Badminton, Cooking Class, Family Dinner

We got up early to meet Bop and her friends for badminton. We met up with her and two others outside our hostel at the wine bar they own. We said good-morning to their cat, Orange, before being kitted out with helmets. Bop drove us to the badminton courts and we began to play. For not playing properly in years we both played well and had a laugh. The others were a lot better than us but that was okay. We got coffee and iced tea before being driven back to our hotel. To say thank you to Bop and her friends we paid the badminton fee.

A quick shower later and we were picked up for our cooking course. Mr Bath wasn’t in so we were taken care of by his assistant who was amazing. We visited a local market to purchase the ingredients for our cooking: lemongrass, galangal, chicken, turmeric, fresh squeezed coconut milk. Robin was not amused at the cuts of meat or the fish flopping in the middle of the road. I have to say I didn’t really like the look of the pig heads either.

Arriving at Mr Bath’s house, we were taken upstairs to the rooftop cooking school. We began by preparing a mountain of curry paste by chopping up our herbs and spices and pulverizing them with a pestle and mortar. Next we prepared the filling of our spring rolls by shedding taro and dicing spring onion. We took a break from food to learn how to fold up banana leave baskets to steam our fish anok. A traditional Khmer (Cambodian) dish, fish amok is a nutty, coconut based curry which is steamed over water in banana leaf baskets for 20 minutes to cook.

After our anok was made we used the curry paste to make a Khmer chicken curry. Robin then made light work of frying off our spring rolls.

Once cooked, we stuffed ourselves full of all the Khmer food we had just made. We had to be rolled back into the tuk tuk to be dropped back at the hostel. We had a rest before finding a post office to ship a few items home.

In the evening, we joined the hostel family dinner of a few Khmer dishes: chicken curry, tofu loklak, mango salad, rice. Being tired out from cooking and badminton we agreed an early night was in order.

-M