JoJo in Laos

Lunch with Indavone

2011-11-22T13:43:00.001+07:00

Here’s my pal Indavone who even though she’s in her 60’s still makes the “V” sign like all Lao girls do when they have their picture taken. I don’t know if it’s a peace sign or a victory sign or something that has to do with Thai pop singers.

I met Indavone through a mutual friend. She wanted to practice her English and I wanted to learn some Lao so we made a pact to have lunch on Wednesday of each week to work on same.

Indavone comes from a prominent Lao family. Her father was in the old royalist government and she was educated at the French Lycee in Vientiane after which she was sent to France on a scholarship and studied economics. Before she left for France she was married and she and her husband returned to Laos after university. One year later the government fell and they decided to return to France although they didn’t absolutely have to since her husband was a nephew of the new Lao communist prime minister. But not seeing eye to eye on politics they didn’t want to stay.

So they lived in France for 40 years, had two sons and Indavone worked for the French government in the tax department. She’s a French citizen and needless to say completely fluent in French. After her husband died she decided to divide her time between France & Laos. So she’s in France with her kids and grandchildren in the summer avoiding the rainy season and in Laos during the French winter. Sounds pretty good don’t you think?

We started having lunch at the French Cultural centre which has a very nice restaurant in the center of Vientiane. Her English is way better than my Lao but when we get stuck we revert to my high school French and if that doesn’t work she always brings along the English/French dictionary.

A digression about lunch or more to the point the lunch hour. To me having lived in New York and Italy, lunch is at 1 p.m. Here in Laos everyone eats lunch at noon. I always end up thinking, really, lunch already? And how does this decided upon lunch time come about? In Mexico it’s not lunchtime until 2 p.m. but that’s because the Mexicans slip in a hearty snack/meal about 11 a.m. called desayuno which allows them to hold out til 2 p.m. I didn’t really figure this out until we walked into a restaurant in Mexico City at 1 p.m. and all the staff looked at us funny. By the time we left the place was packed.

But Indavone thought it would be better if we had lunch at home. And the first time she picked me up we stopped at the market and she got take out. That’s when I had a lightbulb moment. I’ve figured out pretty much what all the produce section of my market has to offer but there’s also a huge “to go” area serving up what looks like delicious food if you had any idea what it is. Indavone could help me decipher all this.

There are some things I’ve already figured out because they’re pretty obvious. This lady spends the entire day cooking up banana fritters and banana chips. You can see her entire operation in this shot including a large bag of charcoal on the right and her boiling oil filled wok on the brazier.

This woman is putting together something slightly more unusual. She wraps a kind of slightly sweet paste made from fried, pounded sticky rice in a lettuce leaf along with some lemon grass, starfruit, raw eggplant and peanuts. You get six in a pack for less than 40 cents with fried chili peppers on the side. It’s the perfect pre-dinner snack.

But what would you make of this line up? This is where I needed Indavone’s vital input.

O.K. this is pretty obvious too – they’re snails. I, who adore snails, don’t eat them in Laos because I did a lot of research on the life cycle of liver flukes which cause liver cancer. The fluke has a complex existence that includes spending part of its time in a river snail before emerging and lodging itself in a river fish. This is why I also don’t eat padek because the liver fluke can survive the fermentation process which creates this Lao fish sauce. Fish sauce from other countries is o.k. because it’s made from sea fish.

But look again, what, I’ve always wondered, is that big pot of green stuff? Indavone and I bought some and then she tried to explain what it was. It’s some kind of leaf that gets soaked overnight and then pounded up with other seasonings. It tasted a bit like spinach or, more aptly, reheated spinach which to me always has a kind of metallic flavor.

This isn’t hard to figure out but I put it in because I think it looks so beautiful.

We actually bought fried fish and shrimp fritters – teeny, tiny river shrimp thrown into a batter and fried - which you can see in this shot in the middle stainless steel sheet.

We’re laughing because it’s the only dish that I can recognize and pronounce – pork lahp – lahp moo. One of the differences between Lao and English is that the adjectives and quantifiers come after the noun. Beautiful very, for example or beers two.

And our final purchase was bamboo soup – in the upper far left metal container - and some sticky rice from that gigantic basket in the background.

We took our food haul back to my place and my Lao lesson continued. The hardest thing about Lao is that it’s all about the tones. So a word like sau can mean morning or daughter or twenty depending on how you pronounce it. I spend most of my lessons saying to Indavone – “o.k. say it again” and then “o.k. now say it again” in my desperate attempt to hear the difference.

O.K., I know I’ll never really learn Lao but by having lunch with Indavone I can get perhaps a smidgeon better and she serves as a bridge for me to learn things about the Lao way of life that I will never get from spending time with ex-pats. If you click the button you can hear me saying the only word that after two years in Lao Indavone thinks I pronounce correctly.

The Pasta Lesson

2011-10-11T12:42:00.001+07:00

Months in the planning, our first big event on our return from the U.S. in September was to be a pasta making lesson as a fund raiser for the Women’s International Group. I was approached in the spring about this project but I explained there was no way I could do this solo. Bruce is the pasta maestro in our house, I'm in charge of sauces, fillings and plating. So a double act it was to be.

First hurdle: where to get hold of a pasta machine. Yes, it’s correct, a true contadina would only accept hand rolled pasta but after almost eighteen years in Italy, Bruce hasn’t mastered that technique yet. Turns out that a fellow WIG member had a pasta machine she’d never used. She got it as a present but being Japanese didn’t know how it worked. Unfortunately, it was a Chinese made pasta maker and when we did a test using it we found it didn’t quite roll out the dough thin enough. Acceptable, but not quite the gossamer sheets we were used to using our Italian machine which remains in Italy.

I was bemoaning this to another friend who thereupon reached into her kitchen cupboard and “ecco” revealed a pasta maker made in Italy! We were in business.

Our first plan was to make two kinds of ravioli. One stuffed with pumpkin – readily available here - and the other from our favorite trattoria “dal Pallazzacio” in Umbria. “Ravioli Letizia” is filled with eggplant - also readily available here – and topped with a sauce of black and green olives, capers and fresh tomatoes topped with shavings of parmesan.

We emailed Letizia, the daughter in the family trattoria for whom this pasta is named, and asked for their recipe. She sent it back with detailed instructions and we made it just for ourselves on Easter Sunday. Here it is.

We then tried the pumpkin ravioli but the filling didn’t have much pizazz. I remembered a recipe of Marcella Hazan’s that substituted sweet potato for pumpkin in cappellaci, and so I emailed our pal, Mikey Tucker, to ask him to send that to me. Mikey and I tossed around ideas about solutions to the blandness and both felt that a combo of pumpkin and sweet potato could be the answer. Which it was. By the way, Michael Tucker writes a great blog which I highly recommend called “Notes from a Culinary Wasteland”. Here’s the link. http://notesfromaculinarywasteland.com

But Bruce was decidedly not happy with the Lao (actually Thai) flour. It didn’t have enough gluten in it to withstand the kneading and rolling process and kept shredding and falling apart. We were saved by discovering a very expensive but very rugged Australian flour at the ex-pat market. $10 per bag - but it worked. Here it is.

So now we were all set. We decided that after our summer holiday in the states we’d teach the class how to make pumpkin/sweet potato ravioli in a butter and thyme sauce with parmesan and then fettucine with a blended fresh tomato sauce which includes carrots, onions, rosemary and lashings of olive oil. We chose not to do the “ravioli Letizia” – yummy though it is – because the cost of ingredients like olives and capers and shavings of parmesan here in Vientiane was a bit prohibitive for a crowd. But you should definitely try it. Here’s the recipe:

Ravioli Letizia

Pasta:
    •    500 grams of flour
    •    pinch of salt
    •    4 eggs

Filling:
    •    500 grams of eggplant cut into small cubes – no need to peel eggplant
    •    1 clove of garlic
    •    extra-virgin olive oil
    •    finely chopped parsley
    •    parmesan cheese

Method:
    1.    Cube the eggplant and place in a saute pan with olive oil, garlic and parsley.
    2.    Cook five minutes and let cool.
    3.    Add 2 T grated parmesan.

This is the filling.

Sauce:
    1.    In a saute pan place 6 T of olive oil, 150 grams of green olives and 100 grams of black olives. Add I clove of garlic and 10 grams of capers.
    2.    Saute for three minutes and then add 600 grams fresh tomato sauce.
    3.    Simmer for a further twelve to fifteen minutes.

Then:

    1.    Roll the pasta out very thinly and stuff with the filling.
    2.    Seal edges well using a beaten egg wash.
    3.    Cook in abundant salted water. A minute or so should be enough.
    4.    Dress with the sauce and top with shavings of parmesan cheese.

While staying in Santa Barbara we bought a ravioli cutter – ours being, yet again, in Italy - and just before getting on the plane back to Laos we swung by Whole Foods in New York and bought fresh rosemary and bay leaves. This had now morphed into a multi-continental operation.

At last the day arrived. I had made the ravioli filling and sauce for the fettucine in advance because the idea was to focus on the pasta making and we didn’t want to be there all day. Bruce made a CD of Neapolitan music to play while we worked.

Here’s the “maestro” explaining how to take the flour; make a well in the center of it; break in an egg and gradually gather in the flour making sure not to break the ring of flour until the egg is incorporated otherwise the egg runs right off the table.

I don’t think I was ever more aware of what an international group WIG is until that day. Here’s part of the gang that showed up. We had women from America, Belgium, Japan, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea and Russia all wanting to learn how to make Italian pasta. Pretty wild.

We decided to use the Italian pasta maker for the ravioli and the Chinese pasta maker for the sturdier fettucine. But there were still more acolytes than machines so here’s Bolo from Mongolia who took things into her own hands and started rolling her own. She realized the dough was similar to what Mongolians use to make their dumplings. She gets the “Golden Contandina” award.

Here’s Seema from Nepal (well, actually, just her hands) making the ravioli. Scroll down to the end for the filling recipe.

And here’s Alison from Papua New Guinea slicing the pasta sheets into fettucine. Scroll down to the end for the sauce recipe.

And so we lunched on fettucine in fresh tomato sauce with rosemary; pumpkin/sweet potato ravioli with thyme leaf, butter and parmesan; salad and a glass of wine.

As the old Ronzoni pasta ads used to say. “Close your eyes and you’re eating in Italy”.

Tomato Sauce (from Marcella Hazan)

•    1 medium onion
•    1 carrot
•    1 stalk of celery
•    1 can (about 425 ml) peeled tomatoes
•    salt
•    pepper
•    fresh herbs (I’d suggest either rosemary or oregano or marjoram)
•    ¼ C extra virgin olive oil

1.    Put the tomatoes in a sauce pot
2.    Chop the onion and the carrot and the celery (medium/fine) and add them to the pot
3.    Add the salt, pepper and fresh herbs
4.    Simmer slowly for 30 minutes – without a lid
5.    Remove the fresh herbs from the pot
6.    Pour the remaining contents into a cuisinart or blender and blend until it’s as smooth as you want it to be.
7.    Pour this mixture back into the sauce pan and add about ¼ cup of extra virgin olive oil – if you want to add a bit more – go ahead.
8.    Stir the pot slowly until the oil is incorporated into the sauce and then let it all simmer for another 15 minutes.

