Salted Cod And Cashew Nut Curry

This recipe was partly inspired by Cambodia's national dish, amok - river fish cooked with mild spices and coconut. Amok varies enormously from home to home over there. Most resemble a sort of runny, yellow curry, but the supposedly authentic ones are steamed in banana leaves and, with the addition of beaten egg, come out like souffles. So chaotic is the dish, you could say it runs ... oh, never mind.

Salted fish is also an important ingredient for the Khmers, and works well in this curry. As for the cashew nuts, you can pick them off the trees over there. Remember to only add salt at the end, if necessary, as it is difficult to estimate how salty the fish is and how much soaking it will need. Obviously the saltier you like it, the less soaking it needs.

300g salt cod or pollack, skinless and boneless
2 medium onions, finely chopped
6 garlic cloves
4 green cardamon pods
4 cloves
2 tsps ground coriander
2 tsps ground turmeric
1 tsp cumin seeds
2 tbsps olive oil
6 red chillies, fewer if you don't like heat
1 tsp vinegar
1 tsp sugar
1 large yellow or orange pepper, diced
1 bay leaf
120g tinned tomatoes, chopped
400ml coconut milk
20 cashew nuts

Soak the salted fish overnight in a saucepan full of cold water. Change the water a couple of times. Heat the oil in a pressure cooker and add the chopped onion. Stir and cook over a medium heat for 10 minutes until reduced heavily in size. Add the diced pepper, bay leaf and garlic and cook for another few minutes, stirring regularly.

Add the cardamon, cumin, turmeric, coriander, sugar and vinegar. Stir for a minute, adding a splash of water if the spices start to catch. Add the tomatoes and coconut milk.

Cover the pressure cooker, bring up to pressure, and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring half way through. Then add the fish, cut into inch-wide pieces, cashew nuts and whole red chillies. Stir well and cover the pressure cooker again. Simmer for 30 minutes, stirring half way through.

Serve with fresh coriander, salad and boiled rice.

Drinking Daiquiris If You’re Allergic To Rum

Anyone who regularly reads this blog (hi Mum) will know I’ve got a bit of a thing about smoothies. I go through stages, but out here in Saigon I’ve been having a smoothie for breakfast most afternoons.

Vitamin C is vitally important in the tropics. I was told that by an American I met in a bar who claims to have been a Navy Seal during the Vietnam War. He’s been living in SE Asia for the past 40 years, and helps run a charity clearing land mines now. Anyway, as we drank a few beers he kept devouring lime quarters, and was horrified when I told him I hardly ate fruit.

“You gotta eat fruit buddy. You ain’t got a rat’s chance out here without the fucking fruit, man” he said. “It’s the vitamin C - you’re body can’t store it. You need to keep stocking the shit up.”

He was an ex-forces agent who wades through jungle swamps with king cobra serum in a holster on one leg, and viper serum on the other, and has “fired every Goddamn weapon on this earth”, so I wasn’t going to argue with his knowledge of vitamins, or anything else for that matter. He told me fruit was the only way to prevent getting serious stomach problems and other infections in Asia, and that lime juice and fresh coconut juice were the best.

His basis for the healing powers of the latter seemed to be based on the fact he can’t drink rum without it. He said he’d always been badly allergic to rum, but a Thai business client persuaded him to drink it with fresh coconut milk one hot afternoon, and he was able to down six daiquiris.



Ever since that conversation, I’ve been squeezing lime juice into my beer, and eating those bitter little oranges, and starting the day with what I am now convinced is the best smoothie in the world – mango and passion fruit. I was put on to it by a woman who runs a fruit stall (video above) at the end of the narrow alley that leads into the muggy catacomb where my hotel is regularly hidden.

There’s something nice about sitting on a plastic chair in the gutter, watching the world go by as you wait for your smoothie to be made. It brought back memories of Cartagena in Colombia. There are dozens of jugo sellers near the harbour, and it’s quite an event to sit at a bar and pick your fruit from big glass jars and see them whizzed into delicious shakes.

My favourite was always banana con leche, and it was so thick I didn’t need much else to eat for the rest of the day. There was always an old ship hand, dressed in rags, hanging round the stands, hustling tourists. “Banana, or...marijuana?” he’d whisper.

They make them the same way in Vietnam – blitzing fruit with ice, sugar and condensed or evaporated milk (just substitute strong coffee for fruit to make Vietnam’s famous iced coffee drink, ca phe da). But if you’re going for the passion fruit and mango you don’t need the milk and sugar – they’re creamy and sweet enough already.

To make it, peel a sweet mango by shaving the skin off away from you with a sharp knife. Then sit the fruit, so the widest part is in your palm, and make cuts downwards, then run the blade tight against the stone to remove the flesh. Cut two passion fruit in half, and using a spoon, scrape out the pips and juice. Put the fruit in the blender with crushed ice, and blitz for at least one minute to make sure it is properly smooth, then wander round hot, steamy streets and drink it through a straw. It’s the best thirst-quencher in the world after green Saigon poured over lumps of ice.

For More: Raw food smoothies
and live frog smoothies