I can’t say that I was dying to see Laos before our trip. It only came up as a possibility when we started doing research on this part of the world and heard good things about it. Nestled between Thailand, Cambodia, China, and Vietnam, it is a small country of only about 7 million people. Most Americans recognize the name only from its role in the Vietnam war. I won’t go into much history because I don’t feel it could be done justice in just a blog post, nor do I know enough about it to try. I will say this… I certainly was never taught about the US’s involvement in the Laotian Civil War (also known as the Secret War) when it dropped millions of bombs on the country, many of which sit in the ground today, still unexploded. Laos just celebrated its independence day which marks the end of that war 40 years ago when the Communists took power. One of our tour guides was explaining the holiday and said, “it is when we celebrate our independence from the US”. I am not sure what he was taught in school, but the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of what he was taught and I was taught (or more correctly kept from me). Laos is probably the only current communist country most people can't think of (the others are the obvious: China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam). Laos is a very poor country and it is shows.
This is where we stayed. Most buildings had the Laos flag along with the hammer and sickle which reminds you that it is communist.
OK, on to more fun things. Yesterday, we took an all day cooking class. Our walk over to the meeting place was interrupted when we arrived at the bamboo foot bridge to cross the river. It had been wiped out by the fast moving river after 3 straight days of rain. So, we went back to our guest house and borrowed a couple bikes and took the long way around via a more permanent bridge. Once at class, we started with a visit to the market. The most lasting impression will be from the butchers. Our teacher joked, “We will just walk past the butcher, then stop to discuss it outside because of the smell. If you want to take more pictures, feel free to go back a second time, and if you want to be a vegetarian, walk by a third time.” There were a lot of animal parts typically not seen by people outside of a slaughterhouse. It was also interesting that all of the butchers were women.
A butcher at the market. I opted for a relatively appealing photo.
We rode along with about 10 other students in the bed of a truck with benches (a very common mode of transportation here) to the the cooking school. It was an outdoor classroom with each of us having a prep station and a cooking station. At the front was a bench where the demonstrations took place and the baskets of ingredients were located. The baskets contained fresh coriander (aka cilantro), saw toothed coriander, mint, dill, lemongrass, local garlic, Chinese garlic, shallots, red and green chili peppers, spring onions (aka scallions), Laos basil (if you are in Thailand it goes by its more common name of Thai basil), limes, and kefir lime leaves. We used some combination of most of these in each of the dishes. In addition, we used banana flowers, long beans (similar to green beans, but about 2 feet long), and galangal (similar to ginger, but not as strong). At our stations we had fish sauce, salt, chicken stock powder, and MSG.
Fresh ingredients for our dishes.
The first dish we made at the cooking school was sticky rice with an eggplant dip and a tomato dip called jeow. Both dips started with roasting chili peppers, garlic, shallots, tomato or eggplant directly on hot charcoal with bamboo skewers. After pealing off the burnt skin, it all goes into a mortar along with salt and the fresh herbs mentioned above where it is mashed with the pestle. The sticky rice is steamed in a bamboo basket, again with charcoal as the heat source. In fact, we never used a stove or an oven. Everything was cooked over a clay “bucket” with hot coals. The sticky rice is eaten with your hands. Take your right hand and dig some rice out of the communal dish, then ball it up in your hand, typically the size of a walnut, then dip and eat.
Roasting an eggplant over hot coals.
Next we made oua si khai (stuffed lemongrass). This was the most technically difficult dish because we had to carefully slice the thin stalks to make a sort of basket to hold the minced chicken stuffing, which had a lot of the same fresh herbs as the sauce, just not roasted over coals first. After dipping in an egg wash, it was deep fried. This was my favorite.
We also made a very traditional Lao dish, laap, or buffalo salad. Not to be confused with bison, or North American buffalo, it is actually water buffalo, a popular meat here. Again, the same fresh herbs were used, and this time we cooked ground buffalo meat in pots over the coals. The recipe can be modified to ones liking, so I omitted the buffalo bile, and Jesslyn omitted the fish sauce in addition to the bile. It was delicious, but next time, I will reduce the amount of fish sauce in my recipe.
Jesslyn’s favorite, believe it or not, was the tilapia, steamed in a banana leaf, called mom pa. We made a marinade for the fish in the mortar in pestle then wrapped it in a banana leaf and tied it up with a strip of bamboo. Tilapia is a very popular and inexpensive fish raised in farms in the Mekong river. Most of you are probably familiar with tilapia as it is also common in the U.S. It has little flavor itself therefore takes most of the flavor from the marinade or sauce.
For desert, we made purple sticky rice cooked in coconut milk, served with tamarind sauce and sesame seeds. It is easy to make and very good (if you think rice counts as a desert). We had the purple sticky rice with a variety of fresh exotic fruit, including tamarind, dragon fruit, sapodillas, and logon.
The final product! On the left is the stuffed lemongrass stocks, on the same plate is the banana leaf wrapped around the fish, next to the buffalo salad on the right. The sticky rice is served in the weaved bamboo container at the top.
Deep frying the stuffed lemongrass.
Working away with the mortar and pestle.
On a random note, keeping track of the currency and exchange rates in each country is always a challenge. More so in Laos because of all zeros on the money. The currency is the kip. There are 8155 kip in a dollar. So, at the ATM, we took out 2 million kip (about $245). We have not seen any coins here, and the smallest denomination we have seen is the 1000 kip note which is about 12 cents. The largest denomination we’ve seen is the 100,000 kip note which is about $12.
On an even more random note, Jesslyn and I are boring. We used to think that we were interesting because we are “traveling the world”. After meeting so many truly interesting people, this is no longer the case. First of all, what we are doing is not all that unique. There is selection bias in my sample of people of course since we are not likely to meet a lot of typical westerners in Laos. But, there are a lot of westerners here, if not a lot of Americans. We’ve met many Dutch, Belgians, Germans, Australians, and Canadians. It turns out we are not all that adventurous either. Other world travelers are hitting up India, Nepal, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Believe me, even though the places we are visiting in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam sound exotic, they are very well traveled by westerners. Maybe you will see future posts from some less well known places in the future!
- Jake