Pumpkin Ravioli

•    1 ¾ pounds sweet potatoes and pumpkin about equal weight (not yams)
•    1 ¼ cups grated parmigiano or grana padana
•    3 Tb chopped parsley
•    2 Tb chopped mortadella, prosciutto or ham
•    1 egg yolk
•    ½ tsp nutmeg grated
•    1/2 tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 450
2. Put potatoes and pumpkin in middle level of oven.
3. After 20 minutes turn down to 400.
4. Cook for another 35-40 minutes or until potatoes are tender.
5. Peel potatoes and puree them through a food mill into a bowl.
6. Add all other ingredients and mix thoroughly with a fork until the mixture is smooth and evenly blended.
7. Taste and correct for salt.

Can I get you something to drink with that?

2011-06-26T18:32:00.001+07:00

The monsoon has begun. Each morning Bruce and I say to each other “Do you think it’s going to rain today” which cracks us up because it is definitely going to rain today and every single day for months.

But despite the refreshing rains it is still wicked hot. Here’s a few examples of some of the beverages with which we can slake our thirst.

The national drink and an internationally recognized fabulous beer. Recipient of many awards - most recently 2010 Gold Medal winner at the Monde competition held in Weissbaden, Germany. And the Germans ought to know. It’s a jointly held company with 50% owned by the Lao government and the other half by Carlsberg. As such its sales (23 liters per person per annum) last year contributed 51.2 million dollars U.S. to Lao’s national coffers. Oh, and it’s made from rice, millet and hops making it a gluten free beer. Perhaps they should start an ad campaign in the west promoting it that way. Here people drink their beer on ice which we’ve really gotten into otherwise you wind up drinking warm beer in about three minutes flat. Beer Lao - 90 cents a quart and worth every penny.

Here’s a pack of our favorite Lao coffee. Organic Sinouk Pure Arabica French Roast. I actually met Mr. Sinouk, a sophisticated Lao who’s spent much of his life in France and is now the head of the Lao Coffee Growers Association. He started a plantation in the south of Laos on the Bolaven plateau which is ideal land for coffee growing. Laos has been so poor for so long it’s never had enough money to buy chemical fertilizers or insecticides to mess up the soil. So Mr. Sinouk’s coffee and other organic agricultural products are being recognized as an ideal niche market for the country. Mr. Sinouk’s time in France has taught him the value of the “appellation controlee” a status he is bent on creating for Lao coffee having already received organic certification from the European Union.

If you really want to get hammered this is your solution. Lao Lao, which if you pronounce it correctly and get your tones right, translates as “alcohol Lao”. It’s Lao white lightning, a spirit distilled from rice (what else?). This is a brand version – although I can’t read what brand - but in village markets you will see home-brewed stuff for sale both straight and with herbs or animal parts macerating in it. 750 ml of 40% alcohol for 75 cents. Yikesarama!

Lao Lao is mandatory at the Lao animist blessing ceremony called a baci. It’s held to celebrate just about everything – a wedding, a baby naming, a new house, a long trip, etc. There’s always a boiled chicken (with head) and a flower bedecked banana leaf pyramid with long white strings attached. Candles are lit, a shaman makes an incantation, rice is thrown and the participants tie the white strings around each other’s wrists while wishing each other good luck, good health and long life. Then everybody downs a shot and snacks on the chicken. You’re supposed to keep the strings on your wrist for at least three days but you must never, ever cut them off . If your string has been tied properly, it has a slip knot and will just slide right off. I have been to several baci ceremonies and the genuine goodwill and kindness behind it all is extremely touching. Just the thought of it brings a tear to the eye.

The country’s second most popular drink after beer. There are Pepsi bottling plants in Laos but not Coca Cola, that’s imported from Thailand. I have a theory about this that goes back to the cold war when the Russians granted licenses to manufacture Pepsi over Coke in the Soviet Union since they wanted cola drinks but not that great symbol of evil American imperialism - Coca Cola. This was a huge coup for Joan Crawford who took over as Chairman of Pepsi after her husband died – as we all remember from that great scene in “Mommy Dearest”. Laos which had thrown in its lot with the Soviets over the Chinese communists during the Southeast Asian wars followed suit – hence the ubiquitous Pepsi.

This is M-150 an absolutely vile, very popular, southeast Asian “energy” drink. I took one sip and chucked the rest. It’s basically a vanilla flavored syrup packed, and I mean packed, with caffeine. The only thing I like about it is the cute little amber glass bottle. During the “red shirt” uprising in Thailand last year it made a very handy vessel for Molotov cocktails. I don’t know if that distinction can be attributed to the glass container or the motto which you can read here embedded in what looks like Wyatt Earp’s badge – “Devotion; Courage; Sacrifice.

In the late spring people set up shop by the side of the road and make sugar cane drink. Which is very delicious over ice with a squeeze of lime. A drink “to go”, it’s handed to you in classic third world takeaway style. A plastic bag is filled with crushed ice and the drink is poured over it. The plastic bag is then put into a second plastic bag, a straw is inserted and a rubber band is used to seal your drink inside the bags. And, hey, off you go. Click here to see how sugar cane juice is made. Sugar Cane Drink

Here’s Bruce demonstrating how to drink lao hai which translates into "alcohol jar". It is much less potent than lao lao and is the preferred tipple of the Khmu, Hmong and Tai ethnic groups. A mash of sticky rice and rice husks combined with a powdered starter made from milled sticky rice and galangal juice it ferments until it’s ready to be drunk communal fashion. The jar is passed from person to person and sipped through a bamboo straw - water being added from time to time to top it up. We bought this one at an ethnic market in Vientiane and tried to ferment our own brew but the ants got to it before we did – so this photo is actually a fake. Still it’s a lovely object.

Despite our affection for Beer Lao, we are winos at heart. A beer is great on a hot day or with a sandwich for lunch but not something we want to have with our pasta al pesto or grilled New Zealand lamb chops. All our years of living in Italy have spoiled us with the availability of excellent, cheap plonk in bottles and demi-johns. In Laos all wine is imported and any bottle of red or white from whatever region in the world goes for over $10 – somewhat ruinous for the old budget. But here we have discovered a reasonable alternative we’d never seen before; what we call “box’o vino” and our Australian friends call “Chateau Cardboard”. This is five litres of drinkable Italian white for $20. I could be way out of touch and find this is available globally but the first time I saw it was in Laos. So, “salute” or as they say in Lao seun duhm.

Can Eat

2011-04-24T17:29:00.001+07:00

The other day I heard voices in the garden. I went out to see who was there and found a group of Lao Americans exploring the land that used to belong to their aunt. She later sold it to our landlady, who pulled down her house and built our place instead.

Even though they’d been in America for decades they’d retained the Lao sensibility when it came to “private” property. The Lao don’t seem to have the kind of boundaries we have when it comes to the land. Which is fine with me because I have two Lao neighbors who steward our garden.

For instance, when Lithang, the guard from the house next door, decides it’s time for the coconuts in our yard to be culled he takes charge of arranging guys who come, scale the trees and carefully slide the coconuts down on a piece of rope.

Here’s Lithang with the vegetable garden he’s planted on the banks of the Mekong. Nobody seems to care who actually owns the land, as soon as the waters recede after the rainy season this rich soil is planted by anyone who has access to the riverbank. The marigolds are to bring to the Buddha.

And this is Mai who lives in the house next door standing next to her papaya tree. Which has grown this tall in just six months. She explains to me all the things that are edible or useful in the garden. Like the property we moved into in Italy everything seems to have a use. No ornamentals, please. Here’s some of what we’ve got.

Lithang calls this mak antelope – at least that’s how it sounded - and told us it would be ready to eat in a few days. Sure enough after four days it became soft and turned out to be very similar to a custard apple which I wrote about in “Strange Fruit”. I’m not a huge fan of custard apples but a friend told me the texture, which I find slightly gritty, improves if you keep it in the fridge

Bananas. You can also eat the flower which is shredded into the famous Lao cold meat salad known as laap. You peel off the tough outer petals and then shred it finely into acidulated water so it won’t turn brown. Interestingly, although the Lao don’t cook it, when I did, it tasted very similar to artichoke. The leaves are used as wraps to steam food or even as disposable plates!

Taro. The starchy root is edible as are the young shoots and leaves but older plants have chemicals in them that create an allergic reaction causing burning and itching in the throat. Another friend explained that taro is a fallback plant grown in case there’s a rice crop failure and there’s nothing to eat. I’ve had taro as potato-like chips but they were pretty tasteless.

I’m told it’s very good luck to have a tamarind tree growing in the garden. Unfortunately, our tree is so old and tall the fruit is unreachable so we just end up with a lot of brown squishy pods on the ground. This is the kind of tamarind used in cooking; there’s another variety that’s sweeter and eaten as a fruit.

We have the same problem with our guava trees. Too high to pick which is a shame because their perfume is heavenly. I’m hoping that the new shoots closer to the ground will eventually bear some fruit. Traveler’s note: young guava leaves are a natural cure for diarrhea.

This is jackfruit similar to durian but not as pungent. Believe it or not these enormous babies are not yet ready to eat - jackfruit grows to be the largest fruit in the world. I guess this is why the fruit grows on the trunk, otherwise the weight would cause all the boughs to break. I have no idea what we’re going to do with all of these when they’re ripe. I guess give them to Lithang and Mai.

Here’s a mystery fruit, the Lao call it mak gnum. Very, very sour. Even more sour than a cranberry. But, as Mai says “can eat” so I’m going to try and make a jam or conserve with them to serve with pork.

This you can’t eat but it’s very useful. Inside these pods is kapok for stuffing into pillows and mattresses. It’s naturally flame retardant and a great organic alternative to plastic foam. Right now the garden looks as though we’ve had a slight dusting of snow as all the pods crack open and the kapok drifts down.

And here’s a close-up of the habaneros flourishing in our very own vegetable plot. We’re growing tomatoes, Italian basil, some broccoli and a whole lot of Mexican peppers – jalapenos, serranos as well as the habaneros. Plus tomatillos. Salsa verde growing along the banks of the Mekong! It could be a first.

Talat Kok Pho

2011-03-13T18:49:00.002+07:00

There it was in black and white in the “Vientiane Times”, Lao’s English language newspaper, the city’s largest market “Thong Khan Kham” was to be torn down and relocated into what is currently a swamp outside of town. This seemed pretty nuts given that most first world cities are trying their damndest to re-open fresh markets in their centres.

Last year the towns second biggest market, “That Luang” accidentally burned down and is now the construction site of a proposed low rise tower of luxury condos being built by the Vietnamese. Those market stands have now also been relocated to the outskirts of town.

The really crazy part about all this is that there isn’t any alternative to local market shopping. It’s not like you can go to Wal-Mart or Tesco to get your fresh veggies, meat and noodles. They just don’t exist here with no indication that they’ll be built in the foreseeable future.

Going to my market, Talat Kok Pho Tavisup, which is just steps away from the “treehouse”, is one of the highlights of my day but with all this dire news trickling in I thought it was time to document the people and the place. So I resolved to interview the women and men of my market. I called my friend Pa – who speaks English – and asked her to come and help me translate. Here they are.

