A FEAST IN EVERY SENSE

This is an amzing city of contrasts of the old and new, ancient and modern.

  There are some 37 wats or temples here, with about 200 monks, so a significant religious centre and the population is quite devout too. 

  It has now become stinking hot, about 40 every afternoon, still, smoky from people cooking on open fires and also smoke starting to come in from the rice fields being cleared. There is also a lot of clearcut that we saw flying in, a major ecological problem, along with the dams being built to supply power but cutting off water supplies to small scale farmers.

  Yesterday we spent a day with the Tamarind Restaurant Cooking School, an amazing experience. We meet at 9am and go to the huge market with everything from dry goods to produce fresh from the fields. Farmers come in early with huge baskets of freshly picked herbs and greens, vegetables and fruit. Everything we eat here has been growing yeterday! Coffee is also grown in Laos but Ted says it's not particularly good. I've found lovely green and ginger teas and the local honey with it is good.

  Our guide Joy (who is what he's named) is a mine of Lao information, not just about food. 

  We visit stalls with packaged candied treats, one called cat poo, because it looks like it, but it's like popcorn wth sugar. Ted picks up dried bamboo for snacking with his Lao beer, which is cheap and good, both light and dark. About $1 for 20oz bottle, a serious size. They also make lao lao whisky here, often with a scorpion or so in it, but we haven't tried it - yet!

  Apparently in the countryside the consumption of sticky rice (the staple here) has led to a 50% incidence of diabetes and health care is not good to combat it!

  There are no supermarkets here so everyone shops at market daily to eat fresh. After market, we take a 15 minute drive into the country to a gorgeous estate on two lily pods, herb gardens, etc. and the comfortable cooking school. All the serious chopping has been done for us already but we stand for almost 4 hours - a long time for Ted's new artificial knee! We were the oldest in the international group, but ran into a couple from Calgary!

  We chopped, wrapped, decorated, listened, tasted, compared with helpful hints all the time from Joy. We stuffed lemon grass!! with a minced chicken stuffing, dipped in egg, deep fried, great along with our home made salsa, either tomato or eggplant. Before that we prepared fish (farmed tilapia as Laos is land-locked) wrapped in banana leaf packages and steamed. Lao food is not hot, you add chiles to taste afterwards. I used very little, Ted went overboard and could not eat his sauce!

  The staff are constantly washing our bowls, knives, saucepans, I'm loving this.

  Then minced buffalo made into a warm salad, hardly cooked, delicous. In fact, many people here eat raw buffalo, the meat inspectors come through market 3 times a week so you can do that safely. Served with a nicely decorated salad, wrapped in fresh lettuce, it was delicious.

  Here everyone lives on sticky rice which is so solid you could build walls with it. It is served in individual rattan baskets with lid attached, so classy, but too much for us.  But you roll it in balls and dip it in the food, which is not very liquid. 

   Afterwards we sit down family style to consume only our own food, or taste other people's to see how different it is. Then we are back up to  the kithen area and the individual open wood fires, hot hot hot. Now we prepare coconut milk with palm sugar and add purple rice, which is dessert. Salt goes in everything. Top with fresh fruits - dragon fruit, mango, tamarind nuts, grated fresh coconut, lychees. We are now full to the brim and not inteested in dinner tonight!

  Fortunately there's a supply of cold beer to wash this all down.

  Back to the hotel, I shower and die on the bed in A/C for an hour or so, read the guide books and the nice little cookbook that came with the course, write my log. Wifi is slow in the late afternoons and I can't get in to write my blog.

  At 7pm we think a stroll is in order so off to the French patisseris (you would swear we are in Paris, lots of people from Paris here too) for a magnificent mini tarte tatin with passion fruit sorbet and coconut ice cream, which is dinner for me, and a beer and nibbles from my dishes for Ted. He can gnaw on his bamboo later! They also deep fry kaffir lime leaves in it, but we don't care for that.

  It's peaceful and quiet here in our hotel up the hill on the peninsula between the Mekong and Khan rivers. I spend some time downloaeding photos every evening then we pass out early, beofre 10pm for sure.