Fried Ginger with Pork

Today at language study I learned how to make a Cambodian dish, fried ginger! This particular dish was fried ginger with pork. This week I've been learning the names of Khmer dishes and ingredients. Then today, after studying for one hour, my teacher said I would learn to make Khmer food. I was SO excited!

We went to the kitchen and we started making the dish. She told me what to do / what she was doing, and continually quizzed me on names of utensils and ingredients. I learned a few new words and re-learned words I had "learned" before. After we finished everybody  (all of the other teachers and myself) got to taste it, then we went back and reviewed. We went step by step and I wrote it all down in Khmer / reviewed all of the words we used! I'll translate it all into English for you! ;-) I also put the Khmer (with my poor phonetics), which makes the directions a little more messy, but makes it more fun (I think)!


Fried Ginger (Chaa Kinyighy)

Ingredients:
Pork or Chicken
1 whole ginger root
3-4 garlic cloves
vegetable oil
sugar
salt
fish sauce
Knorr soup mix or MSG

Directions:  (translated directly from Khmer)
Wash the pork (or chicken) first (lee-ung sike jrew sun)
Then slice pork (bon-tow-op mow han sike jrew)
Peel ginger (jet kinyighy)
Slice ginger (han kinyighy)
Hit / smash garlic (with the side of the knife in order to remove the peel) (dom k'dum saw)
Take peel leave  (remove the peel) (yoke som bawk jen)
Slice garlic (she used the same Khmer word, but actually diced it) (han k'dum saw)

Open light (turn the burner on) (balk plung)
Put pan (put the pan on the burner) (dat k'teya) An interesting thing I learned from this is, they actually say this is the first step! I think in English / America, it is assumed. Here, another teacher asked me what the first thing was and I said, "put the oil in," then she said, "did you not put the pan in first?" :-)
Put oil (dat b'rang)
Stir oil (go b'rang)
Wait maybe 2 or 3 minutes (jum brahael be ruu bai neeah tee)
Wait until hot (dtoke owie k'dau)
Put ginger (dat kinyighy)
Stir ginger until cooked (go kinyighy owie ch'un)
Scoop out ginger leave (take the ginger out of the pan) (This is where the video starts, which I can't upload fro some reason, but I'm trying to upload it on Facebook - I think it will help if you really want to make it) (dooah kinyighy jen)

Put oil (dat b'rang)
Put garlic (dat k'dum saw)
Stir garlic until color red (they also call it deep fried garlic) (go k'dum owie poah cra-haum)
Put meat (dat sike)
Put sugar (dat scaw)
Put salt (dat om-bell)
Put fish sauce (don't worry, it won't taste fishy!) (dat tuk t'ry)
Put MSG (if you don't have MSG, you can use Knorr soup mix) (dat soup Knorr)
Stir until cooked (go owie ch'un)
Put ginger (add the ginger that you already cooked) (dat kinyighy)
Stir maybe 2 or 3 minutes (go brahael be ruu bai neeah tee)
Taste (p'lewuk)
Add sugar, salt, ... (whatever is needed to taste good) (thyme scaw) Another thing I learned was, if it tastes too salty you can add a little more sugar! (That is what we did)

Eat with rice! (nyum jia moy bi)

I hope you can understand that! As you can see, Khmer doesn't have all of the extra words that English has like "the."

This was one of my favorite days at language. My other favorite day was when I went with my other teacher to get gas in her moto and I learned how to get gas and reviewed giving directions. It was so fun driving around the round-about three times as we practiced the word for round-about!