This is Joy. Her stall has local vegetables but also Thai imports like asparagus and sugar snap peas. Actually, her name isn’t Joy, that’s her nickname. The Lao believe that when a baby is born you have to wait at least a month before you give the kid a name because mischievous spirits known as “phi” can enter the child through their name. So everyone gets a nickname which is what everyone ends up being called for life. Joy means skinny and can be used for a boy or a girl.

Joy is 43 years old and has two children. She’s originally from a town about four hours drive from here. Vang Vien. I asked her if she was happy with her job and she said she was indeed very happy and loved her job. Because I’m a preferred customer, a purchaser of asparagus and sugar snap peas, Joy always throws extra goodies in my bag, like a couple of limes or a bunch of scallions.

This is Noy. Noy means little. She is 35 years old and single. In Laos it is not considered strange to ask people how old they are. In fact it’s important information to have about a person because it impacts on how they should be addressed both in tone and grammar. She is a Vientiane native and gets her produce from a wholesale market downtown which I didn’t even know existed. Have to check that out.

This is Nang Kham. She is 28 and moved from Xieng Khuan in the north ten years ago. She has one daughter. Her stall sells salt, sauces, canned goods, dried beans, and other odd items like cigarette lighters. When I gave her a copy of this photo she made a seriously deep bow (known as a “nop”).

This is Song Pon. She is 40 and has two sons and one daughter. The absolutely very first question you get asked by a Lao is “How many children do you have?” It’s the Lao equivalent of “So, what do you do?”. She is originally from the northern state of Xainabouli. I like her stall because she tends to have different - often foraged - items for sale. She told me she pays 26,000 kip rent per day for her indoor stall. That’s just over three dollars. I know it sounds cheap but when a bunch of coriander goes for 10 cents and a couple of cucumbers cost a quarter it doesn’t sound like such a bargain.

Here’s Sia. He’s 24 and speaks very good English -- showing that an education doesn’t necessarily get you a job in a suit. He grills tilapia to go. The fish come from a fish farm about 30 kilometres up the Mekong river and are brought in each day and kept alive in tanks. Then they’re caked in salt and grilled to perfection. You take it home, remove the salty skin, and eat the flesh wrapped up in lettuce leaves with other goodies, like lemongrass and chili. He’ll sell you a packet of these add ons all sliced up as well.

This is Kwai. It means buffalo which is what we call him. Here he is with his daughter, Panda. He is our local pharmacist and speaks excellent English. We love Lao pharmacies because you can get whatever you want over the counter - no prescription necessary. When Bruce and I had dengue fever recently we survived on paracetemol with the kick of ample codeine purchased from Buffalo.

On a Friday night both Buffalo and the women of the market let their hair down with a few bottles of Beer Lao. I always demur when they offer me a glass but Bruce knocks a couple back with Buffalo and the boys. You have to be polite after all.

Somsanga

2010-12-16T11:07:00.000+07:00

Before I left for Italy this summer, a small band of Women’s International Group (WIG) ladies had a meeting with the United Nation’s Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) about a pilot project to help the women of Somsanga, Laos’s largest drug rehab center situated a few miles outside of Vientiane. UNODC already had vocational training programs in place for the men – t-shirt printing, carpentry shops, etc. but nothing for the women.

Stefan, the German coordinator, explained that the most successful programs were ones where the women could learn some skill that might translate into a job when they got out plus generate income for them while inside. We resolved to put our heads together and come up with a plan.

By the time I got back from Italy the plan was in high gear. Tomato and Onion Relish was going to be made at Somsanga, bottled and the sold at the annual WIG Bazaar in November. A gang of eight WIG women had signed up and had already narrowed down the recipe to two choices. One of the first things I did on getting back to Vientiane was to go to a dinner where we ate hot dogs and hamburgers with both relishes to decide which one we wanted to make.

Here’s the winning recipe:

Tomato Onion Relish

Ingredients:

4 kilos ripe tomatoes
1.5 kilos brown onions
½ cup of salt
1 litre of white vinegar
¾ cup of sugar
3 Tablespoons of curry powder
¾ teaspoon cayenne pepper
4 ½ teaspoons mustard powder
Freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon cornstarch (optional)

Method:
Place tomatoes in boiling water briefly and then remove skins
Remove core and chop into small chunks
Peel and dice onions
Place together in a bowl and sprinkle with salt
Leave overnight in a cool place
The following day, drain off liquid and discard.
Place tomatoes and onions in a large saucepan.
Add vinegar
Slowly bring to a boil and then lower heat and simmer for ½ hour stirring occasionally
Add sugar, curry powder, mustard powder, and cayenne.
Add black pepper to taste
Simmer for approximately 30 more minutes
If the relish seems too watery, thicken with cornstarch mixed with cold water. Add slowly while stirring continuously
Place relish in warm sterilised jars
Cover and seal

Seems pretty straightforward, right? Oh, no, no, no dear reader, not at all.

First of all we never should have picked a recipe that begins “The day before...” because we were only at Somsanga one day a week. So we were either chopping everything as you see here at the center or we were chopping at a WIG member’s house and hauling it up there. Even going two days in a row was problematic since “Leave overnight in a cool place” was initially impossible because Somsanga had no fridge. (Later a fridge was available). So we had to schlepp it back to Vientiane and store it in someone’s fridge overnight. And we weren’t just making the amount in the recipe, we were tripling or quadrupling it.

Other trip-ups were the fact that Somsanga doesn’t really have a proper kitchen. No running water inside and just two gas burners to cook and sterilize jars on.

The WIG ladies did all the purchasing of supplies but not as a donation, part of the project was to explain how a small cottage business works. Here’s our presentation explaining the costs of ingredients, jars and labels per jar and how much profit we hoped they would make after they paid us back IF we could bottle and sell 200 jars. No, none of us could actually write this by ourselves, the center gave us two interpreters to translate and they wrote this up. Capitalism at work.

Because there wasn’t enough work for everyone when we were cooking and bottling the relish, we brought art supplies up and had the women and girls design the label. This was done in the “recreation” room which is basically an empty space with a ceiling mounted television and a great big Buddha. We put all the designs up on the wall and then they voted for their favorite. Democracy at work.

One week we left a lot of shiny foil paper behind and when we came back they’d transformed them into amazingly intricate mobiles that they decorated their rooms with. Lao women’s small motor skills are phenomenal which is why they’re such great weavers.

In the middle of all this I got my monthly e-mail from George Soros’s Open Society Institute pillorying the governments of Thailand, Cambodia and Laos for their drug rehab programs as illegal forced incarceration without trial. This gave me pause. Yes, it’s true the rehab center is really a prison, in fact the building was originally a “re-education camp” after the revolution. It had been run by the military but was now under the auspices of the Mayor of Vientiane – a definite improvement. Women end up in Somsanga most of the time because either their families or their village chief drop them off. They remain there until someone in charge decides they can be let go – minimum stay six months.

Most of the drug abuse in Laos is methamphetamines. An ethnic group in northern Myanmar (Burma), the Shan, manufacture it to finance their war with the military junta. They want their own state. Much of the product is headed for more populated countries like Thailand and Vietnam but it gets couriered through Laos. The sad part is that often times women end up hooked without having a clue what they’re taking. They think of it as an energy pill enabling them to work extra shifts at a garment factory or stay up all night studying. But Red Bull it ain’t.

In the end, I decided that going to Somsanga and, hopefully, making a tiny difference and bearing witness to what the place was like was better than staying atop my high horse and rejecting it. What do you think?

This is Nongnut Foppes, originally from Thailand she married a Dutch man and lived in Holland for a few years. When they moved to Vientiane she missed yoghurt so much she started a small business supplying us “falang” with what I have to say is the best yoghurt I’ve ever eaten. Her passion fruit yoghurt is sublime. She sold us the jars and when they were filled we brought them back to her and she showed us how to seal them with a hot gun.

Here at last is the finished product with label and seal.

And here is the Somsanga booth at the WIG Bazaar. The guy is a German volunteer and the women in the picture are from the center and were allowed to come down for the day to sell it. I had pushed for the woman standing to be allowed to do this since she was one the hardest working women on the project.

We’ve not yet sold all 200 jars but we made back our costs with money to spare and I believe in the end we’ll sell the whole lot. We asked Stefan how the profit would be divided. He said in the past they’ve given the participants a choice. The money can be held for when they get out. Or they can use it to improve their diet while inside. Or they can pay to have a party. And naturally, being Lao, they always pick a party. Maybe that’s why I’m here.

The Return

2010-11-28T17:20:00.002+07:00

Just days before leaving Laos for a summer back in Italy two things happened to make my return to Vientiane in September something I could really look forward to. The first was a new place to live. A house on stilts on the banks of the Mekong in the middle of a coconut grove. We call it “The Treehouse”. Almost as exciting as the view was the fact that a traditional Lao market was steps away.

The second was being invited to become co-chair of the Cultural Study Group an offshoot of Women’s International Group – an organization of ladies who do good works. Cultural Study Group organizes lectures and presentations for the ex-pat community about Lao culture so foreigners can get to know more about the place they’re living in.

I learned while away that our first presentation would be tied to the launch of a new cookbook “Food from Northern Laos” by Dorothy Culloty with photos by Kees Sprengers. Amazingly, I had already been in touch with Dorothy via my friend in Luang Prabhang, Caroline Gaylard, of the restaurant “Tamarind”. Caroline had told me that Dolly – as she’s known to her friends – had beat her to the punch with a super book on Lao cooking yet to be published. I got in touch with Dolly and she e-mailed me enticing chunks of the book along with her husband Kees’s luscious pictures. So now they’d been published and I was about to meet them, talk food and get my very own copy of the book. How serendipitous was that? http://www.foodfromnorthernlaos.com

Besides talking about Lao food and showing slides from the book, they also prepared a table full of Lao-style hors d’oeuvres for us all to nibble on afterwards. Meanwhile, their “adopted granddaughter”, Khamsouk Philatorm, a young woman from the Khmu ethnic group who had just taken her first plane ride down from the north hauling local ingredients, demonstrated Lao cooking techniques like slicing banana flowers and how to peel rattan. You can eat the core of rattan raw or cooked. Yes, I do mean that stuff you make furniture out of.

I took my autographed copy of “Food from Northern Laos” home and started cooking up a storm. Every recipe was a winner! The book includes not just classic Lao fare like Or Lam and Laap but also dishes from, and information about, the various ethnic groups that live in the north. The Tai Dam or Black Tai came from Vietnam in the nineteenth century and the women are particularly renowned for their weaving. Here’s the recipe for:

Tai Dam Pork Stew

Ingredients

4 cups of water
1 t salt
2 T oil
1 stalk lemongrass – trimmed to 10 cm (4 in)
2 chilies (or more to taste)
½ tsp chicken stock powder
pinch of salt
200 grams (6 oz) thinly sliced pork
1/3 cup roasted rice powder
1 bunch Chinese flowering greens cut in 5 cm (2 inch) pieces
1 bunch dill – two fingers width.

