Even those who have only a passing acquaintance with me will know I have a great love of food – almost anything goes, and lots of it. I have tried some really great food in Cambodia and it would be a shame not to be able to eat it again (even London ain’t awash with Cambodian restaurants), so I was thrilled to have the chance to do a Khmer cooking course today. It didn’t disappoint.
First we headed to the market to buy our ingredients, where we saw some wierd and wonderful sights:
I also had the joy of seeing – for the first time – where bananas come from. Believe it or not, this is a banana flower, which has petal after petal curved around it. Between each petal is a neat little row of ‘baby bananas’ as our cooking teacher called them. These tiny buds grow up to be big juicy bananas – hence a bunch of bananas. Brilliant.
Next we went to our rooftop cooking classroom:
We made four dishes: spring rolls with sweet and sour sauce, fish amok, banana blosson salad with chicken and sticky rice and mango. We made every single component from scratch, including the banana leaf boat that our amoks were cooked in. Here are the fruits of my labour:
Observant readers will have spotted the recipe book in one of the photos above. Friends and family be warned!
quartergapyear 
You look totes amaze balls darling and the food looks good too. BGA says when are you cooking for him?
Tell him he can be my cooking guinea pig. But in return I will expect a home cooked Chinese banquet so large I take 80 per cent of it home with me for take aways. Deal?…