Yes, I ate that

The longer I live in Cambodia, the broader my palate becomes.  I can honestly say that I really enjoy eating Khmer food.  The flavors and freshness is amazing.  It can be a bit bland at times, but it is always good.  Khmer food, I recently learned from my wife, is one of the oldest and most balanced cuisines in the world.  I'm glad that it is not as spicy as Thai food, but it does have some very similar flavors and ingredients.  We frequent a restaurant in Siem Reap called Khmer Kitchen.  It is small and has amazing food.  The menu is a bit long but everything I have eaten there has been something I crave within a few days.  All I want is some pork or chicken with basil and chili - and they have that.  God be praised!  They will also custom make a dish for my wife of chicken, pineapple, and cashew nuts, which is her favorite as well.

Not long ago, I ate at a Cambodian BBQ restaurant and tried the ten types of meat sampler.  At that meal I ate: beef, chicken, pork, fish, shrimp, squid, frog legs, ostrich, crocodile, and snake, sadly they were out of kangaroo so we doubled-up on the ostrich and it was worth it.  The ostrich and frog legs were distinctly the best, the snake was tough and the squid was surprisingly good.  At this style of restaurant, they place a large, domed, grill-like device in a hole in the middle of the table.  It is extremely hot and and you can see the orange coals glowing beneath.  The staff then fills the grill with with broth, vegetables, and noodles to create a soup to accompany the grilled meat.  To keep the meat from sticking to the grill, there is a large slab of fat on the top which you rub all the grill and works very well.  If you want to know cooking times, the staff will provide the info you need.  I found this experience rather fun because I doubt I'd try some of these meats any other time.

these were stuck in the various meats so we would know what we are grilling

this is how you grill your food

Since I am my father's son, I love my salty snacks.  Recently I bought a bag of flavored deep fried sea weed strips in the snack food aisle at the market where we do a lot of our grocery shopping.  There are several flavors actually, but I've only tried red chili, onion, and wasabi.  They are great!  The red chili are my favorite; they are not as spicy as I hoped for, but still surprisingly tasty, if you like seaweed.

At the store there is also a snack food that is marketed as a french fry snack and they taste like plain Hot Fries.  The "flavor" for the french fries comes in sauce packets for dipping - they are good, but different.  

I also tried some green beans that are seemingly battered, fried, and then dehydrated, I guess, to create this unique snack.  

Lays sells sweet basil flavored chips here, so I tried a bag and was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed them.  They were a bit spicy, which I did not expect despite the peppers on the bag.

You see flavors for snack foods that simply would not sell in other parts of the world.  If you'd like to try shrimp, lobster, kimchi, or grilled fish flavor snack foods, you can try them here.

One market we frequently shop in has this mixture of chili and salt they package with certain sliced fruits.  It is deceptively spicy and, again, quite tasty.  I am a fan of this on pineapple and watermelon.  This salt concoction would taste great on popcorn or even to season grilled chicken - I want to ask them what it is but I have not.

There is also a large range of food I never plan to try.  In the markets you find dried sausages made of meat that I cannot identify and dried fish of various sizes everywhere.  All over town, you see street vendors selling chili coverd snails, crickets, deep fried chicken feet, soups, noodles, smoked duck, coconuts they will open and give you a straw, random fruits including the seriously pungent durian,  pancakes with chocolate and bananas, bags of some yellowish liquid that smells sweet, and many other foods I just cannot identify. - Below are photos of the food section of Old Market in Siem Reap.  I cannot begin to describe the smells that permeate the air in this section of the market.  It is so strong that many expats we know cannot go near these sections of some markets.

When driving around town, especially in the more rural areas, you see roadside vendors selling fried crickets that are covered in chili peppers, lemon grass, and green onion.  Upon seeing them for the first time, I was a bit tongue tied when responding to the site of a rather sizable mound of fried crickets.  When I started teaching and began to interact more with people who live locally, I asked what the crickets were like, and everyone always responded in a very positive manner. This, admittingly intrigued me because each time I would see them, they looked better and better.  I love three of the four ingredients and I've heard insects taste good - I used to eat ants to quiet a kid in an after-school program (and they weren't bad), so what I figured a cricket is a logical step.

Once I built up my nerve to try them, I asked my students for the location of a good place to buy them and one student offered to bring me some the next day.  So I gave the student $1 and she returned the next day with a small bag of fried crickets.  Upon opening the bag it was a very surreal experience to see crickets covered in diced chili and spices, especially knowing that I was about to eat them.  After seeing the crickets and pulling one out of the bag, I was a bit unnerved but still curious what they tasted like.  I was told to pull off the legs before eating them, which I thought would be no problem, but actually ripping off the legs and popping a cricket in my mouth was not as easy as I told myself it would be.  Eventually I ate a few and was stunned at how good they tasted.  The cricket does not have a lot of flavor, what you taste is the spices and oil in which the crickets were cooked.  These are a little spicy and the lemongrass and green onion were mild flavors but all flavors that I really enjoy.

how the crickets arrived

a peek inside the bag

a bowl of fried crickets

As intrigued as I am by some of the wonderful smells that come from restaurants that cater to local residents, I know that if I eat there I will become ill.  My colleagues at work who are Cambodian tell me to stay away from those restaurants no matter how intrigued I am.  I really enjoy exploring new foods and living in Cambodia is definitely providing me many opportunities to explore foods and flavors I had never thought about back in the states.