Khmer Cooking Class

Saturday proved to be an interesting day. We went into Phnom Penh so I could learn to cook some Khmer dishes from the cook that is in the PIP house. Awee was going to show us how to make two soups, Fish Amok and Fried Eggplant.. Khmer style. I wanted to learn about the soup because I fix soup on Sunday nights for the crew. So in the pictures you can see the ingredients and the final products. I won’t go into all the different ingredients because some are difficult to even translate into English. I wrote and watched and came back determined to surprise the crew. So today, Sunday, I chopped, boiled, smashed, and mixed what I thought would be a type of sweet, but sour soup. It actually looked Khmer. But the first thing the guys said was it was not sour enough. I have no idea what ingredient was suppose to make it sour. I will have to find that out. Then the other biggie was I forgot to peel the skin off the green vegetable. They all laughed and ate around it. I feel quite good about despite the two minor differences. Next week, soup two. Fish Amok is way too difficult. I would never try to fix that for the crew and if visitors want it, we will go to restaurant! The fried eggplant is fairly easy and I may try that but the cook had already fixed that this past week. gail