Cambodian Stir-Fry Vegetables With Pork

I used to eat this dish, and countless variations of it, in cheap, road-side cafes and stalls when I was working in Cambodia’s stifling capital Phnom Penh. The heat meant you were never that hungry, just thirsty, and I drank more melted ice than beer.

But this meal and other stir-fried dishes like it were perfect for kickstarting the appetite without bloating you out, and more importantly they were delicious. They were never over seasoned or spiced, and there was always a plastic tray of condiments on each table so you could tweak the flavour as you wished – fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, lime wedges, ground white and black pepper.

The stir-fried vegetables came in numerous permutations, sometimes with meat or fish, sometimes without, and were often flavoured with oyster sauce. They were cooked fresh in front of you and served in silver bowls, with another silver dish containing sticky rice. And the thing I loved most was you always got a ramekin of thinly sliced chillies on the side, that gave a burst of fire and helped the whole thing down.

Those were wonderful days on the whole, and I miss them dearly. And occasionally when the British weather gets the better of me, and gives me a shot of the low-down blues, I make myself one of these dishes, like this one I made for lunch today – stir-fried vegetables with pork. Which if my very rusty Khmer doesn’t embarrass me too much is known over there as sach chrouk char pale khieu.

Anyway, this is how I made the dish and it turned out pretty well. It goes without saying that you can substitute pretty much any other protein for the pork – popular choices in Cambodia are frog, shrimp, squid, crab, fish, eel, chicken, beef and egg. Or just leave it out and have vegetables, maybe with nuts added.

In fact, one of the most memorable dishes I had was fried cabbage and rice with lots of chilli on the side, cooked as a staff meal at one of the restaurants I was working in. It doesn’t get much simpler than that, but they do say the secret of being a good cook, or any other artist for that matter, is knowing when to stop.

Again, for the vegetables, it really doesn’t matter which ones you use. Cambodians cooks are very skilled at making the best of what they’ve got, which for the vast majority of Khmer people is usually very little. I used broccoli, onion, cabbage and carrot, and a few slices of roast pork that were left over from the weekend. The secret is to cut everything small, so it cooks quickly.

Nearly all Cambodian dishes start with fried garlic, so I heated some oil in a pan, sliced two fat cloves of garlic, and fried them, stirring away until they were just turning nutty and brown. Then I added a few thin strips of roast pork. Probably no more than about 50g or so – in keeping with the Cambodian way of making a little meat go a long way.

After all, it’s the flavour that is the main thing – and there is no better way of ruining a stir-fry, aside from burning or over salting it, than drowning it in meat or fish. I fried this for a couple of minutes until the oil was frothing, then added the vegetables, and fried them for a couple of minutes – they generally need very little more than this if they are cut properly.

Just before the end, I added the seasoning – two level tablespoons of oyster sauce, the same of water, then a good sprinkle of fish sauce (about two level teaspoons) and the same of lime juice, and finally half a teaspoon of sugar, and a good grind of white pepper. It went on a plate with rice, and of course thinly sliced chillies, and was demolished quickly, harkening back memories of warmer times.

Cambodia: ‘King’s Face Appears On The Moon’

I got back to Cambodia a few days after King Sihanouk’s death. The country was holding seven days of mourning to celebrate his life. It was easy to be cynical at a time like this. Much of the media have portrayed him as a Khmer Rouge puppet who stood by when his people were murdered in one of the bloodiest genocides the world has ever seen.

He certainly moved with the political tide from peacefully obtaining independence from France to assisting Pol Pot’s rise to power, and has his own place in the Guinness World Records as having a greater variety of offices than any other politician. But the people were genuinely moved by his death, and there were shrines to him everywhere and flags at half-mast across Phnom Penh.

The taxi driver taking me from the airport to the Central Market sighed as the traffic came to another stand-still. “Everyone come to celebrate the King,” he said. “He was a good man. The people are sad. His son not so popular.”

I’d been warned the bars had been closed for seven days but it didn’t seem to have stretched to the neon bars on Street 51 or anywhere else I could see. The only sign of enforcement was the absence of music.  

As I walked further on, I kept seeing huddles of people gazing upwards, pointing and chattering. I looked up at a building, half expecting someone to be up there preparing to jump. But there was nothing. Just a sickle moon with a faint yellow halo round it.

