Monday, February 2, 2009

Cooking Class

It's another gorgeous 80 degree day here in Phnom Penh. On the next to last day of my adventure, I decided to take a Cambodian cooking class, sponsored by a restaurant here. As promised, it began at 9am with a trip to the market. I finally learned what the mystery ingredient galangal actually looks like. It's similar to ginger but a larger and more yellow root, and the two can't be substituted for one another. It's listed in a number of the recipes I have in cookbooks at home, and since I haven't known what to look for in Asian markets, I've been stumped.

After the market trip, I climbed two sets of very steep metal stairs to a rooftop cooking school with two companions (a young Australian couple just finished with a 2-week volunteer tour of Thailand, and about to connect with their Cambodian tour group) and our teacher. The breeze was lovely, and there were 10 stations with gas cook tops and cutting boards and large wooden mortar and pestles waiting for us there. Plus a skillful and shy young woman who did all the washing up and had our ingredients prepped for us as we worked through the day.

The teacher is a young chef, just 22, with good English. He is a graduate of Friends, the NGO program that runs two restaurants (and a souvenir shop and now also a tailor shop) in Phnom Penh that are entirely staffed by former street kids. They learn to be servers and kitchen staff, and eventually graduate to jobs in other restaurants around the city. This young man came from the provinces near Viet Nam and spent two years on the streets in PP before he started at Friends, where he trained for 6 years. He's now designed the menu for the restaurant that runs the cooking school (owned by a Dutch national) and is in university nights after teaching cooking classes for tourists 6 days a week.

By 10:30 am we had started to cook. We finished up at about 3pm, stuffed--having made spring rolls with taro and carrot, sweet and sour dipping sauce, banana blossom salad, fish amok (in a banana leaf bowl, which we also learned how to make) and sticky rice with mango and palm sugar caramel sauce for dessert.

The biggest surprise might have been seeing turmeric root. It's very skinny and you peel off a thin brown skin to reveal a deep orange color. Wherever you touch it it stains your fingers bright yellow. We mashed it up in the mortar and pestle with shallots, garlic, kaffir lime peel (very bumpy!), galangal, salt, minced lemongrass stalk, red chili paste, and julienned nhor leaves to make the basic herb paste which is then thinned with coconut milk, egg, and fish sauce. We added some crushed peanuts and slices of raw white fish and put this whole mixture into our banana leaf bowls. These then steam for 20 minutes. The fish cooks as the milky sauce turns into a kind of custard, which you garnish with julienned red sweet pepper and kaffir lime leaves, and eat with (of course) white rice.

Partly because there were just three of us in class today, but partly because it is the Khmer way, the pace of the day was leisurely and fun with plenty of time to sit and chat while we ate or while things were cooking. Altogether satisfying! If we ever run out of things to do when we're in Phnom Penh with students in the summer--an unlikely prospect--this would be a different way to spend time. They'll work up half day courses for groups, which make just two dishes, on request.

Price of this whole experience, including ingredients and instruction and more food than I could eat and a cook book with 12 recipes and step-by-step directions: $20. Quite a bargain!

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