The result is meat (pork in this case) which honestly does have the consistency of candyfloss. It’s crunchy and melty in that kind of sugar-strand way, and with the meat and the oil it even has a bit of sweetness.

It’s pictured here in a big plastic display cabinet ready for sale, but you can also get it from those rangy kind of grocer/medical shops you find in Hong Kong and other developed Asian countries.

The best way to have it is as part of a rice ball where it adds a really good salty crunch to the soft rice, and to be honest I can’t think of another way you could serve it where it would actually be good. On its own it would be a bit greasy and strange.

Jalan Alor aka ‘Streetfood Street’ Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I’m sure I remember taking pictures of this, but now can’t find them anywhere… To be fair it just looks like normal curry, with ants in – mix of types though, few big ones and lots of little ones.

Eating ants isn’t unique to Cambodia – you get can them fried or even chocolate coated as a snack everywhere from Brazil to Africa. But what I particularly liked about this Cambodian dish was that they hadn’t just gone for the easy option of one type of ant – no. This meal was made with two (or possibly even three) varieties.

The dish itself was like a curry of beef with what appeared to be a generous sprinkling of large leaf-cutter ants – them of the large orange thoraxes, and crunchy deep-fried flavour. But on closer inspection the bulk of the dish comprised many thousands of teeny tiny ants which formed the mainstay of meaty texture.

Sadly I didn’t like this particular dish very much, but funnily enough I don’t think it was the ants. There was some other flavours (I think tamarind was heavily involved) which gave it a very strange sour kind of taste, although when I ate the ants separately they tasted quite good.

The happy end to the tale is that because I couldn’t finish it we had it packed up and gave it to some street kids near the river front. Having walked on a few metres we heard a gratifyingly joyous shout as they opened the package. So presumably ant curry is genuinely regarded as a delicacy in Cambodia. Or they hadn’t yet noticed the insects set amongst the beef…

You can find curried ants at a restaurant on Street 182, about three blocks west from the Royal Palace. The name is in Cambodian, but you can find it by the roasting pig on a spit outside, and grand colourful entrance of fairy lights leading to an interior of miniature bridges over little waterways. Menu is in English with pictures, curried ants around $3.

It's all in the secret sauce...

The laws on cannabis as slightly hazy in Cambodia. You’re allowed to grow it for your own personal consumption and you’re also allowed to supply it to members of your immediate family – “girlfriend also ok” confirmed my Cambodian tuk tuk driver in a conversation on the subject. But selling it elsewhere is not on. So is technically illegal to cover a pizza in The Herb and trade it for profit. But the police apparently turn a blind eye except for the occasional raids.

Pizza arrives seemingly covered in happy herbs. Me and Al have a tentative slice each. I scrape off the chunkier pieces of foliage. Call me a wuss, but you never know how strong hash is until a few hours later if you eat it. I was once stoned for three straight days after eating a hash brownie at a late night party. I was so bored by the third day.

I hadn’t been stoned for ages, and I’d forgotten that interim period of am I stoned? Aren’t I? Things seem difficult to remember. As my friend Rob pointed out, this probably means you are stoned.

Sadly things went downhill from here as I developed a cracking headache, so here my intrepid reporting ends. I was really keen on going out into the town and getting a fish foot massage whilst under the influence, but my pounding head though otherwise.

Me having my feet nibbled my fish for health reasons

And as it turned out, when we went the next day for fish foot massage it was not the kind of thing you’d want to do stoned. The fish have hoary little mouths and go to work on all of you feet – even the soft bits. Really very disconcerting and I’d have pitied the owner to have me, stoned, yanking my feet from the water and shrieking.

As a moral aside to this story, we packed up the remaining pizza to take back to where we were staying. Then flew back the Malaysia a day later to hear the pilot announce as we landed “to remind passengers that smuggling drugs in Malaysia carries a mandatory sentence of death”. Cue me in an angst of paranoia wondering if we’d accidentally packed the pizza with us…. Note to travellers everywhere. Don’t do drugs.

