The people of Ban Phon Song live a simple life. They grow rice, vegetables, fruit, and herbs, and raise ducks, chickens, and cows. They make a living by selling surplus, baskets, and cloth. One of the women interrogated us about our love lives, trying to tempt us with one of her daughters or sons, even offering a couple cows for a dowry!
On July 12th, the SAILers and I travelled to a village about two hours North of Vientiane, famous for its preservation of traditional rural living and subsistence farming. We rolled up a road carved with potholes and stepped out into the rain to greet the little town. The house that welcomed us must’ve held a large extended family. It was spacious and each room was open to the outdoors in some way. A handful of women in the kitchen lead us in stripping herbs from the stem until we left for the rice fields. It rained the entire time, which was nice because it kept the mosquitos away. The rain dappled the water of the fields and everywhere seemed to be alive. Through the brown water swam tiny frogs and grasshoppers, while giant stripped spiders and water bugs skimmed the surface. We teetered across thin grassy strips of land, flanked by calve-deep pools. When we arrived, villagers taught us how to pull up young rice plants. The young plants need space to grow large so we were to pull them up, and replant them in another field. The process was as follows: grab at the base of a couple plants, pull them up with a twisting motion, and once you have a big clump, hit it against your bare feet to get all the mud off the roots. It was a messy process for us unskilled foreigners, though the locals seemed to remain quite clean. Then we took the bushels over to another field and planted the rice in “neat” rows by just pushing the roots under the mud on the bottom of the pools. We were worried our field was so ugly it would not grow, but the villagers assured us it was fine. Once our little field was planted, we returned to the house for a traditional meal followed by longyan for dessert and basket and fabric weaving. Again the locals zoomed effortlessly through the motions, but we struggled to copy. The most difficult part was the basket weaving – the pattern was extremely complex and no matter how hard I studied it, I could not figure it out. Click this link to watch a video showing the process of basket weaving: http://youtu.be/QpYZRWzZYN0
The people of Ban Phon Song live a simple life. They grow rice, vegetables, fruit, and herbs, and raise ducks, chickens, and cows. They make a living by selling surplus, baskets, and cloth. One of the women interrogated us about our love lives, trying to tempt us with one of her daughters or sons, even offering a couple cows for a dowry!
0 Comments
The most popular kind is papaya salad, but cucumber, banana, and snake bean salad are also around. These salads are made from sliced raw veggies, mixed with chilies, fish sauce, peanuts, sliced tomatoes and limes, sugar, MSG, and fresh herbs and cabbage to taste. In Lao, papaya salad is dtam mak hung, which literally translates to “smashed papaya”. To make it green unripe papaya is shredded and mashed together with the other ingredients with a pestle in a tall mortar. These salads are common as street food (given in plastic bags of course) because they’re so quick and easy to make. The food stall lady will usually let you taste it so you can tweak the ingredient ratios before she’s finished. Watch out though; these salads get dangerously spicy.
The Banana.The banana is more often than not extremely small! Bananas familiar to us in America are hard to come by and expensive. These tiny bananas taste more like plantains and have a chewier texture than regular bananas. You can buy them for $0.62 per bunch or get them fried in batter, grilled, or cut and made into sweet oily banana chips (seen in the bag at the left of the photo).
The Coconut.The Custard Apple.The Durian.The Guava.The Jackfruit.. Don’t let its playful bumpy surface fool you, opening this fruit without the aid of a professional is a terrible mistake. While the taste is an incredibly scrumptious banana-mango fusion, it’s sap is sticky and DOES NOT come off with soap and water. The trick is oil, like cooking oil. Apparently it's a good idea to coat your hands and the knife with oil before opening the fruit. The fruit has an inedible tough stringy part that hides the delicious meat surrounding the seeds. You’ve got to slaughter it to get at the good part. I recommend buying jackfruit pre-cut and packaged.
The Langsat.The Mango.Mango is sold everywhere in its sweet ripe form, and also in its crisp unripe form with a more sour taste. Premature mangos are green and mobile fruit carts will sell them peeled and cut so that you can break off chunks to dip in chili salt or spicy fish sauce. On the left is an unripe mango for dipping. Also pictured are two other kinds of sweet crispy fruit for dipping.
The Mangosteen.The mangosteen is native of Indonesia and Malaysia, but I ate a lot of these in China. The pieces of this purple fruit are bright white, sweet, and have a tinge of tang. Now it’s late in their season. Stands across Laos are still selling them, but everywhere the fruits seem to be infected with this nasty yellow fungus. I’ve stopped buying them.
The Lao Melon.The Passion Fruit.The Pineapple.The Soapberry Family.Contains lychee, rambutan, and longan. All are whitish-clear fruit with pits and so, so sweet. Longan was my personal favorite in China called 龙眼, or “dragon eye” because with the black pit, they look like dragons’ eyes. Pictured is a rambutan. I’m not a huge fan because the meat is difficult to separate from the pit and therefore tricky to eat.
