The Smokin' Pot and buying Kiwi Knives, Battambang, Cambodia

Continuing one with Cambodia cooking classes a good friend J and I decided a couple of days in Battambang was needed.  So early one morning we headed up the river by boat for a full day of cruising.  It's a perfectly picturesque way to get to Battambang along the waterways.

Battambang is certainly a sleepy little town, especially in low season and I loved wandering around watching the town come to life.  One morning I headed off for a morning stroll and some time to ponder and found a great little restaurant serving breakfast.  I love nothing more than a traditional Cambodian breakfast of bobor and tea.  Bobor is rice porridge, also known as congee or juk.

Here I had the chicken and ginger.  As is most bobor the porridge is cooked down but still leaving some of the rice grains in contact. Giving it a chewy texture as the rice is swollen with stock. The ginger slithers leaving a hint of heat and zing on the taste buds.

A perfect start to the day.   


Later that morning I meet J at the Smokin' Pot as we were doing a cooking class together.  Smokin' Pot is well known cooking class in Cambodia.  Chef and Owner, Vannak begins the class with a visit to Psa Nat, the local market for fresh produce and we were purchasing our ingredients for the dishes that we were going to cook. 

The market was alive with noise, smells, tastes and enough filth to know you are truly in a third world country, yet somehow this appealed to me and just made the experience so much more! This is the type of market that gets my blood pumping and my nostrils twitching.  Watching how people conduct there daily routine and people going about their business. I am in my element.

This is reason enough to be careful of having ice in your drinks.  Saying that I had ice aplenty and didn't really get sick.

Today we are trying our hands at Fish Amok, grilled beef stirfry and a chicken and lemongrass soup.  We all sat around a big table, each armed with a chopping board and a meat cleaver and an array of vegetables and meats. 

 

 

Chopping, dicing and eventually pounding ingredients to make curry pastes in the big mortar and pestles. It is said that if a woman can pound the perfect paste, they will make a great wife.....I must say my skills are finely tuned and can pound out a mean paste, if I do say so myself!

After preparing each dish, we cooked them on the portable gas stoves set up for us and all sat down to indulge in each dish as they are hot and fresh. 

 

Amok Trey, or Hor Mok (Fish Amok) is probably one of the most well known dishes on the Cambodian menu. It is a dish made with coconut milk, curry and steamed or baked in a banana leaf cup.

Here I am preparing the base.

 

 

The consistency of amok various from region to region and even family to family. This is definitely one of those regional dishes and everybody makes it different, you can get it from a soupy texture to a steamed mousse consistency....I prefer mine more on the moussey set style....

The grilled beef stir fry is a simple dish but so very tasty. Preparing the meat and vegies and a few of those hot chillies!  Typically Khmer cuisine is not cooked spicy or hot, and chilli and spicy sauces are added separately to taste.

 

We also had a chicken and lemongrass soup but I have seemed to have misplaced the photo. (If I find it soon I will update this post).

The class is fantastic, fun and informative and you even receive a recipe book not only with what you cooked that day, but their whole repertoire.

We are "Chaet Dor Kor", slang meaning "my stomach is stuffed" in Khmer. 

J and I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping in Psa Nat.  My aim was to purchase a Kiwi brand meat cleaver.  I was determined to not get "ripped off" even though they are only a few dollars anyway.  The were recommended to me on my last visit by a friend and wanted to get the meat cleaver.  It's still a great knife after all these years.

One Khmer lady gave me a price and I asked her to give me a best price (speaking in English obviously).  Deciding to give my Khmer language skills a public try,   I then proceeded to speak (the limited) Khmer I knew asking for a discount and telling her to not 'overcharge' me (as is expected in the market)....she laughed at me.  I  think I shocked her more than anything as most Cambodians don't expect you to speak Khmer. 

