This is a bee larvae cake, a dish from the ever-popular Sovanna restaurant (No 2C St 21, just south of Sihanouk Blvd). It’s steamed with spices in banana leaves, and picked at like a snack. We had a friend visiting Cambodia who wanted to sample Khmer cuisine, and what better way to do that than to get a big group together so you can toss something like this into the meal mix? ;-) It has a gummy sort of texture, and the larvae pop like a pocket when you bite down on them. It’s got a nutty taste, a little sweet, with a hint of honey. No one disliked it, though it won’t be something we will normally order. Photo from Keith Kelly.

Pronounced plaiii-kwut!, these fruit are hard like rocks on the outside. They’re eaten whether or not they’re ripe. Our nanny Sopheap brought us some and they were so ripe they fragranced the entire house with a pungence the way durian and jackfruit do. It’s the kind of smell where it depends on your mood and health whether the pungence is acceptable!When they’re not ripe they’re white inside, much harder than the texture of apples, and lines your mouth with heavy chalkiness. I can’t quite find a good set of words to describe the taste, especially when it’s hard to taste anything through the chalk. When they’re ripe like in the picture below they’re sweet, with a mushy/seedy texture (you eat the seeds). It’s one of those fruits you never see a Westerner near, even the ones who can eat anything!

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Dear all,

A note from the “infamous” KI-Media team:We would like to thank this anonymous contributor for his ingenious method to bypass the blocking in the Kingdom of Wonder…ful CENSURE.

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For all of us who bravely read blocked websites which are inaccessible from within Cambodia [such as KI-Media], below is a very simple [and elegant] method to circumvent the blockage:

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1. Go to http://translate.google.com

2. Type the address of the blocked website into the box shown on the webpage

3. Change the language at “From:” dropbox to any language that doesn’t have similar script with the language of the blocked website (Example: if the block website uses English, change the language to something like Chinese or Japanese or Thai, i.e. any language that doesn’t use roman script.

4. Click Translate button and here we go

Until this moment, this method works well when an infamously blocked website in our country (I don’t think I need to name it, everyone knows what website it it) was tested.

No one is in any position whatsoever to tell us what to read or not to read. We should be free to read whatever we want.

Regards,

Anonymous