Food Glorious Food...Khao Niaw and Aw-Lam

Mr. Muzzy and I spent "one of those days" yesterday...in our room, on a forced fast...which gave us pause to think about food.

One of the things I noticed right away upon arrival in Luang Prabang was the plethora of traditional Lao food available at all the restaurants, even the ones along the notorious Sisavangvong strip that has been laden with pizza joints, American breakfasts and European fare.  It is really nice to see.  Those who claim Laos has no cuisine, I beg to differ.  It is not like Thai food.  It is simpler, sort of sampling fare and quite tasty.  Usually there are two or three main dishes, a soup (aw-lam is a soup/stew with beef, flavored with the bark of a particular tree that lends a pungent, slightly spicy, sour flavor...don't eat the chunks of wood, please), a vegetable dish (stir fried) and perhaps a salad (the ubiquitous laarb...minced meat mixed with cilantro, rau ram, mint, sometimes bean sprouts, chilis and lime juice...yummmmmm) or a shredded bamboo shoot mixture with various additions.  To this is added the jeow...pastes of various flavors and origins...our particular favorite is jeow bawng (various spellings but essentially a sweet paste, very spicy, with a dried buffalo meat base...mmmmmmm).  There is an eggplant jeow, a thin sweet spicy dip, a tomato based jeow and several more.  The jeow are set on the table with the main dishes and the typical small baskets of khao niaw...sticky rice.  You take a small ball of sticky rice, dip it in a jeow and add a bit of a main dish...the stir fry or salads, and pop it into your mouth.  The soup is served in small bowls.  It's a communal kind of meal...everyone eating from the same bowls with the rice as the conveyance.  And then there is the Mekong seaweed.  This is gathered when the rivers are low...great veils of bright green algae, similar to nori, it is sun-dried in flat sheets dusted with sesame seeds and served fried very quickly in oil as an appetizer with a jeow...usually jeow bawng.

Have we lost you yet?  We ate at Dyen Sabai the other night across the river.  It is a Lao French collaboration and they serve up nice sample platters with a little bit of everything and explanations and good beer and a decent happy hour, all while lounging on pillows in a teak sala under stands of artfully lit timber bamboo.  We have enjoyed the Lao food...especially the seaweed and laarb, but foreign water being what it is, we spent last night eating pizza...and damned good pizza too!  BREAD!  They do that well in LP...hot crusty French baguettes that are pure heaven.  And we found a place that makes delicious lemon and chocolate tarts (each, not together).  So we are back on the mend...coffee and sweet milk for me, cafe dam (black) for Muz.  Other gastronomic pleasures include freshly picked som (oranges), sweet little delights with an easy peel, tiny bananas and papaya.  Unfortunately it is not mango season and the cashews that Muzzy so dearly loves fried as an appetizer tend to come from the fridge and are a bit chewy..but...we had excellent fried peanuts with lemongrass the other night...and Beer Lao tends to make it all more jolly.

The morning market still serves up a veritable zoo of delights....dozens of tiny frogs tied together at the ankles...the larger frogs are in an enamel basin all fighting to escape...the highly colorful crab baskets...this is hard to explain, but a handwoven bamboo circle at the bottom of which are woven in 5-count 'em- 5 freshwater crabs each about the size of a French piastre (silver dollar)...a box of small furry rodents that are too adorable to think about much...pre-cooked bats ready for re-heating, small rats, the occasional civet cat, and the other day a small pig (live and unhappy) in a poke...trussed up in a loosely woven bamboo carrying basket just the size of the pig, about 50 pounds.  I didn't wait to see the man carry him off.  We like to think he was on his way to be a stud pig in some village. There are good smells of herbs and lemongrass and cilantro and mustard and wonderful long beans and dozens of types of eggplants in different shapes and sizes, piles of wondrous mushrooms, some familiar most not, and pans of eels, tiny tiny fish that you see in aquariums at home and mountains of greenish snails that go into the local version of somtam (not-delicious local papaya salad) (much better in Thailand!) and on and on. 
However...we have reached the halfway point of our wanderings and yesterday woke up chanting "NO MORE RICE!"  Thus the reference earlier to the great pizza.

We are off to photograph the oldest Wat on the peninsula...it is a beautiful place with artful mosaics recounting the journey of the Lao peoples to this magical peninsula as well as tales from Buddha's life.
Bon appetite