On Food
If I were you, this is the post that would probably make me most jealous: the food here in SE Asia is delicious. Especially in Cambodia we've had the most wonderful dishes although the cuisines are all rather similar in this region. (Thai food in particular seems to have wormed its way onto every menu - it's hard to find a place where they do not serve green papaya salad. Not that we're complaining...)
With a few dishes we've had trouble figuring out how to eat them 'like a local' since the Vietnamese in particular are very fond of bringing you the ingredients and then you have to assemble them into tasty bites yourself. Usually that doesn't involve too much fiddling but when you're presented with the following, what do you do?!
Well, you could simply eat the spring rolls, then the noodles and stare at the greens until they wilt. Or, for exponential deliciousness, you put a piece of spring roll into a leaf of lettuce, garnish it with some noodles and herbs, wrap it up tight and dip it into the vinegar/chili sauce. Your taste buds might well explode from all that goodness.
Speaking of sauces, here in Vietnam each dish usually comes with its own sauce for dipping. In most cases, this addition makes all the difference. Unfortunately it's not always obvious which sauce goes with what dish. Yesterday at lunch, for example, we ordered four different types of springs rolls and of course they were accompanied by four different types of sauce. The waiter pointed to the sauces and dishes that belonged together and we arranged our plates so that we'd remember what goes with what. Then the fifth dish arrived (yeah, so we're pigging out) and the waiter moved our plates! NOOO!!! Now we have no idea anymore what goes with what and since three of the sauces are of a transparent, identical color only distinguished by the slices of veggies floating inside, it's impossible to recall the connections. Oh well, so we committed the ultimate faux pas and simply dipped things into whatever sauce dish we felt like. A whole new taste experience. ;)
Of course we've also had countless bowls of pho (Vietnamese noodle soup, eaten at any meal from morning till night) and here the trick is to go cheap. As in, the cheaper the place, the better the pho. Restaurant pho (it's pronounced something like fur but without the r) is usually too bland and boring. We had the best bowl of noodle soup so far at the night market in Luang Prabang, Laos. It was spicy, full of noodles, veggies and meat and cost us less than the large bottle of beer we shared with it.
Street food is all about customization. Each person on the table might order the same dish but thanks to a staggering array of condiments, anyone can tweak it exactly to their liking. The usual suspects found on any street side eatery are fish sauce and chilies (either as powder, paste or liquid). Then, depending on what you ordered, you might also receive limes, sugar, herbs and specially mixed sauces.
Barbecue is also a favourite meal. Usually it's bits and pieces of cow, pork, fish or seafood but sometimes you come across a special place like this one in Phnom Penh:
We ordered the 'Special BBQ Beef' at this place because it sounded a bit more fancy than the 'BBQ Cow' but I'm pretty sure it was exactly the same dish, just a bit pricier for the fancy name. It was tasty in any case.
If you're ever fed up with regular restaurant food and just want a snack, there's hope too. Pringles have their own Asian flavours:
