A few months ago, two Khmer colleagues at my office were shifted to the room where I sit and I was pleased as punch to have some company around. We had all spent a week together in the field conducting a round focus groups, and I felt like we got along very well. But then I realized that they had no idea about my snacking. My previous officemate was also a 9-10 on the snack-scale, so we had a mutual understanding, but I didn't know where my new officemates stood. On our first day together, my stomach began to rumble on schedule at 10am, and I began munching nonchalantly on some crackers. A few minutes later, low and behold, my co-worker whipped out her own tupperware (from a bag of multiple snack containers) and we both snacked away.
Over the next few days, my officemate began to share snacking advice. She introduced me to her favorite snack foods, which were common snacks among Cambodians and completely new to me. Three of these items have since become staples in my snacking regimen.
Before introducing them, I should say that I have some selection criteria for good snacks in the office. Office-time snacks are different from movie-time snacks or bedtime-snacks, and these three snacks perfectly fit my criteria.
Criteria for a good work-time snack:
1) Not messy. Nobody likes a snack that contaminates a laptop or work papers.
Example: I tried to bring lychees in as a snack when I first got here. I L-O-V-E lychees, perhaps my favorite fruit. But my lord, they are messy. Peeling even one resulted in juice all over my hands, desk, squirted onto papers and into keys of my computer. Lychees quickly got the snack-axe.
2) Low odor. Again, nobody likes a snack that contaminates their airspace.
Example: I remember multiple officemates brining in tuna salad at my office in NYC, and while certainly a tasty treat, it can be a tad intense for those at the next desk over. Here in Southeast Asia, I've noticed a shared stance on the odor factor. In some hotels in Cambodia, there will be "Please no durian" signs (a fruit with a notoriously pungent, feet-like smell) and just this past weekend in Thailand I noticed that the stinky fruit is prohibited in subways.
3) Not too tasty. Come again?
That's right, I've realized the key to a good snack is one that isn't so delicious as to sidetrack you from work. Example: There's this place in town that makes brownies. These brownies are the embodiment of everything I look for in a baked good: sweet, varying in chewy and crunchy, and just ever so under-baked in the middle so you get the goodness of a brownie and brownie batter all in one. Early on, I bought one at lunchtime to nibble on as I crunched some stats in the afternoon. Around 2pm, I opened my brownie up, took a small bite and turned back to my laptop. And then my memory gets foggy.... all I know is the next time I looked at the clock it was 2:20pm, my brownie box was empty, I was licking chocolate off my fingers, and my laptop had gone to sleep. Bad snack choice.
TOP THREE CAMBODIAN SNACKS
1) Jicama/Bangkuang
- This is a strange, unassuming root vegetable. Before peeling, it looks like pretty unappetizing and even after peeling you might expect it to taste like a turnip or a potato. The first time my coworker offered me one, my expectations were low but now I buy them by the kilogram and eat them daily. The texture is just fantastic. A lot of crunch accompanied by some woodiness and a whole lot of water. It's kind of like a cross between a coconut and a water chestnut. And the taste is extremely subtle, mellow sweetness like a coconut and fresh like an asian pear. Several co-workers explained that this food is popular to eat in the dry/hot season as it is believed to cool down the body.
2) Guava/Tro
Baek- Looking a bit like a lumpy pear, this fruit is a popular tropical fruit flavor. Interestingly, when eaten raw it rarely tastes much like its replicated taste. I've seen small pink-fleshed varieties in India, but here in Cambodia they are fist-sized and white on the inside, with a taste verging on lemony-pear. These guavas also come equipped with very hard seeds at the center, which can break a tooth if you're not careful. Fun fact: A guava contains about 4 times as much vitamin C as an orange, making it nutritious and delicious.
3) Green mango/Svay Keo Lameat
- Mangoes themselves are not a new fruit to me, but up until this year I had always eaten them very ripe, dark orange and very sweet. Here in Cambodia, a common snac
k is a green, less-ripe mango that is characteristically sweet and sour. The ratio of sweet:sour varies by mango, and I find that for most the scale is tipped more to the sour side. This mouth-puckering snack is often accompanied by a dipping powder, made up of chili spice, sugar and salt. This is definitely the most intense of the three snacks in my routine.Okay, enough blogging. I need a snack.
