Palm Sugar by Simi

We all slept in until 825am and dragged ourselves to breakfast as we were due to head off on our day trip at 9am.

Hotel breakfasts are always a joyful time! What’s not to like? A zillion options, eggs made however you want and everyone just helping themselves! Happy days! The fresh fruit and yoghurt is the highlight for me- some wonderful tropical fruit- watermelon, mangoes, passion fruit, papaya and dragon fruit although sadly I’m not a fan of the latter two! The children seem to always find the sweet treats with each of them having the unusual choice of a doughnut this morning!

We headed off to a small
Farming village where we saw rice palm cakes aka Cambodian muffins being made. Actually maybe I shouldn’t say Cambodian… the people from this beautiful country are actually known as Khmer ( pronounced kuh- maya) and their food is Khmer and their country is Kampuchea. The French have named it.. and the English derivation is Cambodia.

Anyway we were able to see the different stages of how these
Rice palm cakes were made . Such a labour intensive process so made us appreciate them so much. We bought 4 of them for a dollar to have for lunch later! ( addendum…. Now sampled… a gelatinous type sponge with a sweet dollop of coconut rice inside… pretty good!)

We went to another stall
to see the process of the palm sugar being made and sampled some very sweet palm juice and some sour plums. We bought a jar of palm sugar to bring home and use in our curries!Read more