The Story

A Bulgarian Healer Works the Pressure Cooker

Bean soup and spanakopita to the rescue.

By Lindsay Sterling

Last Friday evening, it was like a geyser of anger exploded through the floorboards of my house. An onlooker from the street might have seen jets of pressurized steam, shooting out the window seams, my house like a under-funded rocket, the gutters ripping off as it thundered and clattered, the poor astronaut’s family inside, about to lift off on an unplanned mission into the Maine stratosphere. After the rupturing finally subsided, I sat down on my bed, thinking, I need a cooking session. I’ve come to rely on cooking sessions with immigrants not just for cooking inspiration, but life perspective. Clearly, I needed some. Thank God, a friend from book group had introduced me to her colleague, a Bulgarian-American therapist by the name of Svetla Popova, and we had plans to cook together the next morning.

I took exit 5B, made a couple turns, and there was her house: white, simple, and unadorned, except for fallen, still colorful fall leaves. She welcomed me in to her kitchen and started showing me how she makes her favorite Bulgarian bean soup and an easy version of spanakopita, made with layered flour tortillas instead of filo dough. She put previously soaked kidney beans in a pot, then water, then circles of carrot, diced onion and celery, green pepper, and a heaping tablespoon of paprika. The pot looked like it had some sort of special lid and handle, so I asked her about it. It was a pressure cooker, something I’d never used before.

She explained how it worked. With the lid clamped down, the pressure inside increases and so the boiling temperature of water increases. The beans cook four times faster than it would take in a regular pot. With a little prep, the soup only took 20 minutes to cook. In the middle of the lid there’s a hole the size of a toothpick, and on top of that, a heavy piece of metal that hisses and rattles, managing the pressure appropriately. “It talks” she says. “It’s like counseling. You talk, you release the pressure. If you don’t, it’s all closed up and it will become a bomb, the anger that has not been released, and everybody suffers.”

Had she walked by my house last night? Over lunch, a delicious combination of warm, balanced soup with flecks of fresh spearmint from the backyard and garlic thrown in at the last minute, paired with toasty, layered feta and greens, we talked through some stuff. By the afternoon, filled with new perspective and the healing powers of a good homemade meal, I felt like a new person. For anyone who’d like peace restored to their house, I highly recommend Svetla’s counseling, making her soup, or both.They worked for me.

Accellerated Counseling

23 Ocean Avenue

Portland, ME 04103

208-761-3883

svetla@acceleratedcounseling.com

Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2009

Cambodian Bahn Chow

Iceberg wraps filled with crepe, chicken, coconut, fresh mint and basil.

This is dear Makara Meng, the co-owner of Mittapheap World Market who invited me to her relative's house for an authentic Cambodian meal in South Portland, Maine. What an evening it was! There were fried crickets as big as jumbo shrimp; 'n some chlook, a tamale-like deal only it was rice and pork steamed in a banana leaf; and noam koam, a white gooey dessert the texture of those rubber spider toys you throw at the wall, but with a crunchy center of caramelized coconut and sesame. My eyes have been opened. My heart, three days later, is still swollen with gratitude.

The preparation I'll take home with me is bahn chow, which I just tried making for a couple friends. The word is: thumbs up. Delicious. Said one: "I love the fresh mint, basil and cucumber. -- Ooo! And I just got a little kick from the sauce!"

Check out the posts at top right for the recipe, photos and the full story.

See how to do it

Cambodian Bahn Chow

The Recipe

Cambodian Bahn Chow

Iceberg wraps filled with crepe, chicken, coconut, and fresh mint and basil.

As cooked by Sopheap Im from Battam Bong, Cambodia,
in South Portland, ME, Sept 2009

Makes 14 crepes, serves 6-8 people

Bahn Chow Dipping Sauce

1 small shallot, finely sliced
1 small clove garlic, minced
2 small red chili pepper
3 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp distilled vinegar
2 ½ cups water
2 Tbsp fish sauce
½ tsp sambal olek chili
1/2 cup roasted peanuts

Mix everything but the peanuts together to let flavors meld while you cook. Grind peanuts in coffee grinder or chop with knife; add right before serving.

Crepe Filling

¾ tsp salt
½ tsp black pepper
¾ tsp sugar
2 cloves garlic, minced
8 oz. fresh or frozen grated unsweetened coconut
1 whole chicken, meat ground or chopped finely
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 red onion, sliced in half moon shapes
½ pound bean sprouts, soaked in water then drained

Spread grated coconut evenly on a sheet pan and roast until slightly dry and golden. Heat vegetable oil in large saute pan or wok, add salt, pepper, sugar and garlic. When those begin to caramelize (turn light brown), add chicken. When chicken is well cooked, add roasted coconut, and onion. Keep chicken mixture and bean sprouts in separate bowls near pan where crepes will be made.

