So then last weekend, I made plans for 2 back to back hangs, 2 days in a row. One was a challenging 4 mile uphill hike to Sandstone Peak in Malibu and the other was a 5 mile walk along Zuma Beach in Malibu. I had also hiked 3 times that week leading up to the weekend and had a few back to back FaceTime calls the Friday night prior. That following Monday, I was completely exhausted and as a result, was not as productive as I had wanted to be. Plus, my body was completely sore from all the hiking and exercise. By Tuesday morning, I still had not recovered. I woke up with an allergy attack and was basically incapacitated on the couch for the whole day. My body did not like all of that action! As an introvert, too much social activity can be draining but now, in a pandemic, after becoming accustomed to quarantine and isolation, I must have hit a whole new level of social exhaustion combined with too much physical ventures. Anyway, because of that setback, I worked all of this weekend on my cookbook to catch up with the time that I lost during the week.

With my consulting at a halt at the moment due to my project ending last November, I finally have the time to refocus on my cookbook. It was hard to transition back to a creative and entrepreneurial mindset and schedule though. It took a couple of weeks of resistance in December before I found the momentum to get going again. In the last year, it was not possible for me to work on the cookbook while also juggling full-time consulting work, brand partnerships, content creation, and my blog. I believe this break from consulting is a blessing in disguise because now I can commit my time to the cookbook again. My passion project requires more energy. Creativity for me requires more energy. I notice that when there is too much space and time between each piece of the cookbook that I work on, it then reflects in my work. The quality, depth, connection, and flow suffer. I’ll forget why I wrote something or how I made a dish.

Since mid-December, I’ve been FaceTiming with my mom several days a week to discuss my recipes, photos, Khmer translations, ideas, and facts about our history. I’m going back through all my recipes and editing the writing, reorganizing the flow, and deciding which ones I need to reshoot. Even though I devoted the entire 2019 to cooking most of the recipes in the book (and thought I was almost done), I’ve just added more new recipes to my list and I still have desserts that I need to make. And I’d like to add more stories. I still have a lot to do and it has been so exhausting. One evening, I spoke with my mom for 2 hours just about herbs! HERBS! Each of our calls last 2 hours. There’s so much detail to go through and understand. But I know I can do it!

Last week, on a call with a new therapist, she asked me what I do for fun after I had updated her on all the things I’ve been working on and all the emotions I had been feeling. Her question made me pause and think. I had been spending all my time working on the cookbook, FaceTiming with my mom or sister to brainstorm about contents of the cookbook, going to virtual therapy, and attending virtual support groups. Basically, all my time had been devoted to either my cookbook or my mental health. It has been awhile since I’ve dedicated a day or even a few hours to doing something that brings me joy. I was diligent about allocating one day a week to joy last summer and I did do a couple road trips in November that brought me some joy. But I hadn’t really incorporated joy into part of my everyday life recently. I’ve kind of lost my balance again. And that’s okay. It happens. It’s hard to maintain balance all the time.

So this coming week, I’m going to be thinking about some new ways to spark joy for me and try to incorporate it more regularly into my life. I also think that we all need to show ourselves a little compassion and grace for just surviving everything that is happening in the world right now. It’s a lot. In the meantime, I hope you find some way to bring a little bit of joy into your life as well. And if you have ideas, please comment on this post and share! I’d love to hear!

Eating My Way Through Cambodia

Recapping my adventure in Cambodia for my last blog post was not easy to do. I had so much to share and I didn’t even get to share with you all the food I ate! I had watermelon juice almost everyday, binged on noodle soup and rice porridge for breakfast, ate the freshest fruit in Cambodia (dragon fruit, coconuts, mango), devoured chicken skewers with lime pepper sauce, ordered green mango salad every chance I got, drank fruity martinis, and had the best crabs of my life.

