oNe PhOtO a DaY jUlY 2026

JULY 1st A CUP: A little Japanese lidded teacup I spotted in the lobby of our hotel. There are lots of secondhand Japanese household items sold in Cambodia and they appear in hotels, cafes and restaurants all over the country. Our kitchen contains several too

JULY 2nd IN THE FRIDGE: in our hotel room is the picnic dinner we plan to consume on our eight hour train journey tonight. Travelling in style 

JULY 3rd SOMETHING SAVOURY: a huge plate of raw, steamed and antipasto Italian vegetables. On the menu it’s simply called big salad and it’s 100% delicious but let’s find another adj! Ginormous 

JULY 4th SOMETHING CRUNCHY: loaded nachos for dinner. I had other ideas but corn chips on special and the idea of 4th of July meant Tex-Mex took over. Guacamole on the side and I’m so glad it did, deliciousness in every bite 

JULY 5th A VEGETABLE: that I adore and recently a lot more varieties have become available here too so that’s good news for me 

JULY 6th A SPOON: a rustic, long handled, teaspoon. I love a handmade, wooden item and I’m sure this one came from Vietnam

JULY 7th A MEAL ON A PLATE: This was a tricky one for me as we eat almost every meal in a bowl and with chopsticks. However tonight’s dinner of dukkah spiced, scrambled tofu and eda mame and salad was a plate to share before we ate it

JULY 8th A DRINK: Latte one hot one cold. I love those serving gourds - sure beats plastic!

JULY 9th A HOMEMADE MEAL: Breakfast done right with Vegemite, cheese, tomato and micro greens on homemade sourdough ciabatta and I was the lucky recipient

JULY 10th A TREAT TO SHARE: Khmer style peanuts fried with lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves and garlic mixed with cashews, walnuts and almonds for our afternoon ginger lime sodas on the terrace is the treat of choice on AFDs (alcohol free days)

 

JULY 11th  A BAKED GOOD: mushroom, zucchini, string beans, capsicum and rice patties for dinner tonight. Not the greatest photo but this prompt inspired me to try to bake patties rather than fry fritters today 

JULY 12th I MADE THIS: Asian fusion dinner of buckwheat noodles with dipping sauce, kimchi and vegetables 

JULY 13th BREAKFAST: When I make breakfast it most often looks like this

JULY 14th A SLICE: of heaven. Absolute decadence here. We have double chocolate brownie slices with ice cream and passionfruit pulp with affogatos. The justification was we needed to finish the dregs of the ice cream so the new tub will fit in the freezer as we have a dear friend, who is an absolute ice cream fiend arriving tomorrow

JULY 15th A STAPLE: coffee. There are many things I can live without but coffee isn’t one of them. It’s not just a staple, it’s an essential 

JULY 16th A JAR: of Kalamata olives with a serving suggestion. They were once impossible to find here so now that I have I do like to create more cheese boards 

JULY  17th A FOOD YOU’VE NEVER TRIED: Not one of these particular snacks has ever passed my lips but I’ve tried similar and others in this range and I’m aiming to try all of them. They were gifted to us by our current guest who knows us very well 

JULY 18th A COLOURFUL DISH: in the making - Frittata but actually not so colourful once assembled. Just part of tonight’s fare for a dinner party with an Italian theme 

JULY 19th A BOWL: of last night’s dessert for breakfast. Someone was too full to eat it at dinner but happy to have it at 8:30am

JULY 20th A CIRCULAR FOOD: limes  feature heavily in both drinks and dishes for us. They are cheap, delicious, plentiful, seed free and very juicy 

JULY 21st SOMETHING ICONIC: rice noodles are the staple of so many dishes right across SE Asia but these I refer to as lace noodles as they are sheets made of the tiniest rice noodles, in that pattern. They are the principal ingredient of a sensational Khmer dish and the only one I can make a vegetarian adaption of 

JULY 22nd A COMFORT FOOD: for me is a monster sandwich. Whenever we take a long bus, car or train journey I make this eat a rainbow brunch for the journey and these days it’s on homemade ciabatta sourdough. It was an early train to Kampot this morning. Perfection in every bite! 

JULY 23rd A PACKET: of famous Kampot pepper in tradition style packaging is the perfect souvenir of Cambodia and we just happen to be in Kampot today too

JULY 24th A SAUCE: Soy sauce is a staple in our household and I’ve only ever seen these fun, retro look images in the Pot where we just happen to be

JULY 25th ON THE BENCH: in the kitchen is the huge haul of fresh produce we just returned from the local market with, after a few days away. That’s US$11 worth and a supply for us eat a rainbow vegetarians and our guests for the next few days. Everything was in cloth bags, or boxes we provided too so not one plastic bag came home with us. So many reasons to feel grateful and love where we live 

JULY 26th  FROM THE FREEZER: into a coconut already half full of shredded coconut flesh, warm sticky rice with sweetened beans, and palm fruit pieces and then dusted in crushed, blanched, roasted peanuts, that’s a street stall serve of coconut ice cream  

*chosen in the Fab Four on Facebook 

JULY 27th A FAVOURITE MUG: as seen at breakfast this morning 

JULY 28th UTENSILS: Chopsticks are the much preferred option in this household

JULY 29th A RED FOOD: Pomegranates in season now and fresh in the market today

* it even got selected for the Fab Four 

JULY 30th A COOKBOOK: from a restaurant and cafe we have supported through many reincarnations for over 13 years. Their work training marginalized young people in vocational skills, supports children families and communities in Phnom Penh city. I just bought the recipe book as a gift for some avid cooks currently visiting us 

JULY 31st SOMETHING MESSY: food pre earlier today 

PROMPTS 

Rambling word nerd thoughts and reflections on language

“I didn’t want to live in a world where I’d shrug and say yom asset yom bassal and no one would know I meant one day honey, one day onions. I didn’t want to cook and never be told ashteedek (long live your hands). I wanted to be able to ask, ash lonek (how are you? - but literally, joyfully what colour are you?) I don’t believe that flattening us all down into sameness is the way to keep the world beautiful or even alive.”