Method:

Put the water and salt in a medium pot and bring to a boil
Meanwhile, heat a wok or frying pan. Add the oil and when it is hot, stir fry the lemongrass, chilies and sliced pork for a minute. Season with salt and chicken stock powder Fry 1 minute more until the meat changes is color and is lightly cooked.
Add the meat mixture to the boiling water, reduce heat, and then simmer for five minutes or longer for really tough meat.
As the meat becomes tender, stir in the ground, roasted rice. Stir constantly, very gently simmer the stew as the rice thickens it (at least 7 minutes).
Add the Chinese greens. Simmer. Remove the stew from the heat when the vegetable stems are cooked but still crisp (about 3 minutes). Taste and adjust salt.
Cut the dill into 5 cm (2in) lengths and stir in.

What makes this dish uniquely scrumptious is the roasted rice powder. It gives the stew a nutty flavor. To make it you dry roast rice - either sticky or plain - until it is a deep golden brown and then pound it up in your mortar and pestle or use a coffee grinder. Making this gave me a kind of déjà vu of making gumbo. I always get nervous making the roux. Is it brown enough now? Or not enough? If I don’t take it off now will it suddenly burn and taste bitter? But then I thought, well, it’s only a couple of tablespoons of rice. If you mess it up you can start again.

At the beginning of the book there is an exhaustive listing of Lao ingredients – with photos, the English name (if any), Latin name, Lao name transliterated and Lao name in Lao script. By toting the book to my market ladies round the corner I was able to communicate that I was looking for say, prickly ash berries, Lat. Zanthoxylum rhetsa, Lao mak ken.

These taste a lot like Szechuan peppercorns and may, in fact, be a wild variety, but they seemed more zingy to me. Maybe because they’re fresher. You want to get rid of the little black seeds because they’re bitter. I used them in this recipe from the Tai Lue people.

Pork Spicy Salad, Muang Sing Style

Ingredients

250 g (1/2 lb) lean pork finely chopped
¾ cup carrot chopped into ½ cm (1/4 in) dice
½ cup shallot, chopped
3 T duck fat or vegetable oil
2 T garlic, chopped
2 T fish sauce
½ - 1 t chicken stock powder
1 – 2 t chili pepper, ground
1 – 2 t prickly ash berry (mak ken), ground
2 – 3 T Vietnamese mint (or a small handful each of small coriander and mint)
1 medium green chili, finely chopped (or more to taste)

Method

Prepare all the chopped ingredients except the herbs.
Heat a wok. Add the duck fat or oil. When hot, add the chopped garlic followed by the minced pork, fish sauce and instant stock.
Stir fry for 2 minutes until opaque.
Toss in the chopped carrot and shallots and swoosh about with a wok spoon or spatula. Sprinkle in the chili pepper and mak ken. Mix. Keep stir frying until the carrot and shallots are lightly cooked and the pork is done. Taste and adjust seasonings if needed.
Remove the wok from the heat. Finely chop the herbs and mix into dish. Picture of dish.

One of the dishes Dolly, Kees and Khamsouk made for the Cultural Study Group presentation was a dish of the Akha people. Originally from Yunnan, China and Burma they migrated to northern Laos starting in 1850. The women still wear the most beautiful costumes. Here’s a photo taken by Kees.

This recipe for Akha pork balls presented a couple of challenges. One of the ingredients was “a sprig of young guava leaves (optional)”. Not knowing how to say that in Lao, I was about to leave it out when my neighbor, Gwyn, who’s lived in Southeast Asia for many years pointed out that I had two trees in my garden! Here’s my guava leaves with the Mekong in the background.

The other difficulty was locating “1 Tablespoon of pig or duck blood” to use as a binder. Fortunately, Dolly had anticipated this and suggested substituting “1 Tablespoon of egg yolk” which I did. Here’s the recipe.

Akha Pork Balls

Ingredients

1 – 1 ½ C minced pork
3 cloves garlic, peeled
½ t salt
1 small green chili (not bird’s eye chili)
¾ - 1 t stock powder
1 sprig young guava leaves (optional)
3 T mint
3 T sawtooth herb, finger width cluster chopped
3 small spring onions, whites and greens, chopped
3 T Vietnamese mint, finger-width bunch, chopped or 3 small coriander plants, stalk and green, chopped (use if no Vietnamese mint)
1 T pig or duck blood (substitute 1 tablespoon egg yolk)
1 C hot water

Method

Pound the garlic, chili, salt and instant stock together with a mortar and pestle for a minute. Add the herbs and then pound the mixture together until thoroughly blended. Add the minced pork and pound again for a least five minutes. Pounding breaks down the meat fibers and make for light meat balls which stick together. Taste and add more salt if needed. Add the duck blood or egg yolk and mix together.
Put the hot water in a small pot. Roll pieces of mixture into 2 cm (3/4 in) balls. Place them in the water as the balls are rolled. This stops the balls from breaking up. Set the pot on the fire, cover and simmer for up to 15 minutes until the meat balls are cooked through. Top up the water if the water levels gets too low and the meat balls start to stick to the pot. Remove from heat and transfer balls to a bowl.

Sawtooth herb was one of the mystery leaves from “Detective Story”. Eryngium foetidum. I find it reminiscent of fresh coriander but more so. I think you could use more fresh coriander instead if you can’t find it.

I found the Vietnamese mint at the market by showing the photo to the woman I buy most of my veggies from. She went around the market yelling (in Lao) “So who here’s got Vietnamese mint” until a bunch was found for me. I love my market and the women in it. But more on that later.

With apologies to Dolly, I always leave out the stock powder she calls for since it’s mostly MSG and it doesn’t agree with me.

There’s so much more I want to try. A dish with dried fermented bamboo shoots. A chili paste with freshwater crab. A smoked fish stew with apple eggplants. Every day I wander past the vendors at the market to see if I can buy some obscure ingredient – water bottle gourd, rattan, fiddlehead ferns, acacia leaves, etc. If I’m lucky I snatch up my find and head back to “The Treehouse”, crack open this definitive tome, and start chopping and pounding my little heart out.

Strange Fruit

2010-06-05T15:11:00.002+07:00

There’s zero cooking involved in this post but I thought you might like to take a look at some of the exotic tropical fruit common here but hard to find elsewhere.

Here’s a Vientiane institution that New York’s health crusading mayor Michael Bloomberg would whole heartedly embrace. It’s the fruit cart guy. Everyday he and others like him wheel unmotorized carts around the neighborhood dinging their little bells to announce their arrival. He sells fruit and things that are closely related to fruit - like corn on the cob - as snacks which Laotians buy, well, literally by the cartload.

He’s also a good barometer of what’s in season since he certainly doesn’t have the capital to invest in high end imported items. All this produce is sold with a little packet of dipping mix made up of chili, salt, sugar and MSG. Today we have watermelon, sour plums, corn and this:

This is the seed pod of the lotus (nelumbo nucifera). The lotus is sacred in Buddhism and represents the beauty of enlightenment rising from the muck of the pond. And it’s all edible, roots, leaves, stems and pods. At first I found these seeds way too bitter to be enjoyable but then I discovered that there’s an outer skin which if peeled off leaves a tasty little morsel. It’s like peeling a fava bean and may be the Lao equivalent of sunflower seeds. Something you fiddle around with while chatting to friends or watching TV.

As I write, rambutan, (nephilium lappaceum) is here in abundance. Aren’t they fabulous looking? You peel off the fuzzy red outside to reveal a litchi like fruit that is better than a litchi. Like a litchi, it has a small pit in the middle of it. The English, rambutan, actually comes from Malay and means hairy. They’re addictive.

This may be my absolute favorite tropical fruit. Mangosteen (garfinia mangostana). Also very much in season right now. You peel off the purplish skin which reveals four or five pure white segments, botanically known as “arils” which have a sweet, evanescent, perfume-like flavor.

This has to win the prize for most gaudy and glamorous in the fruit category. Dragon fruit (hylocereus undatus). Unfortunately, it’s flavor doesn’t quite match up to the visuals. It’s a bit bland with a whole lot of kiwi like little black seeds in it. I once saw it growing in Vietnam and it was amazing. Imagine a tree that looks like a Christmas cactus but instead of an orange flower at the end of the serrated succulent leaves one of these is hanging.

Right after I penned the above words I went on line and found this photo of a dragon fruit plant and guess what? It is a cactus! One which hails from central America. Which seems odd since I’ve never seen it for sale in southern Mexico where it originally comes from. N.B. My pal, Bill Pandolf, who lives in Veracruz, Mexico, wrote that the plant grows wild there and is pollinated by night flying fruit bats. The flower opens at night and dies the next day. He sometimes sees the fruit in springtime in small country markets for just a day or two and then they’re gone.

Obviously these are mangos but the difference in Laos is that people like to eat them green. My landlady, Nang, gave me these which she’d just picked off her tree. The Lao like to use the green mango just like green papaya. Peeled, shredded and tossed with chilies, fish sauce, lime, garlic and a pinch of sugar. But they also eat it as is. Lao find the sour puckery quality thirst quenching.

Pomelo is like a grapefruit on steroids – known appropriately in Latin as citrus maxima - but it’s not as bitter and also not quite as juicy. It has a thicker rind and you definitely have to peel off the membrane around each section because it’s too tough. Bruce, my husband, has really gotten into a fruit salad mix of this and fresh pineapple, along with Chinese pears, watermelon, and topped with banana. Pomelo is also used in Vietnam in cold beef salads although I haven’t encountered that here as of yet.

I first had custard or sugar apples (annona squamosa) in India. The people we were staying with in Mysore had two trees by the front door. As with all fruit, they were so much more delicious straight from the bush than these I bought here in the market. It’s kind of a pain to eat as well - the skin is mealy so you have to gently pry it off and the flesh inside has lots of small pits that you have to keep spitting out as you go along which doesn’t make for very attractive eating.

Here is the infamous, kind of scary looking, durian (durio zibethinus). The durian has an extremely rank odor which grows stronger as its season progresses. Airlines in southeast Asia forbid it being brought into the passenger cabin and Singapore has banned it being transported on the subway. Way too smelly. You either love it or hate it. But I find the fruit - here pre-peeled by the market vendor – to be actually quite tasty.

When I bought this I thought I was getting a kind of funky looking fig, but it’s not. It’s mak thong. I have no idea what the English or Latin might be. When I cut it open it was another example of a thick skinned fruit with a litchi-like core. Again, quite sour. It was o.k. but I wouldn’t seek it out.

I saw a big pile of these for sale by the side of the road . I haven’t seen them in the market. They’re the fruit of a type of palm tree so perhaps that makes them more of a nut, although the Lao name is mak than and mak is the Lao language classifier for all things fruit. The woman who sold them had to give them a considerable number of machete whacks to get them open.

Here’s the outside and inside. After busting open the fruit/nut you retrieve this white oval lozenge which itself has to be peeled. I have to say that as glamorous as all this seemed the flavor was practically non-existent and certainly not worth the effort. I’m sticking with mangos and pineapple and those wonderful mangosteen.