I had been previously told that the knife would be $3.50 and no more and that being a traveller would double the price.  She told me a price in Khmer riel and as I was a bit slow on the translation I replied that I wanted to pay $3.50.  We had some good banter and we finally agreed on $3.50 (or so I thought). I passed over my money but she gave me change.  I was confused.  Turns out that she only charged me $3.25, which was the price she was telling me and I was ironically bartering for a higher price! She said she had such a great laugh at my expense and the fact that I was speaking Khmer that she gave me the cheaper price even though I hadn't realised just for the entertainment!  I also got the knife cheaper than what a local would pay!

It's these interactions with the locals that made my living in Cambodia all the more wonderful.

Le Tigre de Papier Cooking Class, Siem Reap

 

For my first post of my Roo Travels series is a place that is very dear to my heart. Cambodia.  I had previously travelled through Cambodia in early 2007 where I was completed overwhelmed and fell in love with the country.  The people, the culture, the history, the landscape, the cuisine and the generosity of locals. I was completely smitten.  

I was living in Dubai for a few years and had made the deicision to leave.  I jumped at the chance when I had a free flight to use up and had the opportunity to visit with a friend who lived there.  This was 2 months before I was to return to Sydney.  This is the trip that I knew that I wasn't quiet ready to settle and I wanted to do some volunteer English teaching and spending some time exploring the country.  So I headed back to Sydney for a couple of months and did an intensive TEFL course with a further specialised course in teaching English to children.

I was back on Cambodian soil by July. 

After a couple of months of mooching around with friends and having a well earned 'rest' I headed to Siem Reap for two months to 'work'.  It wasn't work really, I loved teaching English to the kids.  I was helping out at an orphange on the outskirts of the town and then in a little village school for awhile.  I was making friends with some wonderful people and was enjoying my life.

While living in Siem Reap I took advantage of a holiday long weekend and booked myself and a couple of friends into a cooking class at Le Tigre de Papier.  It took place in the open air top floor kitchen along Pub St. 

Donning aprons and chef hats, we chose the dishes that we wanted to cook and proceeded to chop, dice, slice and mincing.  Not to mention the pounding of the spices to make a curry base. Our chef and assistant were very helpful and taught us how to cut at the 'right' angle and how to mince the meat correctly.

Cooking abilities were put to the test with the girls owning up to not being good in the kitchen.  As you know I love to cook but I am challenged myself sometimes.  We had a lot of fun and as a bonus our dishes looked delicious and we were eager to taste them.

Between the three of us we had six dishes to sample, plus during the course of the cooking we all helped make a dessert. 

My dishes of the day were a banana blossom salad.  The banana blossom is a hard plant and needs to be blanched to soften it.  Eaten in a salad it is delicious and crunchy.

 

I also prepared a Samlor Machou Khroeung, which is a beef and water spinach dish.  I love water spinach.  The tubular stems are a good conduit for any delicious sauce and the green leaves are yummy.



There is something that I love about Cambodia cooking, well actually South East Asian cooking generally.  Most Asian cooks do not follow a recipe, they feel their way through the process.  Whatever is available in the markets that day, tasting as they go.  Getting the balance of sweet, salty, sour and heat just perfect for their palate.  There can never really be any 'mistakes’ in the kitchen.  Dishes are made with love. 

Our feast was coming along very nicely.

 

At the end of the cook, we all sat down together to enjoy our feast, deciding to all share our plates (as there were another couple in the group too) to sample as much as we could.  Next to my dishes we had pumpkin soup, khmer chicken and bok choy, spring rolls, shrimp salad plus some other dishes.  It was all very tasty. 

However, there was no way we were all going to get through the mountains of food and a doggy bag was taken to enjoy a meal with a friends family later on in the evening.

We finished the meal off with a custard pumpkin.  It's slowly baked so the custard sets and the pumpkin is sweet and tender.

 

Cooking classes are a popular activity to do when travelling.  It offers an incite into the culture and food of the nation or even region, you learn a new skill and sample some delicious dishes.  This is one of a few classes that I undertook and will be blogging more on my trip through Cambodia.

