Battambang – Cambodia: 14th Oct 2009

This morning was great - we did a ‘smoking pot’ course! No, not a course in smoking pot, but a Cambodian cooking course at a restaurant called the Smoking Pot. It was the first restaurant-based cooking course ever offered in Cambodia and started 9 years ago. The day started with a visit to the market to pick up our ingredients, which included live cat fish (at least they were live when we pointed at them, but a few bashes on the head from the stall owner’s hammer put paid to that). We also bought chicken and beef and all sorts of crazy veg that I’ve never heard of (they must be in the isle of Waitrose that I don’t visit!).

We cooked three dishes - ‘Fish Amok’ , followed by ‘Fried beef with Ginger’ and then hot and sour soup. All were delicious, but our fave was the Fish Amok, really coconutty! We were given a recipe book to take away so we’ll definitely be trying these at home, and we enjoyed the course so much that we’ve decided to do one in Thailand, and maybe one in Vietnam as well!

Afterwards, Sam and Johanna, a young couple from England who had been doing the course with us, joined us in our tuk-tuk for a quick drive around town to visit a couple of temples. In Cambodia they are still building many Buddhist temples – all in the traditional style, with loads of gold and intricate statues. It’s amazing, the same as if we still built gothic style churches in England. It’s a good way to keep the old crafts alive.

After a couple of hours chilling in the guest house we went to a cool bar overlooking the river and surrounded by jungle, where we hooked up again with Sam and Johanna. They’ve been travelling for a couple of months, mostly in SE Asia – they leave Battambang tomorrow but are going to follow roughly the same route as us up to Hanoi so we may well bump into them again along the way!