Crepe Batter

1 14 oz bag Bot Banh Xeo crepe mix
1 can coconut milk
3 ½ cup water
1 egg
pinch turmeric powder
small piece pork fat or vegetable oil

Mix all ingredients (except pork/oil) until smooth. Spear the piece of pork fat with a fork and keep in a small bowl next to the stove. Heat a12-inch nonstick skillet on medium high and wipe pork over hot surface. Ladel ½ cup batter into pan and tilt pan to spread batter into crepe shape, cover with lid. When rawness is gone, put ½ cup chicken mixture in center of crepe, and ½ cup fresh bean sprouts on top of that. Let heat 1-2 minutes. When edges of crepe get dry and crispy, fold crepe in half over filling, and place the whole thing on a sheet pan or large serving platter. Make 14 more stuffed crepes, putting pieces of tinfoil between each so they don’t stick and are easy to transport to plates.

Wrap Fixins

1 huge bunch fresh mint
1 huge bunch fresh basil
1-2 heads iceberg lettuce
2 cucumbers

Wash mint and basil and pick leaves, putting mounds of each on a platter with washed and quartered iceberg. Use a zester to make ridges in the skin of the cucumbers. Slice diagonally and place on platter.

How to Eat It

Use your hands. No silverware. Take a piece of lettuce, fill it with one cucumber slice, one mint leaf, two basil leaves, a piece of the bahn chow crepe and a little filling. Roll the lettuce so that all the ingredients wrapped inside. Dip in the sauce and eat! Continue until you’re full.

The Story

Her Friends Call Her So Peep

The queen of Cambodian cooking is among us.

By Lindsay Sterling

Makara Meng, co-owner of Mittapheap World Market, welcomed me to her relative’s suburban house in South Portland for an authentic Cambodian dinner. The head cook of the night was Makara’s relative, Sopheap Im, who is known as the queen of Cambodian cooks in Portland. “Everyone comes to her,” said Sopheap’s sister. Makara’s eleven extended but close family members that night taught me some amazing things.

First, people eat crickets! For Cambodians, fried crickets are a delicacy. Sopheap washed a pound of crickets, which were tide-mud brown and about the size of jumbo shrimp. Then she split the abdomen of each open with a knife, pushed a peanut inside, and deep fried large handfuls at a time in vegetable oil, using a mesh cover to contain the explosive splattering. When they quieted and turned brown after 8-10 minutes on high heat, they were done. Sopheap’s teenage daughter who was born here and had never tried crickets either, squirmed empathetically as I looked one eye to eye. While the concept of eating bugs was new for me, the experience was familiar: think the flakiness of spanikopita, the flavor of crispy skinned roasted chicken, and the crunch of a potato chip all in one. The platter of fried crickets was the only buffet item that night that yielded no leftovers.

Between her jobs as a lobster and sea urchin cleaner at Portland Shellfish and cashier at Mittapheap World Market, Sopheap cooks a feast for her huge extended family every week. This week the meal, which took five and a half hours and two people to cook, started with bahn chow, a large crepe made out of rice flour, coconut milk, egg and turmeric. The crepe is then folded over a filling of sauteed ground chicken, roasted coconut, red onion and bean sprouts.

Bahn chow is served with a buffet of fresh fixin’s: piles of fresh mint, basil, cucumber slices, wedges of iceberg lettuce, and an herb called fishface. (The dark green leaves are the shape of the card suit spade, and they smell uncannily like a fish just pulled from the water.) Makara showed me how to eat the bahn chow traditionally using no silverware. She took a piece of iceberg in one hand, filled it with one cucumber slice, one mint leaf, two basil leaves, and a piece of the bahn chow crepe and filling. She rolled the lettuce so that all the ingredients were wrapped inside. She dipped her roll into a sauce made of water, fish sauce, shallot, garlic, fresh red chili pepper, vinegar, a little sugar, and ground peanuts. Others in the family liked to eat bahn chow out of an oversized bowl with chopsticks. They cut the crepe and filling into large pieces with scissors, added handfuls of the fresh fixins’ and drizzled the sauce on top.

