Banana flower salad

You have all been waiting for it, I have been holding out. "But what about the food?", you ask. The overarching comment is that in three weeks, eating out for breakfast, lunch and tea, we have hardly put a foot wrong. If you want a point of comparison, go to your atlas. It is less spicy and diverse that Thai food and more simple than Vietnamese food. It is very mild, most dishes have a little sugar, sometimes more than a little, even the peanuts that come with beer have sugar on the top.

At a Khmer style street cafe you will get a main course for $1 - $2.
At a more western style place, you will pay $4-6. (Rip off)

Breakfast: It is just not a Cambodian thing in the way that we know it. Nor do they do breakfast pho like the Vietnamese, but we had some wonderful omelettes. Our advice: eat some fruit and juice, then maybe an egg or a French style baguette.

Snacks: At the school we were given a Cambodian snack every day. All good. Little trays of noodles with pickled vegetables, little parcels of rice wrapped in banana leaves, and special Battambang sticky rice.
Rice paper rolls and spring rolls are much like the Vietnamese style.
In Battambang the preferred snack is sun-dried spiced snails. They looked a bit of a worry and the television was reporting that many children were getting sick from them.
Little grilled song birds, probably just sparrows were also a popular snack. Next time I come I will try them, I promise.

Main courses
Amok is the national dish. It is a mildly spiced coconut curry. My favourite was served in a scooped out green coconut. It was rich and luxurious.
Lok lak is a very popular disk. It is a meat dish with some noodles and most important of all a runny fried egg on the top.
Soups: Tom Kar is lovely but my favourite was the preserved lime and chicken soup. It was magical and restorative.
Salads: The rule of thumb for the safe traveller is to avoid the salads, but that would be missing out. We had green mango salad and banana flower salad. Both of these were just lovely, and so far we are still standing.

French Food
We had one reasonable but quite expensive meal.
We had one terrible, expensive meal.

Drinks
Gen is transported back to her childhood in Goa, every time they serve her a green coconut. They take off the top, she drinks the juice, then scoops out the young soft coconut flesh. She is back home in India.
Wine: They sell it, it is terribly expensive so we have not bothered.
Beer: At 50cents for a pot of Angkor beer, we have been spoilt.
Cocktails: The perfect mojito for $1. A bottle of Havana Club rum for $8. It is as cheap as it gets, we have not missed the opportunity.
Water: Unless you want to grow a colony of amoeba in your gut; water has to be bottled, always bottled even when you clean your teeth. Those who live here and have the means filter it, then boil it. (Apparently there is a whole group of Ivanhoe Grammar students in Cambodia at the moment who have all be infected with amoebic dysentery.)

Cooking school
We did it, it was fun. I could have got the recipes from the internet, and done just as well, but we did it as a group, had an interesting guy teaching us. We declared it "another great day in Cambodia".