Laos Cooking 101

There is a restaurant called Tamarind in Luang Prabang that is gaining worldwide recognition and has been written up in a few foodie reviews and travel guides. We booked a 1 day cooking class with them which was a great time. This was a totally different style from Thai food- in this class we used a mortar and pestle for more than half the dihes to grind up all the herbs and veggies for either mixing in the meats to, or eatng like a salsa. The food was great! We made a kind of Laos salsa (mine was pretty spicy from this little teensie weensie red pepper- yowza!) and we are the salsa with little balls of sticky rice. Marinated fish in a bunch of smashed up herbs and then steam cooked it wrapped in a banana leaf. We smashed chicken with different herbs and then we had to slice open the bottom of a lemongrass shoot and shove all the meat in there to cook it- this was a technique I've never seen and it was so yummy!! More mango and sticky rice dessert of course, and then a soup too. We managed to get more pics of this class and all our classmates. The class was taught at this little remote house amid a beautiful garden. We also made a trip to the local market in the morning to see what the ingredients were. The meat section almost turned me to a vegetarian, but I made it through okay.