Day 17 - Jeow and Laap

Another country, another cooking class Matt's dragged along to. Today our Laos cuisine class was with the Tamarind Cookery school. As it seems is standard for these now (well 2 for 2 so far) first stop was a trip to a local food market. Laos cuisine is pretty different from Thai food, mostly in the range of ingredients used. In Laos there's a huge emphasis on herbs - mint, coriander and dill all feature heavily. It's very much a food culture of nothing being wasted, including the blood and bile. Yummy. They'll also eat anything, there were stalls selling squirrel, rats and bats (not part of our cookery experience today though). Laos is land locked and it's only in living memory that a lot of the road connections with its neighbour's were made so there's a lot of self sufficiency.

Our guide today was Sit. He was good fun and clearly very keen to improve his already pretty decent English. After the market we went to the pretty Tamarind cooking pavilion. Today was slightly different than our Thai equivalent class as we only ate once really rather than in between courses. They also served us booze mid (morning) class. First up we made jeow, a spicy dipping sauce. I made an aubergine one and Matt tomato. Most of the dishes today involved doing some aspect over hot coals, for this one it was scorching the ingredient skins. You can eat jeow with anything but it's popular with sticky rice at breakfast and I'll definitely be making it at home.

Round 2 was making a fish parcel. We pummelled herbs, garlic and chilli in a pestle and mortar to make a paste which we marinated our fish in before making a banana leaf parcel - Sit made it look easier than it was but we made a valiant effort. This went into the fire whilst we made chicken stuffed lemongrass. Yes that is the right way round, we stuffed chicken into lemongrass. It involved careful, patient cutting of the lemongrass into a lantern style so obviously not my forte but we got there in the end. We dipped it into egg and deep fried it over the fire.

Last savoury dish was Laap (or Larp, or Larb) which yesterday I said I wanted to learn to make. We did the beef version, with an option to add bile to make it bitter. I declined. It was very easy to make so it'll be coming to a UK BBQ soon. We sat down together to eat it all and get over-full before making a black sticky rice dessert with fruit. Very straight forward and somehow managed to eat it before rolling home.

Afternoons are unbearably hot here for two pasty northerners so we sat in the air con for a few hours before wandering out along the Mekong river as finding a bar to drink mojitos as the sun went down. We did a mini bar crawl along the river, briefly stopping and quickly leaving a bar where the fly covered toilet was off the kitchen and you washed your hands in the kitchen sink. We went back to the food market for more BBQ chicken and papaya salad before calling it a night as we want an early start at Kuang Si waterfalls tomorrow.Read more