Jennifer & Another Thing from Mr. Sing

2010-05-23T17:22:00.006+07:00

I opened my email the other day and was thrilled to find a letter from Jennifer Davidson. Ms. Davidson is the daughter of Alan Davidson and the co-editor of “Traditional Recipes of Laos” by Phia Sing the royal chef whose recipes I tried to recreate in my last blog. Getting a letter from Ms. Davidson felt somewhat akin to receiving an answer from a message in a bottle thrown into the Mekong. I had contacted by email the publishers of the cookbook, Prospect Books, and they, very sweetly, gave me her home address in Switzerland. There’s no mail delivery pickup system in Laos, so I wrote a letter and took it to the central post office, bought a stamp and handed it over. You just never know, right? I wanted her to know how much I appreciated her and her father’s work and secretly hoped she would look at my blog and enjoy it. Which given her enthusiastic response I felt she had.

But it seems I had made a terrible mistake. The picture I downloaded from Google Images of Alan Davidson wasn’t Alan Davidson at all. It was another guy, Andrew Graham-Dixon, the TV presenter and art historian who produced a documentary on Davidson. Jennifer very generously took the time to copy and send me three photos of the real Alan Davidson. They’re all great but I like this black and white one the best - it feels as though it comes from another time. Just like Laos.

One of the great benefits of living in another country for a while is getting to appreciate the seasonality of food. Here in Laos we have two seasons, wet & dry. Wet runs more or less from the end of May to the end of September so thus far I’ve really only experienced the dry season. But it’s beginning to rain intermittently and subsequently bamboo shoots of all shapes and sizes are showing up in the market. The Mekong is already full enough that barges can navigate it. Therefore I knew I only had a short time left to sample a great Lao delicacy - mawk khai - ant eggs - only available in the dry season.

Red weaver ants build their nests high up in mango trees. The nest is a complex structure of twigs, bark and leaves and people harvest them in the wild by knocking them down with a long pole into a bucket of water. The eggs sink to the bottom and the ants who, needless to say go crazy, drown in the water. At least that’s the plan. Some usually escape to sting the forager - although it’s not an excruciating pain – but it does go a long way to explain why the price for a handful or so is quite expensive by Lao standards.

I knew mine were fresh because there will still a few struggling ants clinging to life in the batch I bought at the market. My housekeeper, Leh, showed me how to clean them by rinsing and soaking them and getting out the bits and pieces of leaf and twig along with the weaver ant carcasses.

It was then that I started to get cold feet. What, you exclaim, the woman who ate steamed wasp larvae and fried bamboo caterpillars?! But yup this picture was starting to creep me out. First I tried pretending to myself it was picked over blue fin crab meat. But that didn’t work – it really does look like larvae, doesn’t it? Finally I pulled myself together. You eat fish eggs, don’t you? You pay big bucks for caviar and lap it up. Come on, give it a go.

But how to prepare them? I have a recipe for ant egg soup from Natacha Du Pont De Bie’s book “Ant Egg Soup” but it seemed that fish was the primary flavor in that dish and I really wanted to taste the ant eggs. So back to Phia Sing who has a recipe for ant eggs steamed in banana leaves. A mixture of ant eggs, finely pounded pork with shallots, beaten chicken egg and chopped scallion leaves gets wrapped in the ubiquitous banana leaf and steamed. This worked out o.k. but I felt the pork was getting in the way of appreciating the ant egg flavor which seemed slightly sour.

Bruce, my husband, had the brilliant idea to leave out the pork and make a kind of soufflé, separating the chicken eggs, beating the whites to stiff peaks and folding in the yolks mixed with ant eggs, scallion leaves and pounded shallot. Here’s the fluffy pre-steamed mass.

This was the delicious result, and the analogy to caviar is not far off. You know how when you get really fresh caviar the individual eggs seem to pop in your mouth? It’s the same with ant eggs which, by the way, are also very nutritious, containing multiple B vitamins and lots of trace minerals. And they have indeed a slightly sour tang to them which is a feature of Lao food. The Lao have a hankering for sour things which they find refreshing, and bitter things which they believe are good for your health. Sour I can handle but bitter reminds me of my Italian friend’s reply to my query about her three spoons of sugar in one demi-tasse of coffee. “JoJo, life is bitter enough”.

Cooking with Mr. Sing

2010-04-19T17:12:00.000+07:00

I really only have one Lao cookbook. “Traditional Recipes of Laos” the collection of Phia Sing the royal chef from Luang Prabhang edited by Alan and Jennifer Davidson. So I resolved to hone my home cooking skills by recreating recipes from the book. My first idea was to go through the book and cook everything in it. But even weeding out those with ingredients that seemed too hard to get even in Laos – “pickled fish roe membrane” or “dried quail (matured until almost moldy)” – there were still over 100 recipes to try.

I decided to narrow the field to recipes that would epitomize different cooking methods and techniques and see what I could learn from that. Here goes.

Recipe #10 Sousi Pa Gnon – A ‘Hot’ Dish of Small Catfish

The second ingredient is written as follows “1 fully grown coconut, split open – grate the meat and squeeze two extractions of coconut milk from it”. This is the kind of instruction that makes me want to turn the page. Have you ever actually split open and grated the meat of a coconut? It’s hard and it takes forever. But here in Laos there is a magic machine that leads you to read on. Click here to see it at work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsSnBtqG8xA

Then all you have to do is pick out the bigger brown shell bits; add some lukewarm water and squeeze away until you get a nice thick milk – actually more like a cream. You drain and reserve that and re-squeeze the coconut with more water until you get the second extraction. A bonus is that your hands get all soft and lovely from the coconut oil.

I couldn’t understand Mr. Sing’s initial instruction: “Put the first extraction of coconut in a wok on the fire until it becomes creamy”. I mean, isn’t it creamy already? But the next phase of the recipe is to fry a pounded mixture of shallots and chili peppers in it. I realized that I had to reduce the coconut cream, getting rid of its water, until all that was left was the oil as a frying medium. Cool.

So I did that, and then added the fish, the second extraction of coconut milk some kaffir lime leaves; salt and fish sauce. Here it is with a handful of coriander and scallions on top.

Recipe #18 Keng Som Kalampi – Sour Cabbage Soup
Recipe #64 Jeow Bong – Bong Sauce

For a royal cookbook #18 is a very homespun recipe. Pork bones; cabbage; scallions; lemon grass and two fresh tomatoes all boiled up in water until the veggies are cooked. The reason I made it is because it’s supposed to be served with jeow bong. Remember the water buffalo skin being grilled in the fire in the jeow blog? That’s part of recipe #64. The rest of 64’s ingredients include 10 dried chili peppers grilled until brittle; 5 small shallots and 5 small heads of garlic blackened in the fire; 2 slices of galingale. Once these are all pounded together to a paste you stir in the previously grilled and then salt-water-soaked buffalo skin bits. Bruce, my husband, felt that the chewy texture of the buffalo skin made the flavors of all the other ingredients stay longer in the mouth. And the punchy flavors of the jeow were balanced by the simplicity of the soup.

Recipe #44 Kanab Pa Gnon – Catfish Grilled in a Banana Leaf

In Laos it seems that everything that isn’t actually grilled over an open flame is grilled in a banana leaf. Here’s a market stand devoted to the sale of nothing but. And don’t try to buy just a couple of leaves – you have to get the whole pack or else they get very huffy.

This recipe mixes small catfish with finely chopped pork belly; pounded lemon grass, chilies, shallots and pork cracklings; plus some scallions and sweet basil leaves. I guess the pork is to add some fat to the dish. You wrap it all in a double layer of banana leaf and grill it. I couldn’t find small catfish so I bought a bigger one and filleted it and cut it up. But I have to admit I really don’t like the flavor of catfish. It’s got a muddy aftertaste that a lot of river fish seem to have. I’ve decided from now on to stick with tilapia which, although a bit boring, nevertheless isn’t a bottom feeder.

Recipe #27 Pa Fok – Minced Fish Cooked in Packets

This was a real winner. Lots of pounding going on but so worth it. Pound together skinless fish fillet (tilapia); shallots; black peppercorns until a really sticky mush. Then stir in some coconut milk and beaten egg plus fresh coriander and some fish sauce. I know these directions are vague but so’s the recipe. Then you spoon the mixture into banana leaves. By the way, in order to make your banana leaf more pliable, you run the shiny side over an open flame to soften it. I learned that in Veracruz, Mexico along with my tamale in a banana leaf folding and toothpick closing technique which came in handy here. Then you take all your banana leaf packets and steam them for a while – like 15/20 minutes. I know, it really is a very vague recipe. But what you get is divine – like a Laotian quenelle.

Recipe 54b Ua No Mai – Stuffed Bamboo Shoots

I got a kind of false start on this one. I found fresh bamboo shoots, already peeled, at the market, brought them home and cooked them. Bamboo shoots are evidently quite bitter and despite cooking them for over half an hour they were still pretty hard to take. I went online and learned that the Japanese cook them using the rice soaking water to dispel the bitterness so I tried that and it seemed to work. But I couldn’t go on to the next step since I had the wrong kind of bamboo – too skinny to stuff.

I needed fatter shoots which could be slashed through the middle making a kind of pocket into which a mixture of minced pork, shallots and scallions gets smushed. Mr. Sing suggested making the slits with a needle but we used a box knife. They probably didn’t have box knives in Luang Prabhang back then. What a pain – this slashing/smushing is the kind of fiddly cooking assembly that I loath. Mr. Sing prescribed wrapping these stuffed shoots in banana leaves, steaming them and then batter frying them but that seemed like overkill. I was, however, a bit afraid that the whole incredibly labor intensive thing would disintegrate in the oil – so I floured them first and then fried them. Mr. Sing would have you fry them in lard but I used vegetable oil . They probably didn’t have vegetable oil in Luang Prabhang back then either. Unfortunately, they turned out to be absolutely scrumptious but if I ever make these for you you’ll know that I really, really love you to pieces.

Jeow

2010-03-19T11:08:00.001+07:00

People often ask me what I think is the main difference between Lao and Vietnamese food. My first answer used to be that Vietnam has thousands of kilometres of coastline so seafood plays a huge part in the cuisine. Laos is landlocked so river fish is the staple here.

But recently I went back to Luang Prabhang and took two cooking classes. One run by the restaurant “Tamarind” and the other a one-on-one with the doyenne of Lao food, Vandara. After these lessons, I’d have to say the use of the mortar (kok) and pestle (sak) - which figured in almost all the food we prepared - may be more germane.

There’s even a whole repertoire of pounded dishes made to go with sticky rice called jeow (rhymes with Day-O like the Harry Belafonte song) whose recipes are actually ones you can reproduce at home. Dear reader, do I hear an electronic sigh of “finally” exhaled down the information highway as you read these words?

I cadged the following four recipes from Joy Ngueamboupha and Caroline Gaylard who published them in their charming cookbook “Tamarind’s Little Book of Jeow” Here’s a bowl of jeow mak len, a tomato salsa which, except for the fish sauce, could be served with a bag of tortilla chips at your next Cinco de Mayo party. I always wonder what Old World cuisine was like before 1492 when the chili was introduced from meso-America. Can you imagine Southeast Asian or Indian food, or practically any cuisine, without it? It seems there’s a substance in chilies - capsicum - which stimulates endorphin production (the feel good hormone) and explains why people rapidly become addicted to them. Chocolate, another New World food, has the same properties.