The best thing I ate on my trip would have to be the crabs I had at Kimly Restaurant in Kep on the coast. It was made with fresh green peppercorn grown in the Kampot region of Cambodia. It’s a little messy to eat but it’s so delicious! You can’t get this anywhere else unless you are growing your own peppercorn. The crabs are fried with the peppercorn straight on the sprig, unlike the peppercorn we are used to seeing which has been boiled and dried. I visited La Plantation to get a personal tour of a pepper plantation. It was really interesting learning about how peppercorn is grown.

I stayed in Kep for only 1 night but went to Kimly for crabs twice during my stay. I’ve had these crabs before, 7 years ago when I was last in Cambodia and it’s still just as good as I remembered. There is also a little shack on Rabbit Island (an island off the coast of Kep that I visited last time) that serves delicious crabs as well.

At the beginning of my Cambodia trip, I took a cooking class where I learned how to make fish amok. This is one of the most popular dishes among tourists. But it’s not something that I’ve grown up eating. My mother has never made this for me. I didn’t even know what it was until I visited Cambodia for the first or second time 13 years ago. I’ve tried making this dish myself a couple times in Los Angeles, but I never thought it tasted quite right and wondered if maybe I was doing it wrong. However, after taking the cooking class and trying the dish at several restaurants around Cambodia, I think that it is simply not a dish that I like all that much. I originally wanted to include this dish in my cookbook but I think I need to leave it out because my heart just isn’t in it…yet.

Noodle soup and rice porridge are 2 of my favorite Cambodian comfort foods. I ate them almost everyday at restaurants and also at my cousin’s house in Phnom Penh. After having eaten that much of it at so many different locations around Cambodia, I have to say that I think my version of it is pretty good, if not better. This trip has definitely boosted my confidence in my own cooking, which makes me feel that all the work I put into the last year has been worth it :)

During my trip, I found myself really enjoying chicken skewers with lime-pepper sauce. It’s a sauce I don’t make very often because I grew up having my mom’s preferred sauce—sweet fish sauce. But in Cambodia, lime-pepper sauce was often served with grilled meats and was so delicious. I’m going to try making this sauce more.

As I ate my way through Cambodia, I was inspired by all the food I ate, the wet markets, the street food vendors, and the dishes I saw on restaurant menus. I will definitely be adding some more recipes to my cookbook and can’t wait to start cooking again!

Back in Boston!

One of the best things about being an entrepreneur is having a flexible schedule. I can meet a friend for lunch or spend the morning hiking and then work till midnight afterwards. My working hours don’t have to be within the construct of a rigid schedule. However, there are disadvantages to this lifestyle. Projects and work load are not always consistent. While I can run errands during the work week, I do spend most of my weekends working. I have to pay for my own health insurance. I’m still working out the kinks to a steady stream of income. I must deal with the emotional highs and lows of feeling like both a success and a failure. This is best demonstrated in the below chart created by Derek Halpern. But ya know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way. I do not regret my decision.

I was able to buy a one way ticket home to Boston to spend some time testing out some recipes with my mom. While it has been nice to get out of town, it’s cold over here still. It has been raining everyday. I’ve been here for about a week so far and have already been able to test out 4 Cambodian recipes (pineapple sweet and sour soup, meatloaf, marinated beef salad, and Cambodian omelet) with my mom and make 4 new recipes of mine for her to try (vegetarian curry, vegetarian bolognese, pork carnitas tacos, and sticky toffee pudding). I still have about 4-6 more recipes to test out with her while I’m here. I should probably start thinking about when I’m going to return home to LA. Hmmm…

I got a chance to get out into the city this past Friday to try a new restaurant (Row34) in the Seaport area one night and it was delish. Sometimes you just need a break from the parents and work! I’m also going to NYC this weekend and staying for a few days afterwards to see my sister and my niece.

Here are some pics from my trip so far.

Interview with VoyageLA Mag

I am so excited to share with you my interview with VoyageLA Mag! They asked me to be a part of their Trailblazers series, Rewriting the Narrative. Here is a link to my full interview.

