Strange Fruit

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

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

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

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

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

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.