Ahar Kaoh
One of the most remote islands in the Great Ring is the island of Kaoh. This tiny rocky island has almost no large animals apart from a few birds, but has a vast number of insects and arachnids. The people who live here, the Anak Khao, have adapted to this environment and developed one of the more unusual cuisines in the Islands.
The cuisine, known as Ahar Kaoh (or the food of Kaoh), has a few interesting features. One is the high use of insects in their food, compared to other areas in the Great Ring. The Anak Khao use insects for both flavor and for bulk. For example, a traditional spicy dish is a whole fish stuffed with kamhosa phleung, a red beetle with a fiery crunch. Another traditional food is sramoch, which is made from flies compressed into a dense cake and then fried.
But the most unique aspect of Ahar Kaoh is the use of the sngaorotrei, or stew fish. This creature is a small mudfish, found living in pools of hot volcanic mud on the island. It is a dark brown color, and is semi-amphibious, able to breath air and travel short distances over land. It has a number of small whiskerlike protrusions near its mouth that it uses to sense its environment.
The sngaorotrei is never eaten. Instead, the Anak Khao will capture the fish and place it living into a pot of stew. The fish thrives in this environment, able to withstand the heat of the cookpot and consuming bits of the stew. The cook will allow the fish to swim around in the stew, sometimes for days, before returning it to a mud pool. The fish imparts a unique flavor to the stew that is delicious, but difficult to describe to someone who has never tasted it. The rare visitor to Kaoh will occasionally try to export the sngaorotrei to other regions, but this has not been successful so far, as the fish cannot survive the long journey without access to the volcanic mud they call home.
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