Happy Angkor Pizza can be found next to plenty of other cannabis pizza places on the main road heading northwest of the south bridge through the city

Duck Embryo Cambodian Style

Psychologically this was probably one of the most challenging things to tackle, not least because it was around Easter time that I was faced with eating The Egg. In Cambodia duck embryo (or foetus) is a popular snack found at lots of street vendors. At least that’s the general word. When you’re actually trying to find one it’s a different story, and I cycled through several non-foetal eggs before asking the people at my hotel if they could give me firm directions. In true Cambodian style they not only found me an egg they had it collected, cooked and served up on a little plate in an egg cup, which made the whole experience a great deal more appetising.

Cutting into the egg itself reveals a disconcertingly brown streaked innard, and when you open the shell proper you get a glimpse of the little birdy’s forming neck and beck, picked out in dark grey-blue against the wider backdrop. This is a little upsetting.

The good news, however, is that the smell is quite appealing – like meaty egg yolk, and the taste is very much like it smells. Especially the brown exterior part. Digging into the neck/head/beak area was a slightly slimier texture, coupled with a crunch which could have been either bone or errant egg shell. If I was starving there would be plenty worse things than this to eat, and the flavour really was quite nice, but it is hard to get over the whole baby bird issue.

Duck embryos are found all over Phnom Penh, but you’re best off having a local direct you (draw a picture if necessary) to avoid the various other forms of egg. Special thanks to the Blue Lime Hotel in Phnom Penh for finding the egg for me.

Tastes a lot better than it looks

But that doesn’t mean it’s still not an experience – right? In fact the restaurant in question did a lot of unusual barbecued things, but snake was the most out there. It came all pink and naked looking in big chunks, alongside a hefty barbecue grill. You turn the grill on, wipe a bit of oil around and on goes the snake. After a mere few minutes its assumed a rather unappetising grey colour, but it smells good at least.

My friend Laura took one cautious bite and announced “that is delicious!”at high volume. And it was. Like really tasty barbecued meat but with a texture all of its own – like tough squid but not in a bad way. It didn’t taste like chicken. Maybe more like pork, and I would definitely have it again. Although maybe in a context more fitting of my egotistical desire to seek out places not usually visited by foreigners though…

You can find the barbecued snake restaurant on Pub Street in Siam Reap – south side of the street.

The deal is that one skilled person devotes themselves to brewing up a liquor based on fermented coconut milk. This is them distributed in weekly or monthly sessions from a big wooden barrel to a close-knit group of local men – including, of course, the brewer himself. Depending on which part of the island you live on and your level of personal gourmanderie you can pick and choose your ‘pub’ on the basis of the skill of the coconut fermenter and/or the conviviality of the regulars. The one which I visited was a jolly mix of singers and musicians, one of which had ingeniously made a bass from a tea crate and string.

Me getting merry on palm wine - I'd just come back from cave swimming

You sit, chat and play music as a wooden cup is passed around. It keeps coming and you down it in one, so it’s a sharp learning curve for those without a stomach for alcohol. The brew itself isn’t bad – sweetish and a bit like mild tasting sherry. But after several cups my memories are a bit blurred. I do remember, however that we all had to stand up and introduce ourselves as newcomers – like an AA meeting in reverse. Brilliantly, however, despite the drinky drinky nature, the clubs also operate in the grey areas of law enforcement, as social transgressions such as wife-beating are met with a lifetime ban. Although with most clubs out in the jungle wilderness and every member participating, I would hazard a guess that drink driving doesn’t feature on the exclusion policy.

You have to ask the locals where the clubs are gathered, as they don’t exactly advertise for guests, but most can be found on the island of Aiktutaki.



Sea Cucumber in the Cook Islands

On this particular mission me and fellow food explorer Katy Warburton set out to grab hold of one of what seemed to be many black soft sea cucumbers which lay all over the place. They’re strange things because the minute you pick them up they go kind of limp and mould themselves to the shape of your fingers. Then they squirt a jet of water at you with alarming accuracy. Having negotiated these perils we took our sea cucumber to a local lady who duly sliced it open with a big carving knife. There was blood and icky orange messy guts.