I carried on walking. More people were gazing upwards. I asked what they were looking at but they just pointed and looked slightly embarrassed. The only ones not looking were the gang of tuk tuk drivers on the corner.

“Hey! Hey sir! Hello, motorbike?” they shouted. I’d forgotten about the relentless hisses and calls from the taxi drivers. It didn’t matter if you walked past six of them, politely declining each time, the seventh would still ask anyway. They had mouths to feed. I was determined to keep my cool this time in Asia. I was determined to remember how it all worked.

The next morning, I found out what all the staring had been about. The Cambodian social media was full of it, but opinion was heavily divided. Was it really the face of the King or just the crescent-shaped moon staring down at them? From the photos it looked unlikely, but I knew from staring at the moon, and its cracks and shadows, or cloud patterns, after a while you can see anything you want.

And for ordinary Cambodians, what they wanted in their time of grief was to stare once more at their former King and hope it was a sign of better times to come. Rather than the increased power of the politicians they’d been left with.

I walked down to the Royal Palace, where the King’s body would be kept for the next three months, embalmed for all to see. Thousands had gathered outside, praying and buying lotus flowers, as the street kids mingled between them begging for hand-outs.

The air was thick with incense smoke. They had given up burning the joss sticks individually and had set fire to bundles, pouring water on from time to time to control the flames. Tears were streaming down the mourners’ faces as the perfumed smoke billowed towards them, filling the dimming light with a spectral haze.

I returned to my hotel as the heavens opened and waited for the monsoon to stop. Then I waded across the road, two feet deep in water. The stench of the sewers was overpowering. The tuk tuks were holding up a computer print-out of a photo one of them claimed to have taken. One of them held a 10,000 riel note next to it, showing King Sihanouk’s face. They kept pointing excitedly and were still going on about it five minutes later when I returned with my iPhone to take a picture.

They might have been half hysterical, they might have been on the pipes, they might have doctored the photo, but as they held the note closer, there was a resemblance. I pointed to the eye shadows on the note, and nodded my head with the rest of them, and then pointed at the corresponding shadows on the moon. It was the King - the man on the moon. I even half believed them.

I waded across the road back to the hotel. The girl on reception was walking up the stairs. “Did you see the moon?” I asked her. She stopped and shrugged. “I tried...I looked for five minutes, but I couldn’t see the King.”

Stop Those Cambodian Witches' Knickers Flapping

A column I wrote for Khmer 440...

It’s hard to spend more than a few minutes in Cambodia without noticing the appalling amount of rubbish everywhere. There are plastic bag graveyards beside every road, rivers choked full of bottles and cans, and witches’ knickers in every tree.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a country where people love the sight of discarded plastic so much. You can be strolling through an idyllic stretch of forest and find a lotus flower-filled pond with cows supping from the water, the late afternoon sun glinting away on the ripples, and there’ll be mounds of sun-bleached bags and other human waste blighting the scenery.

Go to a picnic area overlooking some beauty spot, and it’s as if each family has filled the car with every bit of rubbish they or their neighbours can get their hands on, and then chucked it on the ground...

Continue reading...

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On The Trail Of The Elusive Coconut Man

I first heard about the Coconut Man during a late night conversation in a bar with a strange man who claims to be an ex-forces agent, wades through swamps with king cobra serum in a holster on one leg, and viper serum on the other, and has “fired every Goddamn weapon on this earth”.

He’s been living in SE Asia for the past 40 years, helps run a charity clearing land mines, and is a partner in a security firm transporting millions of dollars of payroll cash to factories across Cambodia. Or so he claims. The last time I saw him, he was wearing a grimy bandana and eating cold chicken out of a plastic bag in a supermarket canteen in Phnom Penh.

That night he was lecturing me about how physically strong Khmer men are. He took a swig of beer and put his baseball cap back over his glass. He sounded like Bill Hicks, but more angry.

“This dude can climb trees and rip coconuts open with his fucking teeth man,” he said. “Can you do that? I know I’m Goddamn sure I can’t!”

I told him I didn’t think I could either.

“Damn right, you can’t! The Khmers are the toughest people on Earth! Pound for pound I’d put them up against any other nationality.”

He told me the Coconut Man lived in the jungle, somewhere along the Mekong River - a river that stretches 300 miles across Cambodia. When I pressed him further on the location, he admitted he hadn’t actually seen the Coconut Man, but had read about him sometime ago in one of the Cambodian newspapers.

