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TRAVEL BLOG ENTRY
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“In my element!” |
Next stop was Battambang to learn how to cook Khmer food… Now those of you who know me well are probably a little concerned that food has featured so little – has Jo FUNDAMENTALLY changed already? Don’t be so silly! It’s that it deserves its own section of course!…So brace yourself for the Food Interlude which will follow at the end of my cambodian adventures!
The cookery course was utterly brilliant – I was totally in my element! First off get to the restaurant and choose which dishes you want to cook –there would be only 2 of us doing the course, virtually a private lesson and the other girl doing the course, Lina a US/Korean girl was just as much of a foodie as me - brilliant. Next, off go to the market and buy the ingredients. Now Ive been to the market in every town I’ve visited – I love them, the sights, smells, tastes – but this was the first time with someone fluent in Khmer and English – too good an opportunity to miss – whats this?! How do they make that?! What on earth do you do with that???! Marvelous!
Then back to the restaurant for the lesson – we’d be outside on the street, under the awning – could it get any better? So we’d chosen 3 dishes – Amok – the Cambodian national dish, a coconut curry, Loc Lac, the other Cambodia national dish – a meat stir fry in a special pepper sauce, and a Cambodian sour fish soup. So in the lovely shade of the restaurant I chopped fresh lemongrass, and made curry paste in a lovely heavy stone pestle and mortar; I made coconut milk by hand – which involves putting grated fresh coconut in a muslin bag and then putting a bit of water in a bowl and repeatedly dipping and squeezing – who knew??? I’d always bought it in a tin back home! I learned how to slice lemongrass properly and how to finely chop garlic using a nifty double handed cleaver maneuver – my new party trick! Then we used the same move for the prahoc…now prahoc if you remember from my first day in Cambodia is fermented fish, and its pretty rank, so I was a little concerned that it was going into my soursoup - that said, id eaten the same dish the night before (it would have been crazy to do a cookery course at a restaurant where I hadn’t sampled the wears…) and it had been lovely - so no judgement and using my new party trick I pulverized the fermented fish pieces into a fine paste which was to be added to the soup for flavour – along with tamarind pieces. Now this is quite fun – tamarind has big pips, so you add a bit of soup to a bowl with tamarind in it and squidge with a spoon until all the sour flesh is in the soup and the pips are shiningly clean – then add the soured bit of soup back to the wok.
Last off – I learned how to prepare pineapple so that it looks beautiful and has the skin and eyes removed – another simple cleaver maneuver. I will definitely be coming home with some cleavers, if customs will let me through!
Has to be said though, even I had difficulty eating all the dishes that I prepared - 3 meals and a half a pineapple - although I gave it a good shot. Needless to say I did NOT have any dinner that night!
previous travel blog entry
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