crickets taste like vegetables taste like crickets

Fried crickets taste earthy, which is exactly what the vegetables we had at lunch tasted like. We snapped up a bagful of fried crickets from this lady selling a whole basket of them at the Central Market, where we had our breakfast, and consumed them at the Khmer Borane Restaurant together with our lunch.

Lunch was the most satisfying meal we had so far, eaten in the cosy comfort of a restaurant/bar. Hamok with coconut milk (imagine otak otak), fried vegetables with pork, Khmer-style sour soup with fish and frog legs in peanut and curry, washed down with Angkor beer, all at the cost of about 5 USD per person.

Breakfast on the other hand was eaten in the claustrophobic confines of the food centre in the Central Market, amidst the chaotic hustle and bustle of the wet market all around us. Stall owners sold all kinds of fresh produce. The skinned fresh frogs on sale were so fresh they were moving and pitifully blinking as they laid in the baskets.

We were wandering around looking for a place to sit in the crammed food centre at the wet market when a lady running a noodle food stall spoke in Mandarin to us. “Ni yao chi shen me? Zhe li you guo tiao, you ji fan…” (What do you want to eat? There is kuay tiao, chicken rice etc here”. We were quite surprised and she found us seats.

In my mangled Khmer I tried to order tea with ice to accompany the steaming bowls of noodle soup we ordered. The drinks lady standing in front of me couldn’t catch a single word. The nice lady from the noodles stall had to translate and teach us the correct way of ordering iced tea: “tai dakor” (this is how the anglicised pronounciation sounds like). I did quite ok asking for the price of the tea though (”tuh-lai bohm-man”), but I was pretty exasperated when the tea lady replied in Khmer, which I did not understand at all. Which defeats the purpose of me learning how to say the phrase in the first place. Heh.

Cambodian food is surprisingly similar to Chinese food. The tastes and general ideas behind the dishes are pretty similar. Noodle soup is a staple for a Cambodian breakfast. The lady sitting beside me at the table was eating you tiao with her noodles; she repeated the same words when I exclaimed that there is you tiao here to the other guys. Apparently the Cambodian name for the fried dough delight is exactly the same as the Chinese name in terms of pronunciation. We got ourselves a few sticks; they tasted exactly the same as a well fried piece would taste in Singapore (crispy and light), except that they were sweater and shorter.

Shortly after this we will be hunting for dinner somewhere along the river that edges this part of town. Hopefully we will find more culinary delights. We intend also to go for happy hour later at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which is only a short walk from our new hotel, the Hotel Indochine. We might be watching the Turkey-Germany match later too; hopefully we will be able to find a pub somewhere.

Here’s to a good dinner and the end of a gastronomically delightful day!