Unemployed at last!: Notable culinary experiences, with digressions on the side

Close and uncensored observations of my eating experiences have been promised. And so, in no particular order, it begins.

Mango, sticky rice and coconut cream on the street in Bangkok.

Sweet, salty, chewy, and succulent all at once. Marks deducted for service in styrofoam.

Degustation amok in Siem Reap.

Amok is one of the national dishes of Cambodia, or so I’m told. It’s a mild red curry of whatever meat, fish or veg takes your fancy, served in a banana leaf with a swirl of coconut cream on top. The curry paste is spice rather than garlic-ginger-galangal based, thinned out with stock rather than coconut milk and the whole seems to be brewed with some sort of red pepper, onion and morning glory. It’s pretty tasty. And it’s called amok, which lends itself to a delightful array of puns. And a degustation amok seems to me to make a good thing even better, with five versions of the one dish, all displayed in their own little banana leaf compartments. I really must start taking photographs of such noteworthy dishes. Full marks for presentation, Amok (the name of the restaurant as well as the dish).

Banana flower salad, Siem Reap

Prasit’s does a mean banana flower salad, possibly a better banana flower salad than this. Monica, who is highly knowledgable about such things, tells me that is because we have better quality produce in Sydney. Of course we do. That said, a banana flower salad within coo-ee of banana trees is hard to beat.

Banana pancakes, Angkor Hilton Guesthouse.

This guesthouse was a little terrifying. I was dropped there at 11.30pm after a truly heinous fifteen hour trip from Bangkok. The bus trip was dusty, hot, and bumpy, there was a five hour schlep through border checks in the middle of it and it was punctuated by a sappy English girl lisping, ‘it’s all experience, innit’ every five minutes. So is being in a padded cell, love. After all of this, I would have slept under a banana leaf. As it happened, I slept at the Angkor Hilton. Our deposition there was a clear example of collusion between a bus company and a guesthouse as no sane person would have recommended this place unless they were on the payroll or a member of the family. Yes, it was large and airy and clean and cheap-ish. (The price offered pre-midnight was subject to some increase with the passage of eight hours. In fact, the overnight net increase in tariff turned out to be 100%. Classy. ) The fact that there was no electricity was a negative, but one with which I could cope. (The midnight story was that the king of Cambodia was visiting in a few days so electricity was being conserved in his honour. The light of day revealed this to be a fiction.) That not one of the surfaces would have passed a basic-spirit level test was worrying to my only occasionally practically minded self. (Watching my torch roll along the window-sill was amusing for a very little while.) The great difficulty I had in convincing my hosts to let me leave was unnerving. (It involved the concoction of a large ballooning fiction involving room reservations elsewhere, a large boyfriend, two large boyfriends, and the inability to make plans independently, and a lot of girly shrugging and giggling.) All that said, the Angkor Hilton made a mean banana pancake – bananas properly caramelised in coconut milk and fluffy eggy pancakes. The coffee tasted like it had been made with last week’s dishwater, but the pancakes, the pancakes were grrreat.

Chilli sauce, Thai Airways

The precedent for a constant fine array of condiments was set on the flight from Sydney to Bangkok. The insipid inflight noodle offerings were supplemented by optional sachets of chilli sauce. Since then, chilli, in various forms has rarely been more than two metres away from my table.

6. Gristle-filled spring rolls, Angkor Wat.

Alas, what record of notable culinary experiences would be complete without a serious dud? Monica and I arrived hungry at Angkor Wat at sunset and thought that we would brave one of the Khmer menu only resto-shacks and order on the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ principle, using the time-honoured ‘point and smile’ technique. A little gesticulation took us a long way. A little risk-taking on the eating front seems vital to me. My father instilled this principle in my sisters and I from an early age and it is one that I am determined to pursue. Following the bloody-minded Pike principle, we wound up with a yummy sour chicken soup and a strange sweet curry with cold noodles, some kind of meat and sausage and pumpkin. On watching others, I realised we were supposed to eat spoonfuls of this alternating with bites of fresh chilli. Unfortunately the chilli-lime plate had been taken away before we could try this. Some cold, yellowy-looking drinks were delivered to the people at the other end of the table. They looked happy, I thought the drinks might be some sort of soothing lemon concoction so we finangled a couple of them too. They turned out to be sugarcane juice – super-sweet, but palatable. The chaps sitting next to us were onto our game and watched us, amused; when fresh spring rolls arrived in front of them, we got in on their act. The fun stopped here. Plenty of fresh greens – mmmm. Some slightly gritty tiny prawns – oooh-kay, texturally challenging but do-able. We both stopped at the same time when we realised that there was a texture which couldn’t be categorised as either leafy vegetable matter or odd little shellfish. That texture turned out to be strips of what I can only describe as cured gristle, long chewy strands of some sort of tough fat which had been stewing in something acidic for an insufficient period of time. It was unforgettably awful and suddenly absolutely inedible. I remain haunted.