2 October 2009 - the joys of amok and avocado

Jenny is a Cambodian girl who started out washing pots at the Lazy Gecko, graduated to Friends (a restaurant in a Jamie Oliver-esque way has taken street kids and trained them up in the culinary arts) where she learnt how to cook and has now hit a new high working as a cookery trainer at Cafe Frizz.


High in a figurative and literal sense. To reach Jenny's rooftop kitchen you climb up several flights of external wire staircase to reach an open but nonetheless steamy workshop. Once you have rid yourself of any vertigo you might have discovered en route, you set to work on your deep-fried spring rolls and your amok.


Amok curry is one of Cambodia's signature dishes by all accounts, and to my pleasure and surprise, my curry of the red variety sitting, slightly uncomfortably in a banana leaf dish was delicious, or as the Khmer might say "chnang". Frankly, even in the curry had been a vile mess, it would still have been delicious, and ...exhausting.



You might be forgiven for thinking that "exhausting" is an unusual word to describe how you feel when you are making curry. However, it has to be said, this kitchen was devoid of a blender. Instead it was blessed with an unfeasibly large pessel and mortar. The pounding of the spices started at about 11am and ended, post break for consumption of the fried spring rolls, about an hour and a half later. I couldn't help but question exactly whether there isn't another way of blending spices, that does not generate the sort of heat that only a hefty dumb-bell can muster. I deleted images from my mind of grape crushing in ancient Greece as a bit unhygienic (nb in Cambodia, due to the quality of the water flip flops should be worn in the shower).


At this point I really should mention Sarra, my friend from England who, inspite of confessing to having zero skill in the cooking arena (LIE), indulged me in this fun morning. Sarra, highly competent in most ways so far as I have witnessed, conjured up some very neatly wrapped fried spring rolls. I can almost see her perfectly drafted corporate documents now....

Mine were a little more experimental in style, shall we say. I like to think of them as artistic. Sarra fortunately had been to Cambodia over a decade ago and so had done the majority of the key sites, bar Wat Phnom and the Royal Palace. Even in spite of the weather and her all too brief stay Sarra got to see both of these plus the Wat Phnom elephant swinging its trunk on Riverside at 5 of an afternoon.

In return, she and her jetlag indulged me yet again by on her first night in Phnom Penh coming to Pontoon with the rest of the volunteers and later on in the week, going to a khmer pyjama party at Rubies.

Had she not done this she would have truly missed out on the journalist we met at Equinox, who introduced us to fried frog. Imagine having just arrived in PP after a nineteen hour flight and being offered fried frog as your first meal. Sarra is robust in many many ways. However even her constitution couldn't quite stomach the idea of fried frog. Sarra found the whole conversation quite surreal. I was keen to know what the dipping sauce was.

A quite natural consequence of a meeting at the Asia Foundation about draft guidelines to the most recent anti-trafficking legislation and draft criminal code is a hunger for something fresh and MSG free. With such a wide choice of food in PP, eating western food is not a given and certainly not the cheapest option. But, the Garden Cafe, just off Street 57 in the Central Market area of town, put the broadest grin on my face, because I had not seen an avocado for so long, that my pine nut, olive oil and avocado salad with veggie burger and fries was so so good. And they deliver..And it was an antedote to the fried noodles and doughnuts I had had the day before...And it reduces your LDL...Need I say more? It just kept ticking those boxes.