Cooking in Luang Prabang

While we were in Luang Prabang Cole, Kenna and I decided to take a cooking course with the Tamarind Cooking School.  It was a great experience.  We went to the market first to learn about all the ingredients we would be using.  Laos uses lots of fresh herbs and vegetables, many which are not available in Canada - but there are some familiar ones - green onions, cilantro, basil, mint, lemon grass, coriander.  The red vegetable is banana flower - used in salads.  It is quite delicious and crunchy.





Chili is a main ingredient in Laos food - in the market there are 5 different kinds of chili powder from not too hot to "Laos" hot.  The chilli powder is in the middle of the photo.  The back of the photo is homemade fish sauce - bought one small plastic bag at a time.  It looks like brown sludge with chunks of fish floating in it - this fish sauce is 2 years old! The front of the photo is garlic - used in many dishes here.



The meat section of the market can be a bit overwhelming to us Westerners who are used to getting our meat in small plastic wrapped packages!  At the market you can get pigs' feet, pig head, liver, kidneys, intestines, ribs, backs, bags of blood (for blood pudding and blood sausage), as well as the regular cuts of meat we find at home.  Our kids have been through a number of markets now and Kenna is no longer eating pork or beef!


After the trip to the market we headed out to the cooking school.  It was a lot of fun.  We used all the ingredients on the table to make 5 dishes.   After the first dish we made with 2 chilis (mild according to our teacher) we decided to 1/4 all the chili ingredients - Laos food can be really hot!

In Laos they use charcoal braziers to cook the food - it works for barbequeing/roasting as well as steaming rice.  All rice in Laos is "sticky rice" that is steamed over a pot of boiling water.



Lots of fresh herbs in the food - so for each recipe we had to pound the leaves and roots with a large mortar and pestle - this makes for incredibly fresh food.   Here is Cole working away.



Here I am with one of our dishes...buffalo meat salad.

For dessert we made coconut sticky rice. Kenna is making coconut milk from dried coconut soaked in water.   She is squeezing out the milk here.

 

Here is our feast - on the left is chicken stuffed in lemon grass, at the bottom is fish steamed in banana leaf with herbs, the small bowl at the top is peanut sauce, the small bowl at the bottom is tomato dipping sauce (really, really hot), the dish in the middle is buffalo meat salad and the sticky rice is in the baskets.  The dessert was still soaking - but it was delicious!