How to Recognize Snakefruit, Transport Piglets, and Catch Crickets: Food in Cambodia

Traveling helps me realize how much I don't know.  Here are a few food-related sights and sounds that were new to me in Cambodia.

FRUIT

Just me and some local "durian" fruit.  It's heavy.

DRAGON FRUIT.  The inside is polka-dotted

Dragon fruit on the outside

See the polka dots!  Fruit salad for breakfast every morning.  

My mouth is watering just writing about the mangos!  Delicious.

Snake fruit - scaly on the outside; sweet on the inside

Before cutting

After cutting

The biggest grapes I have ever seen!

CARBS:  Rice and Noodles

Just one example:  rice sweetened with coconut milk and a few red beans.  Cooked in a piece of bamboo.  Yummy!

 Bought at a road-side stand for  50-cents (USD)

PROTEIN

Fresh eel at the market

Eggs for sale

Luckily for us, we visited Cambodia during cricket season:

Fried crickets and beetles.  Remove legs and wings, head optional.  Taste like potato chips.  

One dollar's worth of friend crickets.

This is how Khmer people catch crickets:

There are certain leprechaun-loving Miller cousins that might enjoy setting up these kinds of traps.  

The white pole attached to the vertical plastic is a light.  The light attracts the crickets at night.  The crickets hit the vertical plastic and fall into the water on the ground.  Crickets are trapped in the water.

chicken - organic and local

frog legs

Pleasurable moment, food-related:  during Relief Society, the women spent time discussing an upcoming cooking activity. At one point, a woman sitting in front of me stood and walked to the front of the room, where she started to sing a song.  The room hushed for the first time (I've never seen such animated church meetings!)  as this woman sang a song that had been passed down for generations in her family.  The words of the song reminded the musician-cook of the different ingredients needed for a certain kind of Khmer soup.  It was delightful.