Hanging out with friends on a rare day off, due to the floods in Siem Reap, I got to hang with some friends.

 

 

Making soft cheese @ The Cheesemaking Workshop

I love cheese.  Soft cheese, hard cheese, fresh cheese, aged cheese and stinky cheese.  I love it all. 

So it was only natural that I was keen to learn how to make cheese.  I have wanted to do a workshop for sometime and I was very spoilt by a very dear friend for my 40th birthday who was generous with a gift certificate for The Cheesemaking Workshop soft cheese making course. 

Lyndall (who is the founder)  along with Sue and David run workshops all over NSW.   They offer both the soft cheese workshop and the advanced cheese making (which incorporates harder cheeses along with blue vein) as well as other workshops and corporate courses.

With eager and excited anticipation I headed over to Northbridge on Saturday to partake in a day of all things CHEESE!

I was greeted by Sally, who is vibrant, friendly and welcoming and will be our facilitator for the day.  There are nine of us today (the workshop can accommodate 12), aprons are passed around and I teamed up with a lovely married couple and after introductions we become the 3 R's for the day.  There are three groups of three.

We are all eyeing off the cheese platter on offer and it takes awhile before we all start to taste.  The platter consists of camembert, feta, labne and a blue camembert, along with some natural yogurt and mascarpone - all of which we are learning to make today except for the blue - that's just a teaser for the advanced course!

 

The feta is amazingly salty and sharp and I'm liking it.  Hope mine turns out like that!

 

 

We are given a breakdown of all our equipment and keeping things separate to stop cross- contamination of the cheeses.

 

Our workspace for the day.  The polystyrene boxes have a big 10ltr container which is our cheese vat and helps keep the dairy environment nice and warm and cozy, perfect conditions for making good cheese.

 

 

We start with making ricotta.  We gently heat our milk to the required temperature, add in white vinegar and watch as it starts to come together (which is called a raft).  This sits for 20 minutes or so as the curds and whey separate.

 

Ricotta turns out to be the most easiest cheese to make and something I know I will be making at home!

We then move onto preparing our milk for both the camembert and feta. They are mixed in a vat in the polystyrene box (to keep it warm).

While that is doing it's thing we stop for morning tea. Tea and coffee in hand we sit down to the large 12 seater dining table and munch on these lovely mascarpone and ricotta tarts.  Creamy but not very sweet and they delicious.

It's not long and we are back in the kitchen.  We are now ready to hoop our ricotta (see I'm learning the lingo) and our 4 litres of milk gives us two decent size hoops.  Once the whey is drained away it's ready to eat (roughly 20-30 minutes).  Our ricotta is going to be used in our lunch today.

Over to the benches to tend our feta.  Here we are cutting the feta into cubes before we start to 'turn' the curd.  It's starting to set to a pannacotta consistency.  When we start to turn it it will allow the whey to separate more.

 

We are then given a demo on how to make natural yogurt and then to hang the yogurt to make labne.  I get to do the hanging for this one.  Labne is sometimes called a yogurt cheese.  It's middle eastern in origin and is delicious rolled in dukkah or fresh herbs.  I suggest rolling in sumac too, which gives it a lemony taste.

 

 

 

We learn about the different cultures used in the cheeses and get to taste the products at each step to learn the textures and tastes of what the end result should be.  There is no waste once you learn what to do with it.  Even the by product whey can be used (if you want to).

 

As an extra element, Sally shows us how to make a quick pullapart bread with feta and olives and homemade butter (and buttermilk) which will be served with our lunch.  So easy!

 

After turning our curd and draining the whey we hoop our camembert.  This fills four hoops and I think they are going to be huge wheels.  But I can confirm that today (2 days after hooping) the cheese has drained and is more dense and compacted (about 1/3 of the original size).

