Tasting Notes: Traditional Cambodian cuisine is being documented to share

Article content

Growing up as the child of Cambodian immigrants, Cheata Nao initially wasn’t interested in the food of her family’s culture.

Article content

“I got into cooking around junior high, but it was more about Martha Stewart and Ina Garten, watching Rachael Ray and learning about Western food,” Nao confesses with a laugh. “The first cookbook I bought was Canadian Living.”

That all changed not long after she moved back to Edmonton from BC, where Nao had picked up a WSET (Wine Spirits Education Trust) certificate and worked her way up to assistant manager and retail buyer at Kitsilano Wine Cellar in Vancouver. Returning as the head wine buyer at Everything Wine and More in Sherwood Park, Nao was also returning to her mom’s home cooking. Turns out that while she was enjoying many of the fine Italian, French and Japanese restaurants in Vancouver, she was also craving authentic Cambodian food.

Article content

“While I was living on my own I would try to make certain dishes from memory,” she says. “It was always just off somehow, it didn’t taste quite right. I realized that when I was visiting my mom I needed to pay attention and start writing recipes down. The problem with Cambodian cuisine is that nobody does that, it’s always from memory. If you wanted to look up a specific Cambodian recipe you’re not going to really find much anywhere.”

Nao hopes to rectify this issue with two projects. First with her de ella new online Get Cooking class, where she’ll be teaching how to make dishes such as Nom Banh Chok Thursday evening, and Cambodian appetizers for April 14, which providentially is also the Cambodian New Year. Her monthly virtual class of her is just the start, however; Nao is also in the planning stages of writing and releasing the first Canadian-published Cambodian cookbook.

Article content

“It’s a cuisine that people are really missing out on,” Nao says. “We’ve got a lot of unique dishes that you’re not going to find in, say, Thai or Vietnamese food.”

Nao points to two ingredients in particular that she hasn’t come across in other cuisines. First is groeung, a paste made from lemongrass, garlic, galangal, turmeric and lime leaves, though crucially there are no chillies. It’s used liberally in Cambodian cooking, from stirfries to curries to soups and fish cakes. The other ingredient is prahok, a salted and fermented fish paste originally developed during the times when there was no fresh fish available.

“It’s very intense. So you just use a little bit in stirfries and dipping sauces. I haven’t come across it in Vietnamese or Lao cuisine, which is strange because they border Cambodia. Oddly, if you go to Chinatown you can buy prahok sauce in a jar made by a Thai or Vietnamese company.”

Article content

Inspired by chef Hawa Hassan’s cookbook In Bibi’s Kitchen, which features stories as well as recipes, Nao is also hoping to get a few anecdotes of her own. Considering the trauma of recent Cambodian history this is very much a delicate situation.

“It’s hard getting Cambodian parents to open up about their lives, especially because of what happened in the war with the Khmer Rouge,” Nao sighs. “It’s something that’s very common with Cambodian children. For now, I’m just enjoying getting closer with my mom while cooking together, and I imagine that the stories will start to come naturally.”

Find her upcoming classes at getcooking.ca.

west coast feet

You’ll find West Coast-inspired pizza and salads at the recently opened Birch & Bear Pizza on Jasper Ave.

Article content

Taking over at night from sister eatery Toast Culture, Birch & Bear is currently operating from Sunday to Wednesday, 4-8 pm The vegetarian Birch side features such offerings as lemon-roasted kale and artichoke, and local mushroom, goat cheese and leek pizza. The Bear side of the menu has such inventive takes on the Italian staple as Korean bulgogi beef, bbq smoked meat, and potato, capicola and truffle oil.

Find it at 11965 Jasper Ave.

EPL makes room for learning in The Kitchen

Food literacy and nutrition are the keywords when talking about the Edmonton Public Library’s new venture, kitchen.

Offering virtual and eventually in-person entry-level cooking classes at the downtown Stanley A. Milner Library, The Kitchen will also be available to community and cultural groups who are looking to produce meals. There will be a wide range of offerings in the 640-meter space, from baking classes to quick meal ideas, cake decorating to knife skills and beyond, aided by an array of mixers, at-home appliances and commercial-grade ovens.

Article content

“We started having conversations with the community as early as 2014 about this,” says Tina Thomas, executive director of customer experience at the library. “So when we were designing spaces at the new Milner, we wanted to get an understanding of what other things people would be interested in, and a commercial kitchen came up. It was number four in the things that people wanted to get hands-on experience on at the library.”

In-person classes are still up in the air, but Thomas notes that virtual programming has been hugely successful for the library.

“We’ve been offering free language classes and they’re overcapacity every time,” she notes. “We’ve had to double the number of classes we’re offering. For the cooking classes, it’s good for people who are working all day and don’t necessarily want to go out at night. Our sustainable kitchen series, which we started two years ago, has been a nice surprise. It’s related to cooking, nutrition and sustainability, and all of the classes that we’ve implemented are all at capacity with a waitlist.”

Article content

Cooking classes aside, The Kitchen website also offers articles and videos on cooking tips, kitchen tools, and low cost cooking.

“We had an expert talking about how to sharpen your knife,” Thomas says. “I never realized I’ve been doing it wrong all along. I’m supposed to flip my knives the other way in the knife block and not have the blade down, so that was also an education for me.”

Downtown Dining Week

Downtown Dining Week is back, running from March 30 to April 10 at various eateries in the downtown core. Look for deals running from $20 to $65, ranging from steakhouses to sushi shops and more at over 60 participating restaurants.

For a fun night out you might want to wander over to Craft Beer Market on April 4 at 7 pm for Tapping the West, an evening of storytelling and beer tasting hosted by Scott Messenger, author of Tapping the West: How Alberta’s Craft Beer Industry Bubbled Out of an Economy Gone Flat. Tickets are $15.75, available in advance from Eventbrite.

[email protected]