I decided to take a cooking class here in Battambang as I had heard and read a lot of good things about a few of the kitchens. Nobody has ever complained, (to me anyway), about my cooking but, let's just say that when I've tried to get a little more adventurous, my daughter has told me that I "should just follow the recipe". Well, now I have the recipes AND have been shown what to shop for as well as cook them the proper way.
Our teacher, Vannak, took us to the market and kept us laughing the whole time. His first stop was at the stall on the picture below where he bought a bunch of lemongrass. He chit chatted with the lady for a bit and explained what some of the other vegetables were that she was selling and then we moved on. Just around the corner from her, he ducked into another stall and asked us to follow him quickly. "I have to buy from her" he explained, "but the lemongrass is much fresher here." He went on to explain that she was a friend of his families and so bought a little from her every time.
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| The first lemongrass stall |
After answering a tonne of questions and finger pointing to foreign fruit, vegetables and local delicacies, he slides into a busy stall and starts picking fresh sun dried tomatoe pieces out of a large bag. "Good timing" he laughs "they don't let you pick all the good ones, but right now they are busy so we do it anyway".
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| Various chillies and ready made curry powders |
He was obviously a regular at the market where he joked with everyone as he weaved in and out of the stalls. The seven of us followed as best we could in this busy market, and soon we were rewarded with a taste of a fish baked in banana leaf and a yummy coconut covered dessert. One of the guys in our group even got to try his hand at extracting the coconut meat from the shell.
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| Grinding out freshcoconut from the shell is not easy! |
After carrying all the market ingredients back for our class dishes (and his restaurant meals that day I think) we sat down and started chopping. We cooked our first dish, beef loc lac in a sizzling wok .... and then we ate it. That's the best part of a cooking class.
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| Chop chop! |
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| I'd love to take the mortar and pestle home, but it was just a wee bit to heavy! |
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| Our kitchen |
Jamie showed up just as we were getting ready to start cooking the second dish - fish amok. I would have had him stay to share the dish with me, but thankfully he doesn't like fish. I had to eat it all by myself.
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| My Smoking Pot! |
The tough thing will be trying to recreate these two dishes when I get all the ingredients and a kitchen. I'd like to apologize in advance to everyone who I'll be cooking for in the future because if I can master these two dishes, that's all your going to be eating for a long time. And yes Chelsea Leah, I'll follow the recipe.
For those of you who want to try your hand at these delicious recipes, I've added a picture for you. Hope you can read it and good luck! I highly recommend taking the class at the Smoking Pot if anyone is ever in Battambang - the whole experience was more than worth it.
