Today was our last day of sleeping in at our wonderful hotel so we took full advantage of it before heading to our favorite cafe one last time for a brunch of eggs, bacon, nutella croissant, a BLT and multiple cappucinos. We hung out to use the WiFi to book flights back to the US (can’t believe we are doing that already!) and do some emails. After that we headed back to the hotel to drop off the electronics before going back to hike up to the top of a hill and see the Phousi Wat. It was a nice hike up some steep stairs with several stops for smaller shrines, a few ‘Buddah footprints,’ lots of naga balastraids (my fave!) and finally the really beautiful main wat at the top of the hill. It also offered us a beautiful view of the entire city, which was amazing.
We headed back down the other side of the hill towards town and went to see if we could buy some T-shirts and a hoodie for Michael. We didn’t have much luck (we should have looked in night market) so we didn’t get anything and decided to head back to the hotel to hang out for a bit before our cooking class that evening.
Around 4pm we headed down the road to Tamarind restaurant for our cooking class. We were with a group of 11 people total and they had us all get in a tuktuk to head outside of town. We didn’t realize we were headed out of town and it was at elast a 20 minute ride but we got to a lovely outdoor cooking space that was very well set up for all of us. The instructor was named Sit and had excellent English. We all got set up with a table, apron and towel as well as all the cooking utensils we needed for the evening. We started with learning how to wash sticky rice (see Michael massaging the rice in the video below!) After that we put it in the bamboo steamer (essentially a double boiler) and moved on to making our first dish called jeou which is essentially a salsa. The options were eggplant or tomato so Michael and I each made one. It included pounding garlic, shallots, chilis, fish sauce, salt and either the eggplant or tomato. We roasted all the ingredients over hot coals first then pounded them in a large mortar and pestle setup. It is supposed to be eating by hand with sticky rice. We each tried some then put it aside to eat with dinner later. Of note, it was better hot than later when it was cold 😦 Next we made mok pa which is fish steamed in banana leaf. We did the same pounding of ingredients with lemon grass, spring onions, cilantro, salt, chilis, etc then cut our fish into 4 1inx2in pieces and put everything in a banana leaf. The banana leaf had to be heated over the fire to make it pliable then we folded the fish and sauce into them and tied them with bamboo to make small packets that were put in the steamer. Very fun to make! Next was lemongrass stuffed with chicken. We had to cut the lemongrass very carefully to make a basket then we put minced chicken and herbs inside of it, basted it with egg and fried it up. The chef made it look so easy but it was by far the hardest dish we made (and the most tasty!) Lastly we made a dessert of purple sticky rice with coconut milk and fruit. We made our own coconut milk but adding hot water to dried coconut and squeezing out the milk then added sugar and the cooked rice and boiling it over our coal stove until it was all cooked together. Then we put sesame seeds and tamarind jam on the top with some fruit – it was hard not to eat that first before dinner! We all sat down at a big table to eat the food we cooked in addition to some other things the kitchen had prepared for us including buffalo laap (cold meat salad), fried pumpkin and bamboo shoot soup. We chatted with the other people in our class. Some were nice although we had a dreadfully annoying couple who asked lots of terrible questions and were hard of hearing as well and of course we ended up getting seated next to them. It was fine though and we mostly enjoyed the chance to socialize with other travelers. Unfortunately we did see a few rats scampering through the kitchen while we were eating out dinner (ewww!) which we were surprised at given how clean and neat the outdoor cooking area was! Although we really loved doing the cooking part, we didn’t really like the taste of most of the food. We decided Lao food probably just wasn’t for us! I think the only thing we might make at home would be the stuffed lemongrass since it was fun to make and tasty! The only key would be getting lemongrass bulbs big enough since I’m not sure we can grow them that huge at home! Overall it was a really fun evening and we were glad we did the class. We had hoped to hit the night market but by the time the tuktuk brought us back to town it was late and we knew we had an early morning so we headed back to the hotel to pack and go to bed.
Mera and Michael Travel 