“This is not the right on” she tells us, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “It is too small.” And so we take back our butchered friend to drop back in the sea and trek out further to find bigger prey. It should be noted here that sea cucumbers honestly do recover from this treatment – really they do. You can slice them and gut them and drop them back and they heal up all ready to grow some new tasty guts. Unless you get the wrong one and then they just heal up wondering why you picked on them in the first place.

At around this point Katy got bitten by a trigger fish (karma), and we realised we weren’t going to be able to get far out enough without a boat. I’m all up for having another try, but on this occasion didn’t manage to get the sea creatures to spill their guts.

Want to read more? For the full write up of life in the Cooks head to : http://www.traverati.com/360-traveller/midnight-feast

Pigs Trotters

And so continue my offally big adventures through Russia and Eastern Europe.  I’m not deliberately seeking out the innards and random animal bits, but they seem to come flinging my way in this part of the world like a kind of grisly nemesis.

Because pig’s trotters are now a trendy pub favourite I didn’t really think they would be that unusual in flavour, but it turns out I was only partly right. In this part of the world it’s all about the jellied pig’s trotters, and to be honest the fact that I couldn’t differentiate between jelly and fatty foot meat I found quite disturbing. I can’t odds the taste – mostly of vinegar – but I don’t really understand why the feet are prized above different cuts.

If you’re not about the trotters then Latvia is also a great place to sample delicious super-cheap dumplings by the bowlful. In several restaurants in the capital you can join a line in a self service restaurant, choose what you like (or guess, in my case, if you don’t speak the language) and they’ll weigh the end result for you to eat on the premises. I never spent more than about £2 ($1.7) on a big plateful.

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Image Courtesy of www.Pastor.us

Remember that scene in Indiana Jones where they’re eating gooey brains straight from the monkey’s little skulls? I always thought that scene was a bit xenophobic to be honest – look at the mad cruel foreigners and their disgusting culinary tastes, and finally it seems I may have been proved right.

The proof of the pudding, as it were, being that brains (at least in my recent experience) are not gooey or slimy in the slightest, and are in fact crunchy like chips on the outside with a soft creamy centre. To be fair they were calves’ brains and for all I know monkey brains do ooze stringy goo when cleaved straight from the open head of the unfortunate animal.

The brains were also fried rather than steamed, which gives me the rare opportunity to put on my knowledgeable nutrition hat and say that the average brain is 60% fat so it would make sense that this would be a good way to cook it. (This is also, incidentally why Omega 3s oils are so good for the brain).

Very hard to make an accurate taste analysis, but chips would be the nearest thing for the delicious crunchy exterior with an added unctuous loveliness. They were really nice.

I ate them in a Ukrainian themed restaurant in Moscow with live barn animals in the centre, but that’s another story (www.shinok.ru if anyone wants to track it down.

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a)      It is super-tasty.

b)      You serve it with maple syrup.

Canadian Breakfast Bread

Which are both key cornerstones of any Canadian recipe. We had this after a dawn ‘pipe ceremony’ – the kind of thing you see in old-style country and westerns where the white people are welcomed in to smoke a peace pipe with the chief.

It starts with a long blessing of the tobacco and liberal dispensation of sage smoke, which is a cleansing thing, and the pipe then theoretically achieves the internal job of what the external herbs have done to the air around you.

I love anything even vaguely spiritual and with a toasty fire, my own pair of moccasins and the promise of food at the end of it this was about the best religious experience I’d ever had (Christians are notoriously stingy with the wafers and I’ve noticed other faiths seem to have a certain meanness where food and heating are concerned but maybe I’m missing something important about God).

Me, Dominique and Mary in a fug of sage smoke

The native bread was the best thing ever on a cold morning, but it went so well with the maple syrup that you can see why diabetes is a problem amongst the natives. Brilliantly, however, lovely native medicine man Dominic (pictured) who hosted the ceremony had managed to cure himself of the disorder which just goes to show where mind over maple syrup can get you…
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