Khmer Wedding Food

As promised, today we bring another list of Khmer wedding bests. It’s hard to top the awkward moments, but I’ll try my best to bring you the wedding’s best food:

3) Banana bread. The final dessert  of the two day event was both locally made and amazing. This probably rates higher more because of the idea of regular delicious baked goods than the actual taste of the bread.

Banana bread in special wedding boxes

2) Snake. The wedding party on the first night had two different types of snake. The first was chopped fine and mixed with onions and more cardamom per bite than an entire cup of Turkish coffee. It was chewy and gristly, but loaded with flavor. I was surprised to taste anything like cardamom, since I’d never seen or tasted it in Khmer food before.

The two snake dishes

The second type of snake came whole. It was fried, and heavily salted. As I ripped mine open, I was lucky(?) enough to find a mass of eggs inside. There was little meat, but the skin was somehow both chewy and crunchy. The eggs were by far the best part – little gelatinous balls of salty goodness.

Tastes like chicken. Really.

1) The best food of the Khmer wedding, and perhaps the best Khmer food we’ve had so far in country was….quail! I had thus far never tasted quail, and this was an excellent first start. It was juicy without being greasy and went great with pepper sauce. It was even more exciting to eat at the time because in a somewhat startling English-Khmer misunderstanding, my co-teachers insisted we were eating a Kiwi (a small bird native to New Zealand). That sounded very exotic to us until we got home and read up on it. Turns out that the kiwi is on the verge of extinction. We frantically did some research and found out that it was not kiwi, but quail. Either way it was delicious.

Mystery Bird

There you have it folks; the three best foods from the wedding. It was great to taste so many different Khmer foods all at once, especially since we cook for ourselves in our homestay. But Katie will talk more about that tomorrow…

-Tim