LAO EATS!

Before I talk about how wonderful Luang Prabang is, let me tell you about what I have been doing in the past two days. Well, I can sum it up in a word: eating. This may not strike you as anything out of the ordinary. If you know me at all, you know eating is my favorite hobby. But this was different and I want to tell you all about it. Forgive any spelling errors. This keyboard is stiffer than a stalk of lemongrass.
I was walking past an Australian-owned Lao restaurant with a sign for an adventure eating course they were offering. Of course I was interested. I loved all the Lao food I had tried so far, so I figured this would be a great education into the cuisine. Well, it was. I was warned that "adventure" meant the eater had to be bold because the whole dinner consisted of the weird things the chef found in the market that day. Well, if you read my post about Thai food, you know things can get pretty weird in Asia. I walked through the local market that morning to see if I could spot my potential dinner. I found small, live birds, dead birds, huge slabs of meat, sausage, blood, bats, curly things next to the blood that I could only glance at (for fear of getting sick right there), and other such scary things. I like to live by the saying, "when in Rome..." so I promised myself I would try everything. Here was the menu for the night:
Course 1: They started us off easy with bamboo baskets of sticky rice (eaten with most Lao meals) and a plate of mostly vegetable dishes. Each course was a sampling platter- one big plate with many small items on it. This one had two jeows (jeow is thicker than a stir-fry)- one made of roasted rattan wood (yes, wood) mixed with herbs and one made of a sour fruit called the Lao olive mixed with pork crackling and beaten into a paste. Pork crackling is pork that has been dried and fried and dried and fried ("good for the heart," as the owner said). There were several strange steamed vegetables (i.e.- earring flower), a simple stir-fry of pumpkin leaves and "curly vegetable," sticky rice and taro root steamed in a banana leaf, and three powders for putting on the rice instead of salt. I liked the one made of river moss. The biggest thing on the plate was a mixture of jackfruit, sesame seeds, and herbs steamed in a banana leaf (very popular method of cooking). FYI, "herbs" usually means coriander, lemongrass, basil, and garlic.
Course 2: This one was more strange. The chef took a fat stalk of bamboo, stuffed it with a ground chicken and herb mix, and pan-fried the thing until it was golden brown and as rich as a casserole. There was a whole, large frog steamed with herbs in a banana leaf. This was good. I ate a leg and thought it tasted like fresh white meat- not too scary. Then, there was a skewer of three small frogs roasted until extra-crispy. We were told to eat these whole, bones and all. I bit off each leg and crunched them down, nibbled the rest, and stopped there.
Course 3: The most difficult of the four. This was a lesson on the various ways Lao people prepare meats. The cured meats were preserved in a mixture of salt and ground rice and left for a few days. I ate part of a cured whole fish (really slimy), cured pork pieces in pork skin (not cooked), the same pork grilled in a banana leaf (thankfully smokier than the other), and salty cured fish intestines (went down easy). There was marinated beef that had been sun-dried and fried- tougher than beef jerky- and dried pork that had been brushed into floss form. It was like eating brown cotton candy with protein. And, strangest of all, were the fried moth cocoons, which ended up being a cream-colored goop with a little green worm inside. You take the thing out of the pod, tear off the outer shell, and squeeze the contents into your mouth like candy goo in a pouch. That was really strange.
Course 4: This one was meant to bring us back to our senses. It was typical Lao lettuce wraps with almost ten things to put inside. You grab a big lettuce leaf and fill it with any or all of the following ingredients: tamarind sauce, rice noodles, lemongrass, various herbs, peanuts, pork crackling, etc.
And to make you laugh even harder, I spend the entire meal eating and chatting with a very proper, travel-obsessed French-Canadian couple who told me about backpacking through India thirty years ago (India was a nation back then?), how Buddhism saved the Cambodian people from grieving their violent history, and that the people of Quebec drink more wine than the rest of Canada combined. I couldn't have been any more entertained, except by the fact that the husband excused himself four times to take a smoke outside. Why are French-speaking people so easily stereotyped? Oh, yes, because it's all true.

Day two of my eating was today when I took a cooking course at the cooking school of a different Lao restaurant. The two teachers (Neng Lee and Leng Lee) taught the whole class in good Engrish. I was the youngest of the bunch (who would've guessed?), and was joined by an Aussie couple, a Brit, another American, and an old French man. We started our day with a tour of the town market and had the vegetables that look alive and all those little colorful packets of dried things explained to us (Oh, so the brown one is dried buffalo skin. I thought so.). We returned to the school, watched two cooking demonstrations: Luang Prabang salad with special mayonnaise dressing and fried noodles with chicken and egg stir-fry. We then paired up and created both dishes on our own. I was with the Frenchie, who again, followed most French stereotypes I am familiar with. He took advantage of every break to take a smoke (and sometimes even during the cooking demonstrations), talked of how he missed his truffle omelettes, and took his time with everything he did. Now, I was in no rush to finish anything. I actually found his leisurely pace quite funny.
We cooked up the first two and ate them for lunch. Both were delicious and I cannot wait to raid our local Asian supermarket and tear up the kitchen at home Lao-style. Next, we had three cooking demos and were able to choose two to cook. From choices of chicken laap (herb-filled, sour chicken salad), Lao pork and egg casserole, and papaya salad, we opted for the first two. We put them aside, had a tea break where Jean-Pierre exhausted his lighter (yes, that is actually his name), then returned to the lab. The last of the demos were coconut-flavored eggplant soup with chicken and fried eggplant with pork. We chose the first, which was very simple to make, provided we had all the ingredients already waiting for us. We also had a demo on chili paste and sticky rice. Our last endeavor of the day was to feast on our creations. This was not a difficult task and we all left with a cookbook in hand, rubbing our bellies. So can you see why I love this town so much? Look what it offers! A chance to eat moth cocoons, learn about Lao cuisine, and defend every French stereotype you know. I think I am leaving too early.