Simon at Sepilok

Carlos (who works at the resthouse) surprised me by wearing a Chelsea shirt today - he's a Manure fan really.
Not the only person i know who has seen the light and developed a soft spot for The Mighty Blues too...

Tonight was our group Culinary Night with Sylvia. As mentioned before, the idea of these sessions is to help her prepare our dinner using traditional methods and local ingredients.
Some of the earlier groups said they'd needed pretty strong stomachs (and that was just the preparation!), but with Vicky in our group being a veggie that meant our meal plan had a leafy vegetable bias and thankfully we were spared the chicken feet soup recipe the last group suffered (that time there were clipped chicken toenails all over the floor...yuk!!)

No, ours was actually really good. I liked nearly all of it.

We started with:
- soup of chicken cooked in rice wine

Then the main dishes were:
- raw mackeral marinated in lime juice, ginger, chilli and onion (which was delicious!)
- pumpkin with pumpkin leaf and coconut milk
- plain steamed tapioca leaf
- papaya buds softened with tamarin
- tapioca leaf fried with salted fish
- lemon leaf with chili, garlic, salt and lime juice
- blanched sweet potato leaves
- blanched pumkin leaf
- chili, shrimp paste and garlic dip
- rice

All washed down with copious volumes of Oranjeboon and rice wine.
Bon apetit!