 

We break for lunch and the spread is fresh and inviting.  Even though we have been picking on cheese and crackers all morning I am still hungry.  Alexia, who is in the kitchen today, has cooked up a lovely lunch of baked camambert with caramelised onions, a salad with feta, spinach and ricotta tarts with a capsicum sauce, the pullapart bread and the freshly made butter.

 

 

  

  

 

It was delicious and light and refreshing!  The communal lunch is full of chatter and laughter as we all get to know each other.  Feeling revived and refreshed with food we move onto the afternoon session, we are shown how to make the rich and divine mascarpone (which doesn't have as much cream in it as one thinks!).

 

We invert our camembert and you can see just how much whey has already come away from the cheese and the cheese is shrinking.

 

 

 

It's time to do one more turn on our feta before hooping it.  Our team ended up with loads of curd from our batch and made 4 very full hoops (and then some).

 

This will show exactly how much it shrinks over time (see photos below).

 

 

By the end of the afternoon we are armed with cheese recipes, enough knowledge to make the cheese and we are all eager to go home and experiment.  After purchasing kits and cultures we say our thank yous and goodbyes and head off ....

 

The soft cheese making workshop was a fantastic experience and I learnt quiet alot about cheese and what effort goes into to making it. The camembert and feta are definitely the most time consuming cheeses to make in this course, however in the grand scheme of things it's not really labour intensive. Just needs the TLC to get it to the eating stage!

I hear good things about the advanced cheese making course where you learn to make cheddar, blue vein, havarti and mozzarella to name a few. Now I just need to choose a date to do this one too! I'm hooked....but perhaps I need to perfect some of the soft cheeses first.....

 

I can highly recommend this day to anybody that is interested in making cheese!  I know my head is spinning with possiblities.

 

Thanks Cheesemaking Workshop for a great experience.

 

Three days later..........

 

.....this is what my cheese is starting to look like.  The top cheese is camembert and the bottom is my feta.  On Sunday morning I gave my camembert its brine bath with added mold spores and is now drying out in it's cool esky (in my garage) for the next 8-10 days.  Hopefully little white hairs will start to grow on it and then it will be ready in a few weeks.

 

 

Yes I had to colour code my cheeses so they wouldn't get mixed up.  They look exactly the same.  So to ensure the right step was done to the right cheese I had to have a system.  In future it will be easy as I will only do one type of cheese at a time.

 

The bottom cheese - the feta - is ready for it's briny bath this morning and will be ready to eat tomorrow.  I can't wait to try this.

 



A Masterclass with Matt Moran @ Sydney Seafood School, Fishmarkets, Pyrmont

I have been blessed with wonderful family and friends, who in their ultimate wisdom and knowledge of my passions and hobbies, have been overwhelmingly generous celebrating with me reaching the big 4-0 and have lavished me lots of foodie gifts!  

One of those gifts was a hot date with Matt Moran (okay I had to share him but that's not the point).

Last night found me sitting beside one of my dearest friends A (along with 40 odd other randoms), smiling and laughing along with celebrity chef, Matt Moran at the Sydney Seafood School at the Fishmarkets at Pyrmont.

This was my first time doing a class at the Sydney Seafood School and I was super excited about doing it with a Celebrity Chef (yeah that sounds naughty!)

We were greeted in reception and ushered through to the lecture style room. Tiered seating offered a great view of the kitchen bench which also offered TV screens and mirrors for added coverage.
After introductions were made (not that any were really needed!) we were regaled of stories of his upcoming Season 2 of Paddock to Plate, along with chef/kitchen stories and of course following instructions on the 3 recipes that he was cooking (which in turn is what we would be cooking following the session).

 

Matt in action

My mouth was drooling just watching him cook and I have to say watching a chef in action is amazing.  They are so methodic and make it all look so easy. 

After this session were were then ushered into the main kitchen area where we were put in to groups of 6 at a bench and after introductions to our team for the evening we discussed amongst ourselves which dish was being cooked by whom. Two people to a dish. A and I were eager to do the Crab and Pea Risotto.



