Laos: Night falls on the Mekong...

    In the couple of weeks we were in Luang Prabang, I'd say we spent at least five evenings sipping beer as we watched the sun set over the Mekong river and the longboats cross back and forth.
    And soon after that, it was time to go home to France.

Laos: Luang Prabang: How to Dry Food.

In this hot climate, drying is a common way of preserving food. We came upon these ladies making small tortilla-like cakes. First they made a firm dough, then broke pieces off and roll them between their hands into small balls. These were flattened, and sandwiched between sheets of plastic wrap. Finally, they were set out on bamboo racks to dry by the roadside. They look like speckled popadoms and I think they are made with some kind of yam.

River weed is another local specialty. You can buy it at the market in thin dark green sheets speckled with sesame seeds. It's served deep-fried, and often smeared with chili paste. One afternoon, I was exploring the banks of the Mekong and found this lady using a plastic bag to harvest weed from the river.

Elsewhere it was drying on a roof.

Here it is (top right) as part of a platter along with Luang Prabang sausage, dried pork with sesame, eggplant dip with a pleasant, slightly charred, flavour, lip-burning chili sauce with bits of water buffalo skin in it and, in that bamboo container, sticky rice.

Finally, rice cakes drying in the sun. I'm guessing they're eaten as snacks.

Laos: Learning to cook Laotian dishes.

    It's like anywhere in the world: a border crossing between two countries doesn't mean a complete change in what people eat. For instance, the cuisine in the French city of Nice and the Italian town of Ventimiglia just along the coast have more in common than say Nice and anywhere in Normandy.
    Northern Thailand and Laos are no exception.
    I'd done a couple of one-day courses in Thai cuisine but knew very little about cooking in Laos. So, early on in our first week in Luang Prabang, I signed up for a half-day cooking course at the Villa Santi, a boutique hotel in one of the town's old colonial buildings. The course was held at its sister property, the Santi Resort and Spa, about 5 km out in the country.
    A little bus took me there. For the first half hour I was left to my own resources so I wandered around the grounds. It was the most beautiful day with just a faint haze over the mountains.

The resort has planted a small rice paddy in its grounds.

     The best thing was...I was the only student. Just me and a young chef who didn't speak a word of English and a young hotel employee so incredibly savvy that you could almost guarantee she's going to end up running some splendiferous four-star hotel. The point was, she spoke perfect English. Not that you need language skills when you're learning to cook. Watching, tasting, that's usually enough, but it is handy to know the name of a specific ingredient if it translates into English.
 

Kaeng pak nam is watercress soup with minced pork. Light and tasty, it only took minutes to make.

Sticky rice with mango or sangaka mamueng as it's called locally. 

Once I'd finished cooking, hotel staff set up my lunch table on the terrace with its view over the rice paddy. Fresh spring rolls, a green papaya salad, the soup, sweet and sour fish. chicken curry and the sticky rice with mango. 

     This half-day made me greedy for more. I'd noticed a few posters tacked up on lamp posts advertising the Tamnak Lao cooking school, an adjunct to the restaurant of the same name. I signed up, showed up and got stuck in.
   We began with a walk around the Phousi Market (see earlier post)) then took a tuktuk back to the kitchen. Four students, two instructors. This time, they demonstrated the dish, then left us to make it ourselves from prepped ingredients using the recipe provided.

Ingredients at the ready...cooking is so much easier when someone else does all the chopping and measuring.

On your left, a Luang Prabang salad. I found the mayonnaise-type dressing too rich (it was made with hard-boiled egg yolks), and I'd probably leave out the optional minced pork. Otherwise, a keeper. 

Finished dishes. Simple garnishes of lettuce leaves, tomato and cucumber...

How to make sticky rice...

     Going through the recipe book I brought back, my notes on the sauce-stained pages show the dishes I'm likely to make back home in France.

   "Excellent" is how I've described feu khua: fried sticky rice noodles with chicken and vegetables. (What I really like about these recipes is that the author included lots of suggested substitutes if you can't get your hands on the exact ingredients). 

     Hmm, another "excellent"--this time for chicken larp, a spicy cold salad made with chopped chicken. By the way, this wasn't pre-chopped. Instead, each of us was given some raw chicken breast, a chopping board and a cleaver. 

     "Very good. Needs mushrooms for texture," is what I wrote about kheua sen lon--noodles with pork, vegetables and woodear fungus. The sensible substitute suggested  for the fungus is green beans--far easier to get my hands on those at the local market until I make a trip to the Asian supermarket in Toulouse. 

      "OK but not my favourite" was a pork casserole. Let's move on...

      That's more like it. "Excellent and easy" applies to khua maak kheua gap moo or fried eggplant with pork but geng phet (chilli casserole) only scored a "very good." 