This is jeow mak keua – eggplant dip. The eggplants and chilies are grilled before pounding and with a slurp of olive oil and substituting mint for coriander you could be eating this in Turkey. Of course, no fish sauce. Although if you were eating it in ancient Rome 2,000 years ago, no chilies, but there’d definitely have been fish sauce. The Romans called it garum and chucked it into everything. It was so popular, that the overwhelming, noxious odor of rotting fish guts led the Roman government to outlaw the manufacture of garum in the home.

Here’s my sak with pounded fresh ginger soon to have the addition of pounded peanuts and then lightly pounded pork cracklings. Jeow king. Nothing grilled; just a lot of elbow grease. This was great with barbecued chicken and sticky rice. The leftovers I mixed with ground pork and then stuffed into wonton wrappers for wonton soup. I feel that if I’ve thrown food away – I’ve somehow deeply failed.

Here’s jeow si khai whose principal flavor component is pounded lemon grass. This we ate together with little pieces of poached tilapia wrapped up in lettuce leaves. The mixture would also make a super stuffing for a grilled fish.

O.K., I lied! This is an essential ingredient for the classic Luang Prabhang jeow bong and you can’t make this at home. But how could I resist a recipe that calls for “ ½ a strip of dried water buffalo skin, grilled until done, then scraped smooth, cut into thin small slices and soaked in salt water”? I got the recipe from Phia Sing the royal chef whose hand written collection was published by Alan Davidson as “Traditional Recipes of Laos”. But how do you know when it's "done"?

Bo, my gatekeeper, who is rapidly becoming my sous chef, demonstrated that cooking water buffalo skin can’t be accomplished by placing it on a grill the way we westerners would do. No, you thrust it into the coals until it turns black and all the hairs have burned away. Then you bang it with your pestle to get all the charred bits off. In fact, the Lao “grill” everything right in the fire which produces the smoky flavor that is such an integral part of Lao food.

This trio is another Bo recipe, who, by the way, also taught me that you can use the outside surface of your mortar as a knife sharpener! Bo’s jeow is about as basic as you can get. Grilled chilies, garlic and shallots peeled and pounded. Fish sauce, natch, and then, to Bo’s taste, a whole lot of MSG. That led me to the internet to find out exactly what it is.

MSG was created by a Japanese chemist, Kikuna Ikeda, in 1907. It was patented in 1909 and here’s a bottle from that same company, Aji-no-moto, still being manufactured today. Wikipedia states that it’s a salt which appears naturally in food – previously extracted from seaweed and wheat gluten - but now from either fermented sugar beets, sugar cane or molasses. It goes on to say that there is no real evidence supporting the claim that it makes you feel physically peculiar when you eat it. But, come on Wicki, we all know that’s not true. Or maybe just us falangs (Lao for foreigner – like gringo) have a problem with it.

Natacha du Pont de Bie in “Ant Egg Soup”, her book about traveling through Laos and learning about Lao food, writes that "Bo’s jeow” was also the former King of Laos favorite jeow. Unlike Emperor Bo Dai of Vietnam who lived out his days in Paris, or King Sihanouk of Cambodia who never really lost power, the politically naïve King Savang Vatthana was not so fortunate. After the revolution in 1975, he and his wife, Queen Khamponi, and Crown Prince Vong Savang were all sent to “re-education” camps in the northeast of Laos where after many years they finally died from malnutrition and neglect. Such a simple jeow befits what seems to have been a simple man.

Bo and the King’s Jeow
12 small fresh green chilies (or less if you can’t take the heat)
4 cloves of garlic
3 small shallots
salt

Grill the first three ingredients. Remove the stalks from the chilies and peel the garlic and shallots. Pound them together with salt to taste.

I make this and then fold it into a fresh tomato sauce for pasta. Zowie!

Jeow si khai

Pound one fresh chili, one clove of garlic and a pinch of salt to a paste.
Finely chop 2 or 3 stalks of lemongrass and then pound them in until softened.
Mix in two teaspoons of lime juice; a half teaspoon sugar and a teaspoon of fish sauce.

Jeow king
Pound 100 grams of peeled and chopped fresh ginger
Add two tablespoons of peanuts and pound thoroughly.
Add ½ teaspoon of salt and 30 grams of pork cracklings then pound until well mixed.
Add fish sauce to taste.

Jeow mak keua
Prick three small Japanese eggplants, one fresh chili and four cloves of garlic. Grill them until charred. Peel.

Pound chili; ¾ teaspoon of salt and the garlic to a paste. Add eggplant and ½ cup chopped coriander. Pound again until a soft paste. Add fish sauce to taste.

Jeow mak len
Pound four cloves of garlic, a pinch of salt and one fresh chili to a paste. Roughly chop eight medium tomatoes. Add tomatoes to mortar and pound a bit to blend flavors.

Put a teaspoonful of vegetable oil in a pan and lightly fry the roughly chopped white part of five or six scallions. Then add the tomato mixture to the pan and cook, stirring continuously, until they have broken down.

Add the roughly chopped green part of the scallions, then ¼ cup of chopped coriander and cook for only a minute.

Add a little dash of fish sauce and a small squeeze of lime. If it seems too sour add a pinch of sugar.

I tried grilling the tomatoes before chopping them and I like the extra flavor that gives.

A Detective Story

2010-02-05T13:08:00.008+07:00

A quasi vegetarian friend of mine wrote vis-à-vis my blog “I’m beginning to think there’s not much I could or would eat in Laos”. So, realizing that maybe I’ve been concentrating a bit too much on odd proteins, I resolved to return to the market and check out the greens.

Here’s an example of a veggie stand where you can get all sorts of Southeast Asian things you know like Thai basil, lemon grass, coriander, lime leaves, etc. and a hell of a lot of things you haven’t a clue what they are. I bought a bunch of every single mysterious green thing I could find. I brought them home and asked my Lao next door neighbor, Pa, what they were called and, as she told me, I tried to write - using the western alphabet - the word the way it sounded to me. Then my husband, Bruce, took photos of each individual leafy thing and we e mailed those pictures labeled with my Lao transliteration to the always helpful Caroline Gaylard and Joy Ngeuamboupha of “Tamarind” restaurant in Luang Prabhang. Could they send me their identification and possible use for same? Which they swiftly did. So here’s what that whole process and some time on the internet taught me.

Plus this guy. Here’s someone I would really have liked to have met. Alan Davidson. A serious “foodie” before the word was coined. He is most well known for writing and compiling “Oxford Companion to Food”. As the British Ambassador to Laos from 1973 until 1975 he gathered information for two seminal works on Lao food. One “Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos” includes the Lao as well as the Latin name for fish from the Mekong. There are also exquisite drawings; general info about each species; recipes etc. Most importantly, for my project, were line drawings of herbs, fruits and vegetables plus Lao/Latin names. In short, a wealth of information.

Like this. Because of Davidson I now know that the westernized Lao name is phak hom tet and the Latin is eryngium foetidum. In English it’s known as saw tooth herb. I first met this plant in Mexico where it’s used a great deal. It’s a similar taste to fresh coriander but you can put it into soups and stews without the flavor disappearing in the cooking process. In Laos it’s served raw with the ubiquitous plate of greens for your pho. If you hate coriander you’ll really hate this.

Here’s another Davidson ID. Phak tam ling (melothria heterophylla). No English word as far as I know. Another of Davidson’s Lao achievements was saving the handwritten recipe book of the royal chef of Luang Prabang. A man named Phia Sing. Davidson borrowed the notebook from Sing and had it photocopied and then later arranged for its publication as “Traditional Recipes of Laos”. With the overthrow of the monarchy in 1975 the original has since been lost.

Believe it or not these are little baby eggplants. Mak kheng. They’re no bigger than a large pea. I made Phia Sing’s recipe for chicken stew - Or Sod Kai - which calls for both phak tam ling and mak kheng. Scroll down for the recipe.

This is a vine leaf – phak ya nang (tiliacora triandra) . The leaves are pounded then put in water and the resulting liquid is added to soups to remove bitterness from other vegetables especially bamboo shoots. I didn’t even know fresh bamboo was bitter since I’ve only ever eaten it from cans. My neighbor, Pa, helped me make a bamboo soup using phak ya nang. Scroll down for the recipe.

The red calyx of this plant is what Caroline and Joy use to make their delicious drink, katiep. Mak som po dee (hibiscus sabdariff). Rosella in English. I’ve only ever seen it before dried as hibiscus flowers. In Mexico it’s flor de Jamaica. Whereas in Jamaica it’s called sorrel. It’s packed with vitamin C and is probably known to you as that zesty kick in Red Zinger tea. You can eat the leaves too – they’re kind of lemony tasting.

Pa calls this phak bai som seua. Caroline and Joy call it phak som pborn. Route 13 which connects Vientiane to Luang Prabhang was only fully paved in 1997. Even today it’s a full day’s drive. So it’s no wonder different towns have different names for the same thing. This feathery plant comes from a tree - Acacia pennata. I tracked the Latin down on the internet and felt really pleased with myself afterwards. It’s used as a souring agent in soups. Also said to be big in omelets in Thailand. I haven’t tried it yet.

I put this one in just because it looks so pretty. The Luang Prabhang name phak khai hom translates as frog’s egg vegetable. Can’t find any more info on it. It grows in rice paddies and is used (yet again) in soup.

As Caroline and Joy so gracefully put it. "Phak com kadao – com means bitter. They believe if you eat a lot of it it’s like an energy medicine in particular inspiring the penis…” Perhaps, therefore, it was appropriate that it was for sale right next to the lettuce, itself considered an aphrodisiac in Ancient Egypt. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.

Needless to say, I offer these recipes realizing it is nigh impossible to reproduce them anywhere other than in Laos!

Phia Sing's Recipe #24
(from Traditional Recipes of Laos)

Or Sod Khai – Chicken Stew

1 chicken cut into pieces
3 sweet young round eggplants, sliced vertically
2 large fresh chili peppers
2 small shallots
1 stalk of lemon grass
cooked sticky rice – a quantity about equal to your thumb – mash it together and grill it until it is golden (this is called khao jee)
20 very small eggplant (mak kheng)
1 handful phak tam ling
1 handful hed bod or hed khao (mushrooms)
salt and padek or fish sauce
basil leaves
chopped scallion leaves

Chop chilies, shallots and lemon grass finely and then pound them together in a mortar until a paste.
Put 1½ pints of water in a pot and place it on the fire. When the water comes to a boil put in the chicken pieces and the pounded ingredients. When chicken is cooked add sliced eggplants, phak tam ling, the mushrooms, the piece of grilled rice, and either fish sauce or pa dek (strained). When the larger eggplants and the phak tam ling are cooked add the mak kheng. Taste and check the saltiness, then add the basil leaves and take the pot off the fire.
Serve the dish in a bowl, garnished with the scallion leaves and accompanied by a variety of fresh raw vegetables (such as cabbage, cucumber and yard-long beans).

JoJo’s notes: I couldn’t buy the hed bod or hed khao mushrooms since they seem to only be available in the rainy season. So I substituted fresh straw mushrooms, washed and sliced in half.