“Were there pictures?” I asked.

“Damn right there were pictures! The man was ripping coconuts open with his freaking TEETH!”

The next morning, I did a few internet searches, and eventually found a feature about a man called Sai Song, who, according to the copy, lived in Preak Anh Chanh village, near the Kampong Cham border in Kandal Province.

It was hundreds of miles away from where I was, but I thought the story might make a few dollars. I found a Khmer taxi driver, who for some reason called himself Ian, and claimed to know the village. In fact, he said he was born in a village a few miles away. He spoke decent enough English, and said he sometimes works as a driver and translator for foreign journalists visiting the country.

He met me at my hotel in Phnom Penh the next morning and drove me in his old Toyota saloon into the flooded provinces along the Mekong River. We crawled down muddy tracks, built for oxen, with the worn suspension thumping away. But there was no sign of the village, let alone the Coconut Man.

Ian kept getting out to ask for directions. I could make out a few words. Occasionally someone would point up the road, or across rice paddies now flooded to the size of Lake Windermere, but with trees sticking out from the water. There seemed to be a lot of men who could rip open coconuts with their teeth in this part of Cambodia. But no-one had heard of the village.

Eventually I phoned the paper to try to get hold of the reporter who’d written the story. It took her a few minutes to remember the tale, and a few more to admit she’d probably written down the wrong Preak Anh Chanh village, and that it was nowhere near the Kampong Cham border. We headed back towards Phnom Penh, with Ian moaning much of the way about the “waste of gasoline”.

“Near Kampong Cham border!” he kept tutting.

We stopped at more communes, and I was about to suggest we head back to Phnom Penh and forget all about the elusive Coconut Man and his self-proclaimed “special powers” - invisibility clearly being one of them - when three young children fishing in a tiny trench pointed excitedly down the road.

From the slightly terrified look in their eyes, it was obvious we weren’t the only ones who’d heard about the Coconut Man’s incredible feats. We drove down the dirt track and asked more villagers, and they pointed at a wooden house with palm trees growing at the front. An old woman was sitting on the front steps with a baby on her lap. She was apparently the Coconut Man’s mother-in-law.

She pointed behind the house and we walked down an overgrown path, lined with ducks, chickens, and half-wild dogs, and stopped at the last barn. After a few minutes, a hugely muscled rice farmer appeared. It turned out he wasn’t the Coconut Man - he was just here to check us out. I began wondering about what they were growing in the barn. Then the Coconut Man appeared. He was much shyer and smaller than I’d expected, but his arms looked like they’d been made from smelted iron.

He took us out to the front of the house as word quickly spread round the village that a barang with a camera had appeared. Soon there were dozens of villagers crowded round the car waiting for the Coconut Man to work his magic. But Cambodians are a suspicious lot, and none of them were standing too close.



I began filming as he scaled a 40ft tree in just 15 seconds and then climbed back down carrying five heavy coconuts. He then ripped open two coconuts with his teeth – taking barely 40 seconds to remove the fibrous, brown husk of the first. And then just 50 seconds to shell the far tougher, green husk of the second.



His other stunts included flexing his neck muscles out like an angry, hooded cobra and ripping rope apart with his hands. I interviewed him through the taxi driver afterwards, but he was a man of few words.

“I knew when I was 12 that I was strong, and decided to start climbing trees and bringing coconuts down for my family and friends to eat. Then I trained myself to rip them open,” he eventually muttered.

I turned to the rest of the family in hope. Anything to break through his steely silence. His five-year-old daughter Yisoung simply said she was proud of her father. I asked the Coconut Man whether she had special powers too. He gestured at her, and she held her hands to her eyes and turned her eyelids inside out.

There was more silence, and then his wife Seap, 22, appeared from the back of the house. She said she was too scared to watch his stunts.

“I tell him not to do them because I’m afraid he will fall from the tree or break his teeth on the coconuts, but he does not listen to me,” she sighed.

A huddle of villagers were standing well away from the others. They said they were scared he was using “Khmer black magic”. “We worry he may bring evil spirits to the area,” said an old woman.

But when I talked to the monks in the local pagoda, they just laughed. They said his skills come in handy every year for the Pchum Ben festival of the dead, when they get him to climb trees in the grounds of the commune to collect coconuts, which are then left with rice and other foods as offerings to the ghosts of dead ancestors.

I climbed back into the taxi, not knowing whether we had a story or not.

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