Master Chef Davey returns
Trip Start
Mar 10, 2007
1
45
153
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Battambang,
Cambodia
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Cooking course the following day at smokin' pot restaurant did not start out well. The guy was 30 minutes late starting it up, was very moody and wouldn't let us choose our own dishes at first, saying we couldn't do this or that etc. In the end though he caved in, so we were off to the market to buy our ingredients. The market trip was actually quite informative, usually they just walk around and are like' this is a carrot, those are cauliflowers' etc, but he threw in some useful facts too. For instance, did you know that the smaller the root of ginger you buy, the less spicy it is, i believe you did not!
Mt dishes consisted of Fish Amok, a traditional Khmer curry like dish made from coconut milk, lemon grass, tamarind and Kafka lime leaves amongst other things
my fish amok
. Thats one damn tasty curry, and I've had it several times since (yesterday actually). Next up i cooked a traditional Khmer stir fry (i chose all the traditional dishes on purpose), spicy beef with basil leaves, which was quick easy and very very spicy. My final dish was hot and sour soup, very easy and very tasty to make. Look out fellow Davey's this is coming to a kitchen near you soon, as i have the recipe book.The cooking course finished about 2, and we didn't want to waste the rest of the day, so we all went on a motorcycle tour of the local area. We saw some local wats, nothing to write home about (yet i am anyway, dumb ass!), however the ride out to them was very picturesque, and once we got there me and Taylor treated ourselves to some more fried bugs (much to Louise's disgust). At one of the wats was another ''killing cave'', of the Khmer rouge's doing, however this time they simply threw their victims about 30m to their deaths. Again bones were still visible there and a stupa filled with bones was left as a mark if respect. Our driver was surprisingly informative about the whole regime, and made the trip much more enjoyable. One of the wats we went to even had a load of scrounging monkeys around it, fun until they started to get agitated, then we all shat ourselves and ran, obviously (i don't want rabies this early into my trip, or at any point in my trip for that matter.) Nice way to see of Battambang.
