Cooking For the Orphans