Wednesday 15th January 2014 – Khmer Red Curry
Today was my first Khmer cooking class, the agenda for the class was to go to the market, buy the ingredients, prepare, cook and then consume. The meal that we cooked is called Khmer red curry.
At 8:30AM Mony, Linda, Julie, Laura and I headed over the street and into an alleyway which turned into an intense market, cramped left to right with stalls selling fish; eggs; fruit; veg; clothes; jewellery and much more. There wasn’t a foreigner insight and more surprisingly, no-one was staring at me. But shock horror came when I was walking through the crowds of people and the women would put their arms around you to get past or better yet just keep prodding you in the side till they got past. So on the trip to the market, we bought: coconut milk; aubergines; sweet potatoes; dried chilli; onions; long beans; turmeric; lemongrass; lime leaves and a few other things I wasn’t sure of at the time.
Returning back at the house we set up a mat on the floor and got preparing the veggies and spices. I was given the sweet task of peeling the sweet potatoes and aubergines. Linda showed me how she’d like me to peel them; she swiped the blade so gracefully over the vegetable, seeming like she was trying to not hurt it at all. She then passes the blade to me and I start hacking into the vegetable as if I have no control over what I am doing. I did get better as I peeled more, but still nowhere near as well as Linda.
I often get bored when cooking; I’m happy and focused through the preparation stage and as soon as the stuff starts going into the pots, boredom struck. I refused to leave though so sat back and watched the stirring and adding and stirring process until they put the lids on the pots to let them ‘come to the boil’. The food was soon ready to eat and for the amount of chilli I had seen them put in the pot, I thought the food would be so spicy and it wasn’t, leaving my belly full of scrumptious-ness!
Wednesday 22nd January 2014 - Wontons
So we headed back to the market for some hussle and bussle. I recognised a few of the sellers from my previous visit a week before – there were lots of exchanged smiles. There weren’t as many questions from me this time round as I had a grasp of what was going on. Back at the house we got preparing the vegetables to go inside the wontons. As I am now an experienced peeler, I was set on the task of peeling the sweet potatoes, which was a success and then the sweet potatoes went to Linda who grated them. The onions and garlic cloves were also being sliced and diced during this time. When all the food was prepared they started to cooking process.
To start, the garlic and onions get fried a little bit and then taken off the heat to be mixed with the sweet potato and meat (for the meat eaters) – also a little pepper, salt and stock is added. Then the wonton wrapping process begins – it is as much an art as origami. You place a small amount of the mixed sweet potato, onion and garlic into the centre of the small square wonton wrapper and then start bringing the corners up, a little bit of squeezing here and pinching there and boom – wonton! Let’s be realistic, it obviously wasn’t that easy for me but again, practice and persistence got me closer to not being an absolute failure during the wrapping. When they are all wrapped and ready, off they plod into the hot oil to fry till brown. Next stop… Jay’s belly.