When VoyageLA first reached out to me, I wasn’t exactly sure what story I had to tell. My entire journey has been up and down, full of highs and lows, as well as self-doubt. My initial thought was that I didn’t have a perfect or fluid story to tell. And where does my story even begin? Sometimes we get caught up in this idea of perfection. But it’s the flaws and mistakes that actually help us grow and learn. I have many stories and they are all intertwined into my current journey of creating a cookbook of my mother’s Cambodian recipes—my parents survival from the Cambodian genocide, my birth at a refugee camp, our escape from my abusive father, growing up poor, feeling like an outsider growing up, etc. These stories have all led me to where I am today. I am not only writing a cookbook, I am writing my story.

During my interview with VoyageLA, I realized I have so much to share and a lot more to say than I had thought. I hope you enjoy my interview and can relate to my journey and feel inspired. There is beauty in all of our imperfections. I need to remind myself that. Everyone has a story. What’s yours?

Happy 2019!

Wow! I can’t believe I have had this blog for a FULL year! I didn’t think I could do it. It originally took a little bit of nudging from a friend to get it started and now here I am—just over a year later. Well, congrats to me for that!

How did you spend your holiday? I spent Christmas and New Year’s in Boston visiting my family. Originally, I wasn’t sure if I was going to visit my family for the holidays. But after my Tulum trip over Thanksgiving (when I quit my job, chopped off 6 inches of my hair, bought a ukelele), I booked a one way ticket to Boston and I am so glad that I did. It was really nice to get out of LA and see my family, even if it meant braving the cold winter. I got lots of play time with my little niece and nephew. I got to play the ukelele for them even though I don’t know how to play (anyone want to teach me?). My mom made some of my favorite Cambodian dishes, including noodle soup, hot pot, pineapple sweet and sour soup, and vermicelli noodles. I also cooked for my entire family Christmas Eve. I made tomato confit with spaghetti, garlic shrimp, scallops, and grilled eggplant. I think it was a success—at least, they didn’t tell me otherwise.

Even though I was in Boston for a relatively short time (though it kind of felt like a long time), I unexpectedly made a connection with someone new. Unfortunately, he lives in Boston. Why does this always happen to me? Sigh. I must love the East Coast boys. But I also love LA. That’s the problem. Why don’t I connect with anyone here? LA is big enough. Help!

While I had fun back in Boston, I am SO happy to be back home, in my own apartment, in my own bed. My body is not made for East Coast winters. My skin was so dry and irritated. My eczema acted up. I felt ugly. And I didn’t know how to dress cute in the cold. I didn’t bring any sexy clothes for dates. Plus, my mom’s place is not that comfortable. She doesn’t like me messing up her kitchen. She keeps the house cold. She wants me to wear a scarf in the house. But Mom, scarves are made for outside! Also, I felt guilty if I slept in too late or wanted to lounge on the couch all day. The first thing I did when I got home was take a hot shower, turned on my fireplace (because in LA, it’s just a flip of a switch), put on sweatpants, and ordered my usual dish at my favorite Thai restaurant. Then I slept all afternoon that first day and slept 10 hours that first night. It felt SO good. Now, I’m rested, adjusted, ready to face the world. It’s back to reality. What is on my to-do list for the new year? Finish my cookbook, find a new job in fashion, learn the ukelele, continue working out. So let’s go Davy!

In My Dreams

I had the strangest dream last night. I’m driving along a narrow, dark road with rails. I don’t know where it leads. I don’t know why I’m on this road. And I don’t know where I’m going. I can’t see anything. It’s pitch black. But I keep driving anyway, using the rails to guide me. There are people in front of me but I can’t see them. I keep inching forward cautiously, afraid that I will hit someone. I can’t stay still because I’m in the middle of nowhere. I have to keep moving but I feel nervous. Finally, I get to a crossroads. Darkness has faded and there is finally light but it’s super foggy so I still can’t see very far into the distance. I have 2 options. I can choose to continue going on that same path even though I don’t know where it leads. It looks like it gets lost in the fog. Or I can go into the train station that has suddenly appeared. I choose to go into the train station, but then I don’t recognize any of the destinations on the map. I am frustrated. I don’t know which train to take, where I am, or where I’m going, or how I even got myself into this situation. I’m lost. And then I wake up.

