Cooking Up Cambodian Style
Trip Start
Apr 01, 2011
1
8
Trip End
Apr 21, 2011
Siem Reap, Cambodia
Saturday, April 9, 2011
After this we were starting to run out of time so we hustled down the the restaruant where we had booked our Cambodian cooking class, Le Tigre du Papier. The class cost $12.00 US per person for a three hour session, and you get to eat your three course meal afterwards. As the meals alone cost at least half of this themselves, it was a great bargain.
It turned out to be just the two of us and our instructor, a tiny little Cambodian woman named Navin. She gave us menus and told us which of the meals we could choose to prepare off of them. After much debate, Gabrielle decided to do a banana flower salad as an appetizer with a herb-crusted Khmer chicken on bok choy as a main (with Dan's encouragement). Dan picked a green mango salad (can't get enough mango!) with a main of chicken amok - a national Cambodian dish, and we shared a sticky rice with mango for desert (more mango!)
With the menu set, Navin hustled us out of the restaurant to go to the market, where we would find the key ingrediants we needed to make our dishes. We walked through the tiny pedestrian ally lined with colourful restaruants, empty at this time of day. Only a few Cambodian wait staff appeared, slowly getting ready for the throngs of foreigners that would decend on them again that night.
The market Navin took us to was not the same as the one we'd been to the day before. This was obviously the local's food market. Similar in construction to many markets we had been to, this wall-less concrete box was filled with concrete tables, creating narrow aisles between them. Each table was stacked high with spices, vegetables, meat, or seafood, Cambodian sellers peering out from behind their colourful wares. At 10:00 am the place was packed, and we only glipsed one other foreign face in the crush. They looked a little lost. Navin grabbed Gabrielle and plowed her tiny Cambodian body into the mix, guiding us through and pointing out the unusual key ingredients in our dishes, including oyster mushrooms, fresh lemongrass, dragonfruit, and piles of fresh coriander and basil. We stopped to buy some amok powder and tom yum soup mix to take home with us to New Zealand, then headed for the meat area of the market.
You'd think we would be more used to meat markets in countries such as Cambodia by now, but it still manages to slightly disturb the senses. Mass piles of whole plucked chickens (dead), lay in large stacks, chickeny feet sticking out into the aisle. Other tables had piles of catfish (not all dead), and some occasionally would exert a great flip and manage to leap off of the table and into the aisle, flopping in your path. Baskets of headless, skinned frogs sat next to bowls of snapping crabs and huge stacks of prawns on ice. Cambodian girls squatted on tables, methodically cutting fish and scraping out the flesh with spoons to make fish paste. The smells were almost overpowering and we were very happy to emerge in the (now seemingly but not really) clean air outside.
Back at the restaurant, Navin took us up several flights of stairs to a clean, airy rooftop studio set up for our cooking class. The ingredients for our meals were laid out in an extremely orderly fashion, with each section of the meal glad-wrapped with the appropriate tools and dishes needed to prepare it.
Under Navin's watchful tutelage we donned our cooking hats and aprons. Gabrielle, being only slightly taller than Navin fit hers well. Dan, being more than slightly taller than Navin, did not. Through not so stifled giggles, Navin apologized that they only had one size of apron. Carrying on, we chopped, squeezed, julienned, pounded and cooked the huge array of fresh herbs for our meals, including cilantro, lemongrass, garlic, chillies, galangal, and tumeric, which stained our fingers bright yellow as we sliced the tiny pieces. Navin even taught us to make lotus flowers out of tomatoes to decorate our finished meals. The final product looked and smelled spectacular and we could hardly believe that we had made it, right down to the banana leaf bowl for the amok.
We made an effort to enjoy as much of the meal as we at the restaurant, but as our stomachs were both still a bit touchy, we packed up the leftovers and headed back to the hotel for a break from the day's heat.
A short time later, we headed back to the more touristy market and bought a few souveniers for ourselves and gifts for friends. Even Dan couldn't resist the cheap prices and did some rare clothes shopping, having to strip down to his underwear - sans changing room - to try on pants.
Feeling a bit better, but still not up to eating, we decided to take a tuktuk out to Angkor Wat for sunset, as entry into the site is free after 5pm. Our first glimpse of the iconic towers was spectacular despite the crowds, and we watched as the sun turned a deep red and sunk into haze over the pools lining Angkor Wat's outer walls. With plenty of light left, we went through the gateway and into the grounds of Angkor Wat. A long stone causeway led to the scaffold-covered towers of the main site, and we slowly made our way down.
By the time dusk had settled it seemed like we almost had the place to ourselves. We stopped to talk with two young monks outside one of the ancient temple libraries. They offered us a cigarette and seemed eager for the chance to practice their English. As the grounds grew darker, we walked back to the gate reluctantly, comforted that we would soon be back.
We found our tuktuk driver and headed back into town. Still iffy about eating anything, we took advantage of another $2.00 US foot massage instead. By now we were starting to go with the flow and embrace the indulgences of Siem Reap, and it was fantastic.
We followed this up with happy hour at an oasis-like restaurant near our hotel and splurged on a pitcher of cocktails and had to follow it up with some delicious crispy spring rolls, as the lack of food showed its effects.
It has been a fantastic day and we're really enjoying Siem Reap as the shock transition wears off. Tomorrow we begin our three day temple blitz. Cue Indiana Jones theme song - ride off into sunset.
All our best from Cambodia
Dan and Gabrielle