Everyone ended up helping everyone prepare our ingredients anyway, and we all were chatty and happy as we chopped, diced and sliced.

A having a go at skinning a squid

Matt made his way around to all the benches, overing tips and advice on our dishes, along with some photo bombing.

I really enjoyed this cook.  It was social and fun and learning to cook dishes that I hadn't attempted before.

icing down my peas (and yes I pea'd on the floor!)

 

 

This was the first time my friend A had attempted to cook seafood - I think she may just give it a go in her own kitchen now!

 

 

During our cooking time, I quickly popped out to purchase yet another cookbook (so don’t need another one right!!!!) and chose Dinner at Matt’s. He was close by to sign my copy and for a quick photo or two. He also signed my huge Birthday badge that A asked me to wear for the evening.

meeting Matt Moran

Matt Moran cookbooks

So what did we cook?
We start with risotto.  A dish that I very rarely eat.  I have attempted risotto in the past and I have always been disappointed in it. It's either to chalky, gluggy or starchy.  Over the past 5 years I haven't been eating alot of starchy carbs (ie bread, pasta or rice) not because of any allergen or dietary issues, just because I have adopted a high protein, low carb approach due to some surgery I had on my tummy.  There are days I wish I could eat a whole bowl of rice or pasta (just never going to happen) *sigh*...anyway I digress......


 Crab & Pea Risotto

 So this is the dish that A and I were allocated.  A did most of the actual cooking of it.  I mainly chopped and threw in the ingredients.

crab and pea risotto

I haven't cooked crab before.  Love to it when the luxury permits.  We used prepacked raw spanner crab (which takes the cooking and picking time out of the equation) and fresh peas.  We all mentioned how shelling fresh peas took us back to our childhood when we used to sit with our mum (or grandma) and shell a big bowl.  One of the ladies on our bench mentioned that her grandma made the kids whistle during the shelling.  Why I asked?  Because if you weren't whistling it meant you were eating the peas!!!! LOL....so true!!!

I was very taken with this risotto and it's a definite on my recipe radar.

Chilli, Salt & Pepper Squid

chilli squid with fresh lime

 
Again, calamari is a dish I love to eat when out but never attempted at home.  But that has changed.  this was spicy and the calamari was tender.  Just make sure that your oil is very hot to ensure a crispy batter.

The ladies did a fantastic job, and plating was very pretty.

Steamed Blue-eye Trevalla with garden herbs and Sauce Vierge

blue-eye trevalla

This was surprisingly simple and easy to cook and definitely will be on the menu at a dinner party soon.  I think this is the first time I've taste trevalla.  It's a good meaty white fish but light and so very tasty.  The fresh herbs used are sensational and the tomato, lemon and peppery flavour of the sauce pairs well.

Receipes were easy to follow and plenty of staff on hand to show you where all our ingredients and cookware was placed around the benches.

I have always been wary of cooking seafood at home, mainly because it can be a very expensive protein to stuff up (and easily at that) and there have been plenty of times I've overcooked my fish but after tonight’s cooking class I feel a little more confident that I could do more seafood dishes at home.

Overall, I think we cooked, dished up and plated rather well in the 1 hour time slot and it was lovely to sit down with our ‘team’ and eat our creations ‘family’ style, chatting over a glass of wine and some fine food (if I do say so myself).

A & I celebrate over a glass of wine

 

The dining room is abuzz with activity.  We have set our own tables and we are to also clear them at the end of the meal.  Helps the staff with clean up.


I love the lighting in the dining room and absolutely love the design of the lights!

lighting in the dining room

If you like cooking, learning new techniques, cooking classes, celebrity chefs and/or seafood, I would recommend booking in to do a class.  The School offers a great current program.

Thanks to A, I and A for the wonderful birthday gift and being able to share this experience my my dear friend.  It was a fabulous night.  I have a feeling we will be back doing another class in the future!