Khmer New Year

Happy Khmer New Year!

Yes, the third and final New Year that Cambodia celebrates in this calendar year is upon us. But there’s more to Khmer New Year than cranking your karaoke machine to “eleven” and the recent adoption of the Thai Songkran practice of attempting to knock foreigners off their motorcycles with a well-aimed waterbomb.

For starters, there’s Khmer New Year games. I especially like:

5. “Leak Kanseng”
A game played by a group of children sitting in circle. Someone holding a “kanseng” (Cambodian towel) twisted into a round shape walks around the circle while singing a song. The person walking secretly tries to place the “kanseng” behind one of the children. If that chosen child realizes what is happening, he or she must pick up the “kanseng” and beat the person sitting next to him or her.

I’m assuming that you ineffectually beat them with the towel. Secondly, the Ministry of Tourism’s page on Khmer New Year is improbably informative this year. It even includes a typical Khmer traditional story; typical insofar as the protagonist has to deal with the imminent threat of being beheaded by a religious leader and then his corpse feasted upon by a pair of talking eagles.

Speaking of which, on the food front, New Year is another chance to fatten up your local monks and appease the spirits of the dead at your local wat with some num anksom. The only trustworthy Khmer recipe resource on the web, Khmer Krom Recipes, serves up Num anksom sach chrouk (rice cakes wrapped in banana leaf with pork):

Like many Khmer Krom families, each year, a few days before the New Year, my family will dedicate a day just for making rice cakes. Some of my relatives, neighbors and friends will get together usually at our house, some brings sweet rice, some bring mung beans, some bring meat for the cooking event. We’ll makes and shares hundreds of num anksom chrouk , num anksom chet, num kom. Most the cakes will be giving away to neighbors, friends and the poor. We’ll take some sweet rice cakes to Wats for food offerings to our ancestors.

Sadly, my neighbours haven’t been so industrious this year, but they generously gave me a big plate of steamed corn which they told me that they “cooked with no chemicals”, so no more grey onion sauce for me.

Sihanoukville is the Next Goa III: Beyond Thunderdome

Glowstick-wielding candy ravers rejoice:

THE “largest and wildest” full-moon party, promised the yellow flier taped to a phone booth on Khaosan Road in Bangkok. Another installment of Thailand’s girls-gone-wild bacchanal on the island of Ko Phangan? Or its bigger brother, Ko Samui? Or maybe it was the newcomer Ko Phi Phi, a remote island that is luring younger partygoers in the post-tsunami boom.

Not quite. This particular moonlight spectacle, in fact, wouldn’t even be in Thailand, but across the border, in Cambodia’s budding seaside town, Sihanoukville. It is “just nine-and-a-half hours from Bangkok,” according to the flier, the work of Cambodian entrepreneurs hoping to turn Sihanoukville into the latest party hot spot.

Those Google Ads that the New York Times has been running about “The Cambodia Craze” must be paying off, because Sihanoukville is back again with the words “In Cambodia, the ‘Next Phuket’?”. Jeff Koyen actually mentions that ” it won’t be long before the stretches of sandy seclusion are overrun with package tourists” which is an excellent assessment if the cruise ships start rolling in. Mark my words, Sihanoukville is the next Ensenada.

Satay Cart

Satay at Chatuchuk

Pristine white countertop, immaculately displayed satay skewers, and the sense of organisation and style that I have never seen within the Cambodian street food genre. Largely, because this satay cart wasn’t in Cambodia, it was under the stairs at the Mo Chit skytrain station near Chatuchak Market in Bangkok. If strolling over the top of a waft of satay smoke doesn’t make you hungry, I’m probably not going to be the first person to tell you that you live a life of olfactory impecunity.

Quick Melbourne Roundup

If you want to know why the blogging has been slow over the past few weeks: I’ve been in Australia for weddings, returning via Singapore and then Bangkok thanks to JetstarAsia being shithouse. Those of you paying forensic attention will notice that the background of the Chocolate Flavour Collon shot is in fact the floor of the departure terminal at Pochentong Airport. I haven’t indulged in much Cambodian food as such, but a whole lot of cheese, lamb, and bottom-fermented ales.

On the Melbourne bar scene, Manchuria has taken over the old Chez Phat space and fitted it out as an opium den, substituting iniquity for a rampaging cocktail list and a wide selection of whiskeys. Thanks to them, I discovered that one of my favorite Melbourne brewers, 3 Ravens is now bottling and widely available. In new bar trends, Section 8 (pictured below) has taken the a piece of wharfside streetside, turning a space that you could easily mistake for a carpark into a space that you could still easily mistake for a carpark. Artifice is the new subterfuge.

Section 8 Container Bar, Melbourne, Australia

As for Cambodian food, Melbourne’s best Khmer restaurant, Bopha Devi has also opened a new outlet in the Docklands. Next time I’m back and my cash situation is liquid, I’ll drop by to review their $24 amok trei.

Tony Wheeler needs new Friends

On my Singapore-Shanghai jaunt I spent a couple of nights in Phnom Penh and if the restaurants I tried hadn’t been up to scratch I would have been severely disappointed, since I was dining with Nick Ray. He’s the author of our Cambodia guide and also advised on locations for the movie Tomb Raiders’ Cambodian sites, Nick knows his way around the country. Friends was set up to employ street kids, many of whom go on to work in other hotels and restaurants. The food is superb.

When asked to name his top ten restaurants worldwide, Lonely Planet co-founder Tony Wheeler lists Friends of Phnom Penh, which left me with one question: what the fuck? I admire Friends’ work and know a couple of successful graduates from their hospitality training but their pseudo-tapas eatery hardly rates alongside the world’s or even Cambodia’s best restaurants. Although the Lonely Planet is almost my last resort for a restaurant recommendation (fitting somewhere between “moto-taxi driver” and “the khmer guy who eats the leftovers from my bin”), I’m going to take my future food advice from them with a mound of salt.