The Tamarind.Tamarind is a very strange fruit. It has a crunchy shell that must be chipped aside to get at the gooey brown fruit underneath. After the shell, fibrous veins ensconce the fruit, which surrounds hard round pits. You’ve got to be skilled with your mouth to avoid getting brown goo all over your hands. In my opinion tamarind is worth the work. It’s sweet and tangy and is often made into jams or pastes for dessert.
If you’re looking to cut living costs in Laos, a diet of noodle soup is a good option. Each bowl comes with plenty of options for customization: fish sauce, oyster sauce, shrimp paste, chilies, bean sprouts, mint, cilantro, basils, lime, and cabbage, to name a few. Khao Piak Sen.Lao chicken noodle soup with shallots and fried onions often eaten for breakfast. The noodles are soft and made of rice. Usually they’re made fresh daily. Phe.A close relative to the Vietnamese pho so popular in the US. Beef soup with rice noodles and bean sprouts. Khao Poon.My personal favorite, this dish is difficult to make, and therefore difficult to find. So far its only been seen in the food court at the Morning Market. It’s a spicy coconut curry soup. Luang Prabang Noodles.The recipe originates from Luang Prabang, but we in Vientiane still get to enjoy its spicy fermented peanut pork skin taste. It has flat rice noodles, everything just stated, and also pork, scallions, fake meatballs, snake beans, herbs, and this wonderful peanut paste I haven’t found with any other dish.
First, I apologize for the lull in posting! I graduated from the SAIL program and have become increasingly busy settling down and establishing my social network within the city. My four-day vacation to Pakse ended a long time ago, and I didn't spend that much time in the actual city itself, but I’d still like to share a few pictures and videos of the area. Here is a video of the main market in Pakse: http://youtu.be/n52AYSb1640 Here is one taken from our van as we went through the outskirts of the city: http://youtu.be/sCJXMYrEj44 Kailuk is duck egg with a developed baby inside. I bought it remembering my experience in Nanjing, China when I ate a goopy, salty, yet delicious chicken fetus. This kailuk, however, was much more developed than my previous chicklet, and according to my Lao friends, more developed than what they had eaten in the past. Nonetheless I took a bite. When couldn’t chew up the feathers, I decided to stop eating it. It’s eaten with a strong salt-and-pepper paste that looks and feels like sand.
The preferred drink of Laos is Beer Lao. As one of the major marketers in Laos, no matter where you go in Vientiane, the green and gold is there – mainly on banners, umbrellas, the clothes of tourists, and the masses of gold Beer Lao creates that are stacked neatly on top of each other outside of restaurants and shops. Beer Lao is 70% barley and malt imported from Europe, and 30% jasmine rice. 49% of the company is owned by the Lao government and 51% by Carlsberg Group, a Denmark brewery. Beer Lao currently exports to about a dozen countries including America. They also sponsor the Beer Lao beauty pageant and print the famed Beer Lao calendar, which shows wholesome village beauties wearing traditional Lao dress.
When we travelled to Pakse, we were able to score a special tour inside the Beer Lao factory, free Beer Lao included. This cookie, called dtok jok in Lao, is airy, crisp, and deliciously mild. It’s flavored with coconut milk and black sesame and is made by dipping a molded ladle first into batter, then hot oil.
I’ve found that Laos and the nearby countries have many dishes that involve wrapping a savory something with khao poon (Lao vermicelli) in fresh leaves and rice paper. These have come to be my favorites. An example familiar to American tongues is the spring roll. However the best are the kind that you wrap yourself. Nam Khao. This dish is Lao. Sticky rice mixed with seasoning, egg, and shredded pork skin is balled up into a sphere and crisped until brown in the frying pan. When chosen to order, the ball is warmed, broken, and mixed with more seasoning and lemon juice, and garnished with roasted chili peppers. The leaves are lettuce, different basils, mint, and banana flower. Pun Pa. Pun pa means "fish wrap". You buy the fish, the herbs and leaves, and the extras like the photo below separately. This dish can easily feed two good eaters for $3.72. The leaves include cabbage, lettuce, cilantro, basils, mint, and sorrel. Nam Neung. This dish is Vietnamese and is named after the Vietnamese sausage. Comes with peanut sauce, unripe bananas (so terribly bitter!), bean sprouts, unripe mango, cucumber, whole cloves of garlic, and a variety of herbs and leaves.
Though not as popular as with generations past, one can still find Lao markets selling betel nut or limestone chew. Much like tobacco, folk will chew this substance for a stimulant high and to mollify their addiction cravings. The betel chew has four main parts with an optional fifth: betel leaf, limestone paste, betel nut, and si siet bark, with something sweet for added flavor like sugarcane. The bark acts as a binder to hold the parts together and turns bright red upon chewing. When chewed, the entire concoction numbs the mouth and stimulates saliva production so that a chewing person appears to be constantly spitting out blood. Consequences of the chew include tooth decay, cancer, and other problems similar to those caused by chewing tobacco.
|