Day 3: Laos and chillies
It’s okay, while today was about food, especially chillies, there’ll be no episodes or descriptions involving Laos plumbing (which is, so far, as good as anywhere).
Laotians like it spicy. Some menus have a grading of 1-4 or 5, with 2 being “European spicy”, 3 being Laotian regular, and 4/5 roughly translates to “it goes to 11”. So far I’ve been okay with 2, it’s comfortable without raising a big sweat behind the eyeballs. I’m yet to go to 4, though it is a little tempting.
Today we did a cooking class with Mr Sit from the Tamarind Restaurant. About a dozen of us, from Germany, the US, Hong Kong, and Melbournia, piled into a minivan and started at the big day market. This is a crazy maze where anything and everything can be found, but Mr Sit took us to the food. We were introduced to all manner of green leafy things, from familiar herbs through to the stuff they forage for in the jungles, because it presumably tastes good. Another stall introduced us to the wonders that is home-made Laotian fish sauce: take some decent sized fish, a pile of salt, water, and a bucket. Wait a while (weeks, months) and hey presto! Aromatic brown sludge (don’t try this at home). There was also meat, meat, and more meat, every part of the animal (mostly pigs, buffalo, and chickens). Laotians have a soft spot for buffalo bile, which looks like muddy water with a greenish tinge, and smells warm and earthy (I skipped having a taste as I’m not sure how much refrigeration these jars get).
In addition to meat, Laotians like to deep crispy fry lots of things, like river weeds, bamboo, kaffir lime leaves, mushrooms, just about anything can be turned into a salty beer snack, and we now have a couple of bags of car snacks for tomorrow.
After the market, it was out into the countryside to the cooking school, a bouncy unsealed trip that included a pause while they decided if we should drive over or under the powerline cables — we ended up doing both. It’s a close call, as Luang Prabang doesn’t have the housing density of Hanoi, but the Laotians do a decent job of emulating the hazardous chaos that is the domestic electricity supply in these parts.
The cooking school is lovely, big ponds, a waterfall, big herb garden, and plenty of room for a fairly rustic cooking school. There were no food processors or Cuisinarts for us, just kiwi knives, mortar and pestle, and spoons. A second area had the cooking braziers: imagine a metal bucket base, then put a terracotta flowerpot with an extra large lip on top (drilling extra holes in the base). Fill the pot with hot charcoal and you have it.
On today’s menu was sticky rice, jeow (a dipping paste/sauce), fish wrapped in banana leaves, deep fried chicken in lemongrass, and buffalo larb (a salad, eaten like san choy bo). A lot of the base flavours are similar: coriander, Lao basil, dill, lemongrass, garlic, kaffir lime, and each dish had the option of adding a chilli or two. Naturally, I took this option, so while a more rational person may have arrange their meal so there were one or two spicy dishes, mine all had a decent kick (this was on top of the breakfast noodles, where I had lots of the chilli in fish sauce condiment).
It’s no exaggeration that, six hours after the feast, I was still burping lemongrass and chilli. I’ve since had a mango and yogurt smoothie and things are a little more settled.
We also made the wonderful coconut sticky rice dessert, so visitors next year may get treated to this on occasion (this doesn’t have chilli, nor buffalo bile, nor home-made fish sauce).
A bumpy ride back and it was time to relax some more. I’m practising my relaxing, working on spending whole minutes not looking at computers, phones, and I do get twitchy. More practice needed.
The evening was a gentle stroll around the night market, a quick haggle over a snow globe, and another massage (I asked for neck and shoulders and back, but in translation ended up more a traditional Lao massage with lots of stretching and prodding). We also wandered down a marvellous lane of street food, but were still too full from lunch to really indulge (no room for whole fish on a stick).
Tomorrow we’re heading out to the bear sanctuary and the weaving village, followed by an evening boat ride along the Mekong. At least we have some yummy deep fried snacks for the travel.