Corn on the Cob with Grey Onion Sauce

Cambodian Corn Vendor

There isn’t a nation in the world that doesn’t sell corn-on-the-cob as street food and Cambodia is no exception. I have seen people barbecuing corn streetside in all the Cambodian provinces to which I have toured. This particular corn-griller was fired up in Hun Sen Park, but frankly, Phnom Penh is rife with them.

Cambodian Corn with Grey Sauce

What attracted me to this particular vendor was a curious pale grey sauce that she ladelled over the corn. As I am wont to pimp Cambodian culinary innovations, I bought one of the less dessicated looking cobs for a few hundred riel and asked for a dose of the grey stuff. I was hoping for prahok-flavour. The sauce had the consistency and flavour of warm dishwater after you had recently cleaned the plates from a meal that consisted solely of week old spring onions, chicken necks, and MSG. I now have a much deeper understanding of why this particular corn condiment hasn’t had the same global appeal as butter and ground pepper.

Addendum (18 April 2006): After a discussion with a workmate, the grey sauce is alleged to be coconut milk, salt, monosodium glutamate, spring onions, oil and fish sauce.

Chocolate Flavour Collon


The good news for Japanese expats and Pocky fans alike is that Starmart in Cambodia has started stocking Glico products via Thailand. The bad news is that Glico have also imported their Japanese brand of Engrish humour with them, as evidenced by the Chocolate Flavour Collon.

Collon is available in flavours that run from nauseating (“Strawberry”) to downright weird (“Green Tea”), but on my mission to Starmart for some milk, I only spotted the Chocolate and the Cream flavour.

As for the taste, I only bought the Chocolate, because Cream Flavour Collon made me feel dirty. It had a pleasingly crisp carapace surrounded a slightly gooey, chocolate-flavoured pool cleaner substance.

Overall, the experience was marginally less infuriating than the Flash-heavy Thai Glico website. I clicked through to the Collon page in hope of shedding some light on its ingredients and was greeted with a full-motion commercial for Green Tea Collon starring someone who I swear is the Thai sister of Juliette Lewis, cavorting overzealously in a tea field with her Thai friends. The level of their zealotry seems to suggest that the main ingredient in the Green tea flavour is cocaine. I looked no further.

Riches in the ruins

“When I was in the jungle,” Kat Manh tells me, “I ate this.” He is pointing at a drawing of a pig-tailed macaque in a park leaflet on protected species. “Also this,” – a crab-eating macaque – “this,” – a Sunda pangolin – “and this,” – a common palm civet. “Very tasty,” he concludes

This is the confirmation I needed: pangolin is tasty. Now I just have to work out how to crack them open. I believe you need a lobster fork, something that Andrew Marshall from the Telegraph omits to mention when he hits Cambodia’s best ghost town at Bokor.

See: Riches in the Ruins with an inexcusable companion piece just to prove that you can’t publish a travel article about Cambodia without mentioning Angkor.

Amok Trei (Fish Amok), part 2

Jo, one of my readers, is much more hardcore about fish amok than me. Frankly, I respect that.

She writes:

Dear Phil

Please just allow me to be a French bad surrender monkey and give you a lecture about Amok by correcting a few things. If I agree that there is about one recipe of amok per cook in Cambodia there are some rules so you can call your dish amok.

First of all the krachai (in Thai, ktchey in Khmer, Kaempferia pandatura in Latin, zedoary in English) is the most important spice in amok. You shouldn’t advice not to use it or you amok won’t taste much different than Samla kti (and that we don’t want, damned no)

Amok paste is nothing but Khmer yellow curry paste mixed with krachai.

Here is a recipe:
Yellow paste
1 small piece of fresh turmeric
1 small piece of galangal
2 stem of lemongrass (no green on)
4 shallots
2 garlic cloves
2 kaffir leafs
To turn it as amok paste, just add 3 pieces of krachai.

Second weird thing, shrimp paste: ask any Khmer female cook and you’ll see that you should use prahok (I recommend some good prahok trey compliegn 10000 riel/kg if it’s from the year). A small spoon will do, thinly chopped before being used. Kapi! And why not barbecue sauce too???

Chili? Some people use it for amok. Others don’t. What is sure is that is shouldn’t be fresh chili but always dried (fresh chili is only for salad or Thai curry paste.) Just soak them and chop them thinly, using a bit of palm sugar to make a paste.

Amok is always sweet. So trust me, palm sugar, palm sugar, palm sugar…

Amok is amok because it is made with slok gno (a leaf from a tree that doesn’t seem to have a good name in English or French. Morinda Citrifolia in Latin.) It’s available on every local market. The fruit of the tree once ripe has an interesting smell of old spoiled French cheese. The leaf brings a little bit of bitterness and the characteristic taste of Amok. When I go home I usually replace it with Swiss chard green (or spinach at least)

How is your amok going to hold without eggs once you steamed it? If steamed amok is quite popular among expatriated and tourists I would believe that among Khmers the liquid version is the most cooked and ate. The steamed one is originally made to be taken away when people go the rice field.

One last thing. Could we stop decorating amok or soup or whatever with kaffir leafs and chili julienne? Khmer food is delicate and complex enough so it doesn’t have to be ruined with that kind of things. Let’s just leave it to the Thai.

Sorry for that. It had to come out. Have a good day.

(Addendum, 13/03/06, Mid-morning: Jo is a man. Sorry.)