Sopheap made three other phenomenal dishes that night – more than I can share here. But you must know the queen of Cambodian cooking will be making appearances between her other jobs at the new Three Monkeys World Cafe, opening this October. If my evening with her is any indication, an open spirit will be rewarded. Her way with food made my heart skip a beat, then thump with joy.

Mittapheap World Market

61 Washington Ave.
Portland, ME
207-773-5523

Three Monkeys World Cafe
Opening in October
349 Cumberland Ave.
Portland, ME

fishface leaf:

frying crickets:

Thai Red Curry Chicken

Love at First Thai

That childhood taunt, “Why don’t you marry it!” might actually be worth listening to if the love professed is a kind of food. Things seem to be working out well for Nick Sherman, a Maine-born salesman for a residential building company, who loved cooking and eating fusion food. When living in Seattle, he followed the fusion master Tom Douglas’s every move through his Seattle Kitchen cookbook. But three years ago last April, back in Maine working long hours in preparation for a vacation, he didn’t have time to cook, so he went out nightly at Chinese, Korean and other Asian restaurants. “It was fast and good,” He said about the food. One might say the same about the relationship he was about to discover.

In his single, dining-out adventures, he crossed paths with a striking Asian woman, the tallest he’d ever seen. She was 5’8’’ and lean, with straight, long, black hair, an open demeanor, and an outwardly curved nose. He introduced himself, and discovered her signature high voice full of rough but sweetly brave English. Her name was Rattana. She was a textiles engineer from Bangkok, Thailand, who was traveling in the U.S. for six months, visiting friends and extended family. He asked her out on a date. She was sorry, she was leaving Maine the next day to live with a friend in Chicago, but he could drive her to the airport if he wanted to.

It must have been one car ride. A month later, over phone and email (her writing was fluent), they decided she should fly from Chicago back to Maine to go on another date. They went to a lighthouse. Then she cooked Thai for him in his condo. I can’t say how love made it’s way so quickly through the language barrier, but I can tell you that the red curry chicken Rattana made for me was good enough to merit some kind of proposal. Mine is “Cook for me again, Rattana?” His was slightly different.

Inside her pretty white china bowls with a periwinkle pattern of hexagons along the outside rim, the generous sauce around the rice is the lightest shade of pink, made not of dairy and tomatoes as in Indian curry, but light coconut milk, simmered with red chili curry base, eggplant, fish sauce, palm sugar, chicken, kaffir lime leaves and at the last minute, whole leaves of fresh basil. The triangles of eggplant (in my mind a texturally challenged vegetable) are somehow gracefully soft and yet full of structural integrity.

She showed me some tricks. Dunk whole basil leaves under the simmering coconut milk, and they don’t turn black, but an even brighter shade of green. She gets the ingredients from the Asian market at the intersection of Congress and St. John St., where the coconut milk is the right texture and sells for 79 cents a can (as opposed to $2 at the supermarket), and the red curry base is good (as opposed to “not good,” like the kind she tried from Shaws). She picks kaffir lime leaves, unavailable even at the Asian market, from a potted plant her Auntie sent her from Virginia, which has been flourishing, surprisingly, in her Maine dining room.

The taste of it all radiated in my mouth, into my belly and into my head with paradoxical rich openness. I look around: Rattana and Nick’s beautiful new house, built by the company he works for, is decorated with Buddha statues, gold-flecked Thai linens, and pictures of two lovebirds: on their second date in front of a Maine lighthouse, and then, three months later, in wedding gown and suit.

Thai Red Curry Chicken

Serves 4

1 c. white rice

1 can coconut milk (Chaokoh brand preferred)

1-2 Tbsp red curry base (Maesri brand preferred)

6 fresh kaffir lime leaves, sliced thinly

¾ small-medium eggplant, skin on, cut into 1/2” thick triangles

1 can Asian cultivated sliced bamboo shoots

1 lb. bite-sized raw chicken pieces

2 Tbsp palm sugar

15 basil leaves

2-3 Tbsp fish sauce (Squid brand preferred)

1 tsp salt

Cook rice as you would normally (in saucepan or rice cooker). Put coconut milk into medium saucepan on medium heat. Add curry base and stir until incorporated. Add kaffir lime leaves. When simmering, add chicken pieces, eggplant, bamboo shoots, palm sugar, fish sauce, 1 Tbsp water (if desired for thinning). Once chicken and eggplant are cooked, add 15 whole basil leaves, making sure to push each under the coconut milk. Add salt and more fish sauce to taste. Serve in bowl with lots of sauce over white rice.