#30 - Cambodia

The biggest lesson we learned this week is that there is serious skill involved in cooking with lemongrass! The fibrous plant is tough to chop up and it tough to eat when not chopped ultra fine. The lemony smell was amazing, but the texture that resulted in our meal was bad enough to have us leaving a lot of it behind.

For out "trip" to Cambodia we decided to make fish amok. Traditionally it is a thick soup of coconut milk, vegetables and fish poached in a banana leaf with loads of herbs. Thankfully we were able to find a recipe that excluded the banana leaf part and were able to make it on the stove. The smell while it was cooking was AMAZING, but like I mentioned about, the texture was not great due to the huge amount of fibrous little bits of lemongrass.

Jack was in charge of "fun facts" this week, and while I wouldn't say that discussing the Khmer Rouge was fun, we did learn that the country has had 12 different names since 1941 (with each ruling government changing the country's name to suit their purpose) and that the current king was educated in Czechoslovakia and is a classically trained ballet dancer.

Overall, we have decided that we love Cambodian flavours and will let the professionals cook it for us in the future.