All posts tagged: Laos

Vientiane: Crickets, Mystery Meat and other Eats.

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Our first dinner in Laos was in Vientiane at Khop Chai Deu. Our Intrepid Travel guide, Golf chose this large restuarant/bar not far from the Mekong River for our group dinner. Local dish of steamed fish with banana leaf sounded good to me and The Koala got a butter chicken masala. Some of the others got deep fried crickets. I gave it a whirl and to be honest, it just tasted like nachos. Especially when eaten with a salsa chili type sauce. Is anyone offended by the taste of nachos and a spicy salsa? So, if you can get over any mental or visual phobias of eating deep fried crickets, the taste isn’t something to worry about. As much as we loved eating local foods, we were really craving a standard New Zealand style flat white. We found these coffeeas at JoMa Bakery Cafe (across the road from Khop Chai Deu). These roast vege wraps were good too. The bill for 2 coffees and 2 wraps came to 86,000 kip / $13.70 NZ / $10.70US which is …

Eating laap in Laos

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Laap, also spelled larb, larp or laab, was my absolute favourite dish during our epic South East Asia adventure. Laap is made with ground meat, ground sticky rice, fish sauce, lime juice, fresh chili and lots of herbs like mint, coriander and spring onion. The locals eat it with their hands and with sticky rice and raw vegetables. I totally fell in love with this fresh, zingy, savoury dish. Crossing into Laos On a cold mid January morning, we get up early, have a buffet breakfast at our hotel in Vinh, Vietnam and get on a 6am private bus to Laos. It is cold, grey and misty. We take Ho Chi Minh Trail which is a windy path through the mountains and you can see how it could have been used in war against a foreign enemy. The mist is so thick in places you can’t see across to the other side of the valley. Looking out into the heavy mist it’s easy to think that the mountains are on the edge of the world. …

Foodie Treasures from the South East

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Some of the foodie treasures I picked up from south east asia. I’ve always wanted a mortar and pestle and making my own green curry from scratch in a cooking school in Chiang Mai made the want a need. Weasel coffee from Vietnam, table cloth, coconut wood salad servers and serving spoon from Thailand I also gifted a package to my work because they were fantastic about letting me holiday for 10 weeks. In their package there was the same chili sauce, weasel coffee, Sabah Tea (from Borneo) and coconut salad servers. I coveted this Thai/Laos style BBQ cooker, a chopping board and a cleaver, but alas, these were not to be found in the usual tourist markets. If anyone knows of a Thai BBQ restaurant in Auckland or where to buy a cooker from, let me know.

Congee. Jook. Rice Soup. Rice Porridge.

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I love congee! I love Jook! Chinese congee is usually very mild. Bland even. Even the chicken and scallop version I had for breakfast not long ago in Hong Kong could have done with a little more seasoning. So it was a delight for me to try versions of this dish that other asian countries had to offer. Congee is not something that is found easily in Auckland city. Kiwis don’t really dig it and it’s considered poor people food by those who love it. Not something you would order when you eat out. What’s the difference? The easiest way to differentiate between rice soup and rice porridge is that rice soup is cooked rice in a flavoured broth. In rice soup, the rice and the soup are separate layers. You can have a spoonful of soup and then a spoonful of rice if you please or you can have both at once. Much like noodle soup. Rice porridge has the consistency of porridge because the rice granules are cooked until they break and thicken the soup. …

We are home.

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It has been an epic 65 days of traveling, eating, drinking, experiencing and adventuring with my husband The Koala. Along the way, we’ve traveled with friends and family, met up with old friends and made new friends. We visited 7 countries and stayed in 18 different places in south east asia. Brunei, Malaysia (Borneo), Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand. It’s been exotic and surreal. Being back in front of my mac, in our lounge (looking just the way we left it) it feels like the last 2 months happened to someone else. In the 2 months we’ve been away, I “cooked” only 3 times. A half day cooking class in Chiang Mai, and if you count it as cooking, we had local BBQ where you cook raw ingredients at your table at a restauarant- we did this 2 times (Vang Vieng, Laos and Koh Phangan, Thailand). All other meals – I’m talking an average of 3 meals a day – were eaten out. That’s 192 meals right there! I didn’t photograph every single …