Samantha Ellis from Chopping Onions on My Heart. 

I too as someone who loves to cook would adore being told “long live your hands” but that music will never play in my ears. And I’m orange by the way. 

The language above is Judeo-Iraqi Arabic but the beautiful imagery of of the literal translations reminded me of the many times I have discussed idiomatic expressions with speakers of other languages. The conversation takes a turn where each individual tries to find an expression in their native language that the other languages don’t have an equivalent for. Invariably they do not find one but the same ideas are expressed so very differently. 

The first such conversation was with Xiang Xia in Dali China, back in the 1990s. We started with the expression fair weather friends, which she had read in a novel and couldn’t fathom, as I recall. Since I was also learning Chinese at the time, I then demanded to know the Chinese equivalent.   酒肉朋友, (jiǔròu-péngyou) which is literally wine and meat friends. From this point we discovered so many more and marveled at how often the references drew on different associations in the English and Chinese versions.  Associations and symbolism drifted between the weather, hospitality, sports, history and traditions.  Rhyming patterns and rhythm were also variants. We never drew any conclusions or published. 

Years later in a bookstore in Hiroshima I found an illustrated book about Japanese idioms, in which each idiom was presented with its English counterpart on the opposite page. Of course I had to buy it though, I have no idea where my copy would be now. Possibly at the Oxfam Secondhand Bookstore in Adelaide, but I doubt that.

They ended up receiving over ten cartons of our books when we decided that we weren’t adding them, to an all too recently acquired storage unit in preparation for our departure to teach in Thailand. 

Recently I spotted a Khmer-English version of this kind of publication and thought to buy it for a friend, with the language skills to appreciate it but I resisted the urge. Possessions can often become burdens especially when you are leaving. Oops I digress. 

Another linguistic quirk of Japan I observed while living there is the assumption about the origins of foreign words embedded in their language. One of the three alphabets that are all used concurrently, consists of only foreign words. In a Japanese person’s mind that often equates to English. For that exact reason people would say certain single words to us slowly and clearly expecting us to understand. The origin of those words may have been French, Portuguese or German but  the expectation was it was English because so many of them are. Often we did not comprehend their meaning but I developed an interest in discovering which language the word had come from. 

Similar language fascinations seem to pop up everywhere. 

Having just started writing this we slipped out to post some snail mail- yep that’s another interest of  mine: returning to hand written, personalized, slow communication. The wait, expectation and revelation being lost in digital versions. I’ve been on that bandwagon for some time. But yet again I digress. 

We happened upon an exhibition entitled “Of Words.” Though it proved somewhat tedious translating the narrative to English via a digital app, as all the information was presented in Khmer and French only, the irony was not lost on me. Here I was relying on the very technology I so often malign. One of the many fascinating facts that came to light was that almost all the loan words in the Khmer language are French in origin and there was resistance to this trend, when they first fell into common usage. The succinct French version almost always prevailed over the more long winded Khmer creations which relied heavily on descriptions. Stands to reason really, having historically been a protectorate and so many Khmer being able to communicate in French already that that would be the language source and efficiency would prevail, I suppose. 

The book quoted above introduced so many new linguistic concepts and vocabulary to me, that I feel I must at least comment on the vocabulary I’d never encountered before. These words were nevertheless totally self explanatory upon reflection. It obviously appealed to the word nerd in me so I thought I’d conclude with a few examples. 

What children hear is not necessarily the language they first speak, especially if it is not the one, in which they engage with the exterior world. If a language different from their parents’ native one prevails and is used at home by children and parents together, the one their parents speak to each other is only the parents’ mother tongue not their children’s. The term mother tongue then in fact becomes confusing. The children absorb and speak only fragments of that language but understand so much more. Milk language is the more accurate term applied to the child’s use of the parental language. Fascinating to me at least. 

There is also grief attached to knowing that that language is becoming extinct and you may never hear it spoken again, even if you speak only a broken form of it yourself. Many migrants, displaced people and refugees have this experience. This concept was at the heart of the book. 

Predator languages was also new to me. This brutal term includes English, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew and doubtless many more. These languages take over and native languages are lost. Historically certain ethic groups have been prevented from freely speaking their mother tongues or even punished for doing so and furthermore, for those who speak only those ethnic languages or for whom they are their native language, higher education and countless other social and economic opportunities are lost or even deliberately denied, in order to enslave them in some regimes. Bully languages is a term which carries the very same meaning and has much more impact in my mind. 

Globally thousands of languages have already become extinct. 

Very many, developed, English speaking nations, in addition to  Israel, China and Russia (and without a doubt many others I am unaware of) stand accused of repeatedly and persistently suppressing minority languages in this way and this is referred to as lingucide. However, who is actually paying attention to these brutal and alienating practices? It bothers me how complacent we have become as societies and how we are becoming ever more homogeneous.  

These are lived experiences for millions of First Nation and ethic minorities globally and identity is intimately tied to language. Native Americans, indigenous Australians, Tibetans  and Uighurs and countless Middle Eastern ethnic groups are among them. First nations people are a disproportionally large group who have suffered this loss of language.