The sweet young round eggplants you can buy here look like green golf balls. And are indeed sweet, you can eat them raw.

Pak tam ling turned out to have a very gentle anise flavor. Similar to braised fennel.

I also think the mak kheng should be added a bit earlier. Not right before you take the pot of the fire. They seemed a bit harder than they should be. Maybe add them in with everything else or just slightly later.

Pa Thongsanuan's Bamboo Soup - Kheng gnaw mai

1 kilo bamboo shoots thickly sliced
2 handfuls raw sticky rice
½ kilo oyster mushrooms, cleaned and thickly sliced
10 small fresh chilies
1 stalk of lemongrass peeled and smashed
2 cups phak ya nang juice
1 tablespoon shrimp paste
3 tablespoons sieved pa dek
1 chicken bouillon cube
salt to taste
2 small bunches phak kha yang, washed and cleaned.

Blanch bamboo shoots in boiling water and then drain and rinse. With the flat side of a kitchen knife or cleaver smash shoots.
Soak the sticky rice in water to cover for 20 minutes.
Return shoots to a pan with water to cover plus smashed lemon grass. Add phak ya nang juice. Bring to a simmer over medium heat.
Drain soaked sticky rice and pound with chilies until a paste, then dilute with water and add to pan.
Add shrimp paste to pan.
Sieve pa dek directly into pan.
Add mushrooms, bouillon cube and salt to taste.
Simmer for five minutes
Turn off heat and add phak kha yang

Serve over rice.

JoJo's Notes: phak ya nang juice is sold here in the market already prepared. Pa dek is Laotian fish sauce. There’s a picture of it in the “What Makes It Lao Food” blog. You sieve it because it still has bits of fish and bone in it.

This is phak kha yang. According to Caroline and Joy it is only popular in bamboo soup in Vientiane. So don't try ordering it in Luang Prabhang.

The flavor of this dish is extremely distinctive and very reminiscent of Veracruz, Mexico’s hoja santa leaf. I don’t know if that’s because of the phak ya nang or phak kha yang or a combination of both.

Ping

2010-01-15T13:39:00.000+07:00

I’ve finally found a word I can say and have the Lao understand me. No struggling with the six tones. O.K., now, is that a high falling tone or a low falling tone? (The biggest problem being that I can’t actually hear the difference.) But if I say ping everybody gets it. Ping means barbecue and Laotians are absolutely mad for anything and everything cooked over a fire.

Here’s a relatively mundane selection of chicken (kai) on the right and pork (moo) on the left.

For dessert or a street snack you could try banana or sweet potato both nicely caramelized from the grill.

For an early evening nosh you could have a chicken foot kebab. The Chinese were incensed when President Obama levied a duty on Chinese tires and threatened to start charging import taxes on chicken. This seemed very odd to me. Why would the Chinese ship over American chickens? Then I learned that what the Asians crave is what we discard. The demand for odd bits like chicken feet and gizzards exceeds their production. I’ve tried chicken feet both here and in Italy and quite frankly I don’t get it. I think it must be a textural thing - perhaps the cartilaginous crunch.

As we head back into adventurous eating, here is, what, a “croak” of frogs? You can find frogs this size and other tiny itty-bitty ones all done to a turn. Thus far I have wimped out when it comes to frogs. Perhaps too many bad memories of having to partake of whole grilled little birds – guts and bones included – which are considered a delicacy in Italy. Once more it’s just crunch, crunch, crunch.

These vegetables – eggplants, garlic, shallots and chilies – are being grilled prior to being peeled and pounded to make a jaew. A jaew is a condiment served with a typical Laotian meal - a spicy dip for the sticky rice. There are endless varieties. With grilled mushrooms or shrimp paste or minced pork or even grilled water buffalo skin - but the blackened garlic, shallots and chilies always seem to be the foundation of the dish.

So much Lao food being cooked over charcoal it seemed imperative that we purchase our own. Here’s where we bought our charcoal stove, stand, tongs and grill. That set us back a whopping great $8. Some of the stoves are reinforced with tin cans taken from other sources. We picked one appropriately decorated with roosters and fish from what had originally been a large can of mackerel. The person who sold us our supplies was a transvestite. There are quite a few transvestites in Laos called khatoeys. The Lao are a very tolerant people and see them as a third sex. The person who sold us the actual charcoal was also a transvestite. Is this a khatoey niche trade?

Here’s our very own tilapia, pa ning, on the fire. Yet another use of that miracle plant – bamboo. I bought pieces at the market that the seller then split down the middle – but not all the way - with her girl machete. You slide the fish into the split and then tie it on with finer bamboo strings which you’ve soaked to make them pliable. Brilliant! The fish is easy to turn; doesn’t stick to the grill. Our gateman, Dui, showed us that you can even upend the fish onto it’s back so the thicker part gets cooked evenly with the thinner part.

Sindad is the Laotian idea of a great night out. And it certainly is. You get a hubcap shaped grill – kha tha - placed over burning coals set in a hole in your table. Then you choose what kind of very thinly sliced meat or fish you want. This comes on a plate with a piece of pork fat to grease the hubcap plus a host of fresh veggies, noodles, an egg and a bucket of broth. The broth goes into the rim of the hubcap to which you gradually add your veggies and noodles. Meat is cooked over the coals and then dipped into side dish sauces.

Click this link to watch our sindad being set up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCCmEuTJrW0

Korean friends here told us this is a Lao variation of Korean barbecue. The hubcap actually started out as a real hubcap. Koreans came to Southeast Asia and had to improvise with the closest thing they could find to the Korean hibachi-like original. Now kha tha are made here especially for sindad.

The Laotian version introduced the veggies and the broth. Your delicious finale is the egg cooked in the incredible broth you get after you’ve finished everything else. Perfect with a Beer Lao or, perhaps, two.

Fast Food

2009-12-30T13:38:00.017+07:00

Laotians and Italians have at least one thing in common. When an Italian gets up in the morning he doesn’t wonder whether he’ll have a bowl of pasta or not that day. It goes without saying – at some point - either lunch or dinner - he will indeed have a bowl of pasta. Laotians, likewise, from my observation, appear to have the same relationship to their noodle soup called pho. It seems they are always eating it. Either for breakfast or lunch or in between. They eat it at roadside stands or they get it to go or they, like these folks, eat it at a stall in the market. This is my favorite pho place in my favorite food market - Thong Khan Kham. Please note the crowd. When it comes to third world eating turnover is your friend.

Pho is actually a north Vietnamese invention.
The Vietnamese brought it with them when they themselves were brought here to run the bureaucracy of Laotian French Indochina. But it has a couple of Laotian twists. First there’s the plethora of condiments. Vietnamese pho, at least in my experience, is a much more pristine affair. Chili flavored fish sauce; fresh mint, basil, and coriander, perhaps a few more fresh chiles, a handful of bean sprouts, a squeeze of lime and some shrimp paste if you’re feeling brave. That’s about it. Here we have all that plus scallions; long beans; soy sauce; vinegar; chiles - whole pickled, crushed dried and crushed dried in oil; pickled ginger; peanut sauce and a real shocker – sugar. I originally thought it was MSG but it’s not. People actually dump soup spoons full of it into their broth!

And although you can easily get a pure beef pho, Laotians are big fans of innards. You pick out three or four bits you like with the tongs provided which are then chopped up by the proprietor. These and the fresh noodles become the foundation of your soup. Brit that I am, I adore this. I tend to go for a tongue, kidney, spleen combo.

But is this the future? Here’s the food court at the brand new mall in downtown Vientiane. I must admit it does have its advantages. It’s bright and air conditioned (kind of). There’s a series of sinks with soap, water and paper towels for washing your hands before eating. There are a half dozen TV’s all playing different Thai channels so you can keep up with soccer matches or new music videos. And then there’s the food.

Of course there’s plenty of pho - even one actually made by a cook from Vietnam. But then there’s a lot more. This is a Chinese noodle soup. Note the wontons and the pork tinged that weird color. You can also buy kimchee soup; fresh and deep fried spring rolls; pot roasted ham hock on rice, the list goes on and on. There’s even an Indian halall food stand for our visiting Muslim friends from Malaysia and Indonesia.

Payment is made with these coupons which you buy once you’ve decided what you want and how much it’s going to cost. I couldn’t figure out why the coupons but I think it might be a hygiene thing. Paper money is one of the most common spreaders of disease. It really is filthy lucre.

If you want to eat here every day the management suggests you buy a refillable mall food card the how to’s of which are explained in two languages. Lao and English. Each food stand has a debit machine for the card, skipping the need for coupons. Here’s the bus boy’s advertisement for same.

But, alas, could this truly be the future? This construction site is Vientiane Mall – Phase Two. The edifice going up - surrounded by the charming buildings which remain of the original Morning Market - will be finished next year. The billboard announcing its amenities includes the following:

1st Level consists of:
Units for Fast Foods of sizes: 100 m2; 192 m2; 368 m2; 504 m2 Expected to house Fast Food like - Pizza, Ice cream, Grill/Burger, Fried Chicken

Hunter/Gatherer

2009-12-20T13:07:00.002+07:00

Northern Laos is craggy, forested, mountainous country. There’s very little arable land and what there is is given over to sticky rice production. Water buffalo are highly prized and everyone seems to have some chickens and a couple of little black pigs running around the yard but other than that – plus kitchen gardens – you’re out in the forest looking for free food.

There’s a wonderful restaurant in Luang Prabhang run by an Australian (Caroline Gaylard) and her partner a Laotian (Joy Ngeuamboupha) called “Tamarind”. Joy does the cooking, Caroline’s front of house and they’re both dedicated to serving food that – although tailored for tourists – retains the flavors and spirit of Laotian cuisine.

But, for a really authentic Lao experience, you can order in advance and they’ll make you a dinner described as “Adventurous Lao Gourmet” a rare opportunity to try all sorts of foraged food. After a phone consultation a couple of days before in which I allowed that rodents made me a bit squeamish but everything else would be dandy we arrived for what turned out to be an unforgettable evening. Here’s what we had:

Sample Plate One – All to be eaten with loads of sticky rice.

A: Pak Goot which means curly vegetable. A kind of fern simply stir fried with oyster sauce.

B: Pounded river crab (mortar & pestle working hard here) with garlic and lashings of chilies. Absolutely scrumptious and one of our favorite tastes of the evening.

C: Soop pak. A Luang Prabhang style salad. Eggplant, sesame, and a vegetable that looks somewhat like okra (but isn’t) along with its bitter yellow flower, both called maak buap.

D: For those of you paying attention from earlier posts – here we have maak kok again – one of the secret ingredients in the papaya salad – only this time its been grilled on a barbecue and mashed. Bruce and I saw it “in situ” growing on a tree while trekking near the Chinese border. Yes, that’s right, JoJo actually went trekking!

E: Another big hit. Het bot. A kind of dried mushroom that seemed slightly sweet. Sautéed with kaffir lime leaves. I’ll try and bring some back to Italy since Caroline said you can buy it already dried in the market.

