If I have not made it known yet, one thing about me that you should know is that I really enjoy cooking. Fortunately for me, I was instructed by some pretty competent chefs in my youth which contributed to my love of cooking and skill level in the kitchen.
By no means would I say I am a great cook, but I think I am a good one. My cooking philosophy resolutely rests on the premise that you do not need a recipe and failure breeds success. I wouldn't say that I never use recipes, but I seldom rely on them beyond an initial glance at ingredients and cooking times. This helps me to really learn about making the dish I am making, kind of like learning a foreign vocabulary word. Rote memorization only goes so far, it is the practice of recalling the word in random but appropriate contexts that helps solidify the brain's reliance on a new word-idea-pronunciation.
I have a similar attitude towards travel - the best finds (restaurants, beaches, people, foods) for me are often the ones I find while lost (or pretending I know where I am going). For the most part, I have a pretty high tolerance for uncertainty, so this outlook suits me.
With cooking, I love the idea that cooking is art, and art is unrestrained. Some of the best things I have made have been by gut instinct decisions counter to the recipe's directions or a serendipitous mistake made without the ability to rectify. More often than not, my dishes or concoctions, seem to just work out. I am not trying to give myself a pat of the back here or say that I am constantly reinventing a better wheel than has even existed before, I am just saying what works well for me.
A note of trepidation I have about serving in Cambodia is the prevalence of host family living situations, over the option of finding and renting your own accommodations. There are certain advantages to each. With a host family you are NEVER alone, which can be simultaneously great and terrible (especially for a young married couple); your language tends to improve dramatically as you have constant language partners who can correct your pronunciation, grammar, etc; there is a certain degree of safety associated with most host families as well as a bond that tends to be very strong.
My main concern here is not a deal breaker, only one of personal preference that I believe is an essential part of learning, and really enjoying, and new culture: if we live exclusively with a host family for the duration of our service, I may not have many chances to cook as a local. It is exciting to me to think that I could learn a totally different style of cooking with ingredients that I may never have at my disposal again.
Curious to know if any PCVs who have only lived with host families in the PC have found the experience frustrating because they weren't able to cook. Has anyone cooked for their home families? How did that go?
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