White rice with water spinach and chilies in oyster sauce.

I’m a big carnivore.  I don’t find a meal to be very satisfying unless it has meat in it, so it’s quite rare for me to enjoy the dish pictured above.

I was in the Asian market the other day and noticed that they had water spinach for sale.  It’s not something that’s always available so I grabbed a bunch.  In Khmer, it’s called tha guon.  It has various other names but you’ll most commonly see it referred to as water spinach or morning glory because it’s part of the same family.  It’s quite popular in Cambodian dishes as part of a sour soup and is often paired with pork or fish.

A lovely bunch of raw water spinach.

It was sitting in my fridge for 2 days before I finally decided to do something with it. I didn’t have the patience or ingredients for a soup, so I wanted to find something simple.  After browsing a few of my favorite Asian food blogs, I decided to just simply stir fry it in oyster sauce.  A popular Thai restaurant near me has that on the menu as a side dish though I have never ordered it.

So after washing, trimming and snapping the longer stems in half, I stir fried the tha guon in a bit of oil and minced garlic before adding some oyster sauce and chopped Thai chilies.  It was quick and easy, with the end result being so yummy that I didn’t miss the meat at all.  Water spinach is very “meaty” in itself, with hollow stems that retain their crunchiness when cooked and chewy leaves that soak up the sauce.  Maybe one day I’ll cook it up proper and make a Cambodian soup with it.

Speaking of meat, though I don’t know if I would call it that, today I bought a big, thick slice of beef liver that was on special at Ralphs since it was going to be past the sell-by date tomorrow.  The piece was huge and looked almost like a juicy steak, but it was nothing of the sort.  I took it out of the packaging and it was slippery and floppy.  It makes me shudder just thinking about the texture.

I pan fried it whole and then sliced it up.  My entire apartment ended up smelling like liver which is not a good thing!  I do not like the smell, texture or taste of liver at all.  So why did I buy it in the first place?

Freshly sliced liver ready to be wolfed down in less than a minute.

My dogs will eat almost anything, not that I think they even taste it to begin with.  Penny inhales her food like a Dirt Devil vacuum.  In fact, I only sliced up the liver because if I gave her one big piece, she’ll just try and swallow it whole.  It’s unbelievable how they will whine and drool for things that aren’t normal dog food, and yet once they get it, it’s just GULP GONE.  Jesse actually took her time and chewed, but once she noticed that Penny had finished, she started eating faster and gulping down 3 or 4 pieces at once.  I guess my dogs love their meat almost as much as I do.

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