F: This is also a pre-prepared condiment. Pak Gat. A dried vegetable pounded with salt. Looks like pepper but it’s not. Great dabbed on your sticky rice.

G: River moss, dried in sheets with garlic and chilies and then flash fried is a very popular Luang Prabhang dish which you can also bring home. This is the same moss but not dried and, instead, mixed with fried garlic.

H: River moss again but this time steamed and mixed with dill, spring onion and wood from a kind of vine botanically related to the pepper family – sa khan. You can eat the piece of vine but I just sucked on the wood which has a spicy and, well, kind of woody taste.

Moving on to Sample Plate Two in which things start to get a bit stranger.

A: Here’s a relatively straightforward item. Ua no mai. Bamboo shoots stuffed with a mixture of pork, shallots, eggs and scallions and then batter fried. Delicious.

B: Next up, nor mai som. Pickled bamboo shoots with ginger. It seems that along with sustaining the nation on a daily basis sticky rice can also be used as a pickling agent. I haven’t a clue how. I’ll try and check that out.

C: Cured fish in sticky rice. The fish was tilapia not a native Lao fish but increasingly used all over the world because it’s so easy to farm. Originally from the Nile, I believe. This was pretty fishy – somewhere between the sour of a pickled herring and the salty of a kipper.

D: Here’s where it got a bit too weird, even for us. Fish guts - lower intestine fish guts with contents - if you get what I mean. Salty, intense. Makes sea urchin roe taste bland. A little dab on your sticky rice is all you need to get the idea. A teaspoon could flavor risotto for eight.

E: Moo foi. Pork marinated with turmeric, dried and then fluffed up. A nice break from the fish guts.

F: Sin dot. Laotian water buffalo jerky cured with ginger, galangal and sesame seeds. I’d bring some of that home, too.

G: Som Moo. Pork fermented using the ubiquitous sticky rice and then grilled in a banana leaf. Very tasty. A bit odd but the kind of odd you can get into.

H: In our phone conversation I’d asked Caroline if they could serve anything that was seasonal. So we got this smashing mushroom dish. Het bot – same as the dried ones – but fresh and stir fried with garlic and spring onion.

And last, but definitely not least, Sample Plate Three.

A: Steamed wasp larvae. You pick out the larvae from the comb and dip them in salt. If one of them is black you can still eat it but it’s more mature so you have to pick off the stinger before swallowing. This didn’t really taste like much of anything. It felt like the kind of thing you’d be grateful to have if your plane was downed in the jungle and you’d happened to survive and a friendly ethnic group was trying to feed you.

B: This was my Waterloo. It’s a waterbug, grilled. You crack it open and eat the insides. Maybe it was just too similar (if not exactly the same as) waterbugs that come out of tenement basements in New York's Lower East side when it rains, but to me it tasted like chicken livers gone bad.

C: Now here’s a bug you could learn to love. Bamboo caterpillar (Omphisa fuscidentalis) flash fried. It’s so popular here and in northern Thailand that the Thais are trying to farm it, but for now it can only be found in the wild. Tasty, tasty.

D: River eel threaded on bamboo sticks and grilled. You can eat the whole thing, bones and all. Bruce thought it would be a great thing to take on a picnic. Very, very nice.

E: Frog cooked in bamboo leaves. Also very good but unfortunately we were running out of steam, perhaps from an over indulgence in sticky rice with the first plates, which was a shame. It was a lovely dish.

F: Elephant ear leaves, pounded and steamed then grilled in banana leaf. Nice flavor. On our trek we learned that you can take the root of the elephant ear plant, dry it for a couple of days and then make it into a tea. If the tea tastes sweet – you’ve got malaria. If it tastes bitter - you don’t. Amazing what you can learn as you’re desperately scrambling down the side of a mountain in flip flops!

This is the one dish I had especially ordered and it was fantastic. Or lam. A specialty of Luang Prabhang with bits of buffalo skin and that pepper vine (sa khan) in a stew of buffalo meat, local greens, saw tooth coriander, cloud ear mushrooms, chilies and tiny little eggplants the size of a pea. We were so full we could only sample a taste of this incredible dish. I really want to go back to the wonderful “Tamarind”, trimming our gastronomical sails a bit next time, and order this again.

So, what makes it Lao food?

2009-11-16T14:22:00.000+07:00

You can read books and download recipes, but when it comes to cooking it really helps to actually see someone make something. Television is clearer but since I don't expect to see "Cooking the Lao Way" on the Food Network anytime soon, Bruce and I decided to get some hands on experience by taking a cooking class here in Ventiane. Here's a bit of what we learned.

Green papaya salad is popular all over S.E. Asia but the Lao version is a bit different. And, by the way, green papayas are not even in the same family as yellow papayas. Which is why, until we took the class, I could never find them in the market. I don’t think they look the same at all - more like a huge cucumber.

When it comes to making Lao food if you don’t have one of these you’re sunk. Laotians with their kok (mortar) and sak (pestle) rival the Mexicans with their molcajete when it comes to pounding stuff together. In this case you start with a mixture of lime, chili, and garlic all smashed to a paste.

Then you put in the green papaya which you’ve peeled and shredded. You make hash marks in it and then cut it into strips. Be sure to keep turning the papaya around while you’re doing it. If you don’t it’s bad luck. And don’t get any of the seeds in the middle mixed in – they’re bitter.

Now you put that in your mortar along with sliced cherry tomatoes and the mystery fruit.

They call this maak ko - English translation: plum. But it ain’t like any plum I’ve ever seen. Smells like grapes and has a very large pit. Anybody know what it really is?

Or this? Maak Khua, translated as yellow eggplant. Anyway, it all goes into the mortar and gets smushed about.

This is what makes it Lao. Paa dek is the fish sauce of Laos. Pretty grim looking stuff, I know. Since Laos is landlocked they make this mixture from fresh water fish from the Mekong mixed with other stuff that then sits around for a year or two. Yes, that’s right - a year or two - before it goes into pretty much every dish in the land. It tastes kind of like liquid anchovy paste.

So you add a spoonful or two of that and, finally, chuck in a bit of sugar and you’re ready to eat green papaya salad (tam maak hung) with the other definitive Laotian food – sticky rice.

If you’re Laotian you eat sticky rice every day. That habit is even used as a definition of Lao ethnicity by anthropologists. To make it you have to soak it for at least a few hours or overnight. Then you rinse and drain it and put it in this lovely woven basket. It looks like a lot, but sticky rice doesn’t swell when it cooks so what you see is what you get.

This is a Laotian stove. And, no, we didn’t take this photo out in the wilds, this is what everyone, even in downtown Vientiane, cooks everything on. Charcoal in the bottom; grills and pots on top. You steam your sticky rice over hot water over this brazier for thirty minutes.

Then you stand in awe as your cooking instructor, La, flips the whole thing over in the basket. Three more minutes on the fire and you’re done. To see La in action, click here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10_UTOfQIc4

It’s always served in these adorable baskets with lids on. You make a small ball of rice which, naturally, sticks together and use it to scoop up your food. It’s especially useful for finishing up the last of the sauce. And don’t forget to put the little lid back on. Failure to do so is bad luck too.

This market stall makes nothing but papaya salad and will customize your order. You can stipulate more or less chili, how much paa dek, etc.. Notice how there’s two kinds: one with just liquid; the other with bits of fish in it. It’s sort of like peanut butter you can have the crunchy or the smooth. Then you pick which of the mystery fruit you want in it or have a change of pace with a whole green banana (peel and all) banged in instead. I’ll have to try that next time.

Breakfast

2009-11-06T19:19:00.000+07:00

Here’s what Laotians eat for breakfast. A noodle soup and fried Chinese doughnuts. Some people slice their doughnut into shreds and add them to the soup. It’s weird but I’m told it’s good.

But let’s face it, breakfast is everyone’s most conservative meal. I mean, if you’re a yoghurt and granola with a mug of green tea person you’re not all of a sudden going to turn into a bagel with a schmear and black coffee (no sugar) person.

Breakfast at Hotel Villa Manoly

So this is my idea of a great Laotian breakfast. A classic “continental” breakfast plus tropical fruit as served at our hotel, Villa Manoly, the morning after we arrived.

French colonialism was a miserable thing for those lands they called “protectorates” but the one decidedly good thing they brought with them was how to make baguette. From Tunisia to Pondicherry to Laos they taught the locals how to make really scrumptious, crusty bread.

Banh Mi

Here’s the Laotian version of the Vietnamese “banh mi” called khao jii pâté. Lunch for two for a mere $2. There’s a lot of Vietnamese influence here because the French also imported – along with the baguette - Vietnamese to run their provincial government for them since they deemed the Laotians hopelessly lazy. We prefer to think of them as more laid back.

We moved into our studio apartment and went shopping for dinner and the next morning’s breakfast. We bought butter and local “fair trade” orange marmalade but there wasn’t a baguette in sight. The woman at the store mimed the arrival of bread to be at 4 p.m. We missed that appointment but the next day Bruce went to pick it up only to be told by someone else who spoke English that they have never sold baguette. Hmm.

The first night in our new digs I made a simple dinner of scrambled eggs with fresh shitakes. But something strange happened when I melted the butter.

Butter?

Looks like butter, right? Silver foil paper, happy cow face, even butter written in English. But that odd smell, what was that? Coconut! The ‘butter” must be cut with coconut oil. Yuck. Who wants coconut oil in their eggs?

So now I didn’t have baguette and I didn’t have butter either.

Phimphone Market

In every cosmopolitan city from Rome to Saigon you’ll find a store like this. It sells stuff to ex-pats at really high prices. French cheese, salsa in a can, frozen lamb chops, even V-8 juice. This is where we purchased our real New Zealand butter. We’ll probably be back around Thanksgiving for cranberry sauce and maple syrup.

We found another ex-pat place called the Swiss Bakery which sold baguette but it had sugar in it and was spongy and definitely not crusty. Kind of like the Italian version of baguette they sell at the Coop in Spoleto.

There was only one solution to the problem. I went back to Villa Manoly and talked to Goi.

Goi

This is the extraordinarily charming manager of the Villa Manoly. His name means banana. That’s his nickname. It seems everyone in Laos has a name but is known by their nickname. He called out to the woman who serves the breakfast and she showed me on the map where to get the bread. Right on the road beside the main market. They offered to go and get some for me but I explained I really needed to know where to go myself. I walked all along the highway by the market in the midday heat and I couldn’t find a single goddamn loaf. And then suddenly, voila!

Bread Stands at the Bus Station
All clumped together at the entrance to the bus station just like the kitchen supply places on the Bowery. I bought five.

Butterfly Net?

Try to guess what this is for. It’s vital to Laotians for their breakfast beverage – Lao coffee. Laos grows some very good coffee on a moutain plain by the border with Vietnam. You put the grounds into this sock-like contraption, pour boiling water over them and press down with a spoon until the liquid runs through it into a jug. This is a colossal pain in the ass and very messy. Fortunately, Bruce spotted a knock off version of a French press coffee maker at a housewares store called Home Ideal and the Laotian sock is now being used to strain chicken stock.

I know, you’re right, you can’t believe my first Laotian food blog is about a “continental breakfast”. But I promise you the next ones will be much more indigenous.