July 12th was Srey-Yuu's 14th birthday, and I decided to give my daughter my time, the most precious resource of all, and a pretty outstanding hot-pot spread too.
Everybody Do Srey-Yuu's Chores 🧹
Her birthday fell on a school day, not exactly easy circumstances to do something special, but I have been asking her for many weeks how she'd like to spend her special day. The number one thing was that she didn't want to wash any dishes on her birthday, so I took that one step further and made sure that we performed all her chores for her.
When Srey-Yuu would arrive home from school there would be nothing for her to do, and luckily she didn't have any homework. I had spent the previous evening making two plates of carrot halva, then woke up in the morning to start making a hot-pot, her favorite food, and something I've never made before.
👨🍳 I'm A Chef, How Hard Can It Be?
I used to cook a lot of SE Asian style foods in my younger years, but now that I've got a Cambodian wife, I leave the SE Asian foods to her, and I stay in my comfort zone of cooking mostly South Asian flavors. After I googled several different vegan hot-pot recipes, the broths were all very simple, so I sort improvised my own version with inspiration from several websites.
Ultimately I wanted to make a fairly simple broth the first time, and then decide based on the taste, what I will add in future hot-pots. I fried green onions, chilies, ginger, and lemongrass, then added 4 liters of water, tamarind, tomatoes, pineapples, corn on the cob, nutritional yeast, soy sauce, sugar, and salt, and an hour later a heavenly broth was waiting on the stove.
🫵 Are You Not Satisfied?
As soon as Srey-Yuu arrived home I took her book bag and told her everything has been done. I then asked her what she wanted to do with nothing but freedom and me at her service until bedtime. At first she seemed a bit perplexed, but with some interrogation she revealed that she wanted to Netflix and chill.
While Srey-Yuu watched Netflix, we all prepared a party area over at the cabin. I divided the massive batch of vegan hot-pot broth into two pots to allow the guys to add meat if they wanted. Well, it turns out our neighbors were out of town, and that meant no meat for sale, so everybody went vegan for the evening. Much to my surprise the guys were enjoyed it and wanted to know the details of how to prepare it.
The Ole' Stink-Eye 😠
A good birthday or non-birthday hot-pot must have a lot of accessories for maximum entertainment. We had several kinds of noodles, leafy greens, tofu, veggies, sauces and whatnot, so it made for a pretty good spread. Also, there was dessert that I mentioned despite no photographic evidence, and lastly Srey-Yuu's stink-eye face in the above photo, something I didn't notice until uploading the pic.
I stepped out of my culinary comfort zone that is mostly Indian food and made SE Asian food for SE Asians, glad to have not let anyone down. After the food Srey-Yuu wanted to watch a full-length movie before going to bed, so I let her Netflix and chill one final time. There were a few gifts too, a small phone bag I brought from the US and a Harry Potter LEGO set.
The following morning was a regular school day, so Srey-Yuu had to get up at 5:30am and moto 30km to the Thai border where the nearest public school is. I love this girl to the moon and back, would do anything for her, and hope her birthday was a special despite us not having a lot of financial resources.
We Are Wealthy In Other Ways 🐱
I'd like to think there are many ways to be wealthy, and we have an abundance of many things like love, mountain views, spicy food, bad jokes, a cute new kitty friend, and so many more things that have no dollar price. ChairWoman Meow was present for some of the birthday proceedings, and was her usual highly tolerant self. That's all for meow folks, smell ya later.
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