It was one of those dreams that lingered, long after I was awake. They say that dreams are a reflection of your current state of mind. I have also heard that your mind works to resolve issues in your dreams. Perhaps, my dream was trying to tell me something or provide me with an answer to a question I didn’t know I had. This feeling of being lost has been reoccurring for me, not just in my dreams but also in real life. My dream did not need to tell me this. I had been feeling it everyday for maybe…the last year as well as on and off throughout my life. By now, I really should have learned to embrace this feeling. But I naturally resist. I get uncomfortable. I feel anxious. I fight it. I worry about not knowing my destination. I worry about being complacent. I worry about moving in all different directions but never really getting anywhere. Maybe I need to stop trying to hold on so tightly, let go and ride the wave. How do I do that?

About a year ago, I once told a stranger about my journey last year: getting laid off, starting a cookbook, and going through a break up all at once. Embrace the uncertainty, embrace the unknown, he urged. He said, “You may not like your apartment now, but you know what, this could be the last apartment you live in on your own, as a single woman, before you meet your life partner and move in with him.” When I told him about not knowing what I was doing with the cookbook, he said, “You’re going to figure it out. You’re going to finish the cookbook. Once you finish the book, you’re going to think back on this time when you didn’t know what you were doing and appreciate the journey. Embrace this part of the process.” It helped to hear someone say that to me.

This week, 2 random strangers reached out to me, one on my blog and one on my Instagram. The person who reached out to me on my blog is from San Diego and he just wanted to say that he hoped I finished the cookbook and that he loves Cambodian cooking. The person who reached out to me on Instagram wanted to tell me that she peeked at my blog and loved my story and encouraged me to keep writing because she is looking forward to my cookbook. Sometimes, kind words from strangers make all the difference.

xx

Davy

Savory Cambodian Crepe

For as long as I can remember, I have had chronic allergies and difficulty breathing. As a child, I got sick often. As an adult, I still get sick often. Doctors could never identify the problem. I didn't have asthma. Allergy shots didn’t help. It wasn't a severe issue, just uncomfortable and inconvenient. 

When I was 9 years old, my mother, my sisters, and I ran away from my abusive father. We left California and found ourselves in a tiny studio apartment in the suburbs of Boston. We made ourselves a home with hand me down furniture. I shared a full size bed with my mother, while my 2 sisters slept together in the bed next to us. Every time we ran away from my father and moved into a new place, I had issues breathing. My nose often bled. The air was always too dry.  It was never quite right.

One night, I woke up complaining to my mother that I couldn't sleep because I couldn’t breathe. I may have also been sick. My mother led me out of bed and into the kitchen. I immediately resorted to what always soothed me when I couldn't breathe; I climbed onto a stool, stuck my head out of the kitchen window in the middle of a Boston winter. I distracted myself by watching my breath form clouds in the air as the snowflakes gently caressed my face. The cold air calmed me. 

As my head hung out of our kitchen window, my mother pulled out leftover banh chao from dinner earlier that night. She assembled two plates of the savory crepe, mixed it with fresh vegetables and herbs, and smothered it with sweet Cambodian fish sauce. She summoned me over to our dining table. Together we sat in silence, side by side, eating banh chao with our hands. Both of my sisters slept soundly in the open room next to us. 

My mother and I didn't speak. We just ate. In that dimly lit dining room, surrounded by darkness. In the middle of a cold, winter night. In that small studio apartment. Away from my father. And finally, I could breathe again.️