      One of the cornerstones of Lao cooking is jeowbong, a thick chili paste. Making that and sticky rice wound up an intensive day.

Laos: Markets in Luang Prabang: the Night Market

     At night, this town becomes pure magic. Around dusk, motorbikes and trucks roar along the main street bearing folk who set up red tents and fill them with gleaming scarves, shawls, jewellery, and crafts of all kinds.

You can just make out the market at the end of the street. Note....no streetlights. 

Embroidery typical of Laos and northern Thailand.

Pressed flowers are sandwiched between two sheets of handmade paper to create these enchanting lanterns. They fold flat so you can pack them in your luggage.

Just look at those colours--and this was one of many stalls selling silk scarves and shawls.

    There's also a narrow laneway entirely filled with food stalls and, partly because of the food, and largely because of the atmosphere, that's where we ate a number of suppers.

Making salad from scratch.

Backpackers heap their plates high at the noodle and vegetable buffet.

My absolutely most favourite thing at the nightly food market were these marinated hunks of pork, sweet, spicy and sticky, grilled over charcoal --and consumed with a plate of steamed vegetables and the inevitable beer.

     

Laos: Markets in Luang Prabang--the one outside our guesthouse door.

     It's a long story...how we landed in Luang Prabang, took a taxi for the estimated 25-minute ride to the guesthouse, and how two fraught hours later, I arrived there on foot, having left Peter with the luggage and the taxi. By now it was well after dark so we had no idea that our little laneway was home to a daily food market. The first morning, I went outside and tah-dah!

Everything fresh as fresh could be. Someone who lives here told me that the farmers arrive in the wee hours, sleep in their trucks and have set up their "stalls" by 5 a.m.

  

Laos: Markets in Luang Prabang: Phousi Market

   You have to take a tuktuk to this enormous market on the outskirts of town--and this one isn't for tourists. It's where the local people buy everything they need on a daily basis. Some of it is inside a huge building, ill-lit apart from the occasional fluorescent strip lighting overhead. 

     The liveliest way I can tell you about its wonderful crowded chaos is to copy the notes I made as I strolled. Not sorting them out means you get an idea of the glorious confusion--and profusion--of it all. 

If this lady doesn't have it somewhere on her stall, what you're looking for probably doesn't exist. 

 Just some of the fresh vegetables for sale.

      Here's what I scribbled down as I ambled up one aisle and down the other.
       Phousi market. Indoors, outdoors. Enormous. Everything in shiny plastic bags. Loose dried chilis of different kinds. Huge green-yellow papaya. An immense selection of plastic and enamelware, and stainless steel bowls. A truckload of oranges. Backpacks and 4-in-1 plastic holders for condiments. Cel phones and gold watches and silver jewellery. Pale beige-peach-coloured squash. Stacked trays of brown eggs. Almost orange-gold potatoes.

   Trays of woven bamboo heaped with bean sprouts. A tin tray holding one enormous blood clot. Live fish in aerated plastic bowls of water. Fresh rice noodles. Water buffalo feet. Pungent dried fish smelling like overworn underwear. Murderous smell of freshly hacked meat. Knives, tongs and rice makers. I have bought river weed with orange and garlic. Not sure if it needs cooking. The girl who sold it to me was giggling too hard over our lack of communication. 10,000 kip. Another 8000 spent on a tin tray, painted with flowers. Flashlights, steel wool and toothpicks. Ladies with sewing machines stitching up sarongs. Sequinned jeans. Cola and 7up. “Mingwing Weaving” men’s underwear. Locks, keys and hinges.

Spices in the bowls at the front. Fish-sauce-in-the-making in the bowls at the back.

Meat in the raw.

    When I wrote "a truckload of oranges," that's what I meant. I went to this colossal market three times altogether, and still didn't see everything. 

The Thailand and Laos Report. Episode 6: Luang Prabang

   All I know is that we want to go back to this enchanted town that's part French Colonial architecture, part gilded temples, and part absorbing food and textiles markets. Our guesthouse was on a street that, as dusk approached, became filled with red tents. Inside sat ladies selling the most beautiful hand-woven silk scarves and shawls. Some sold traditional Hmong earrings and neck-pieces. Others, parasols and lanterns. 

   We wandered narrow laneways lined with bougainvillea bushes, watched a working elephant trundle along the main street and got up before dawn to see the people of Luang Prabang give sticky rice to the Buddhist monks.

   The food here is similar to Thai cuisine in its freshness and use of herbs and chilies. Several times we ate river fish, whole, stuffed with lemongrass and herbs, and simply grilled. We made our way through dozens and dozens of tiny bananas that were as yellow inside as good egg yolks. And while a great deal of Beer Lao was consumed, we didn't have the courage to taste some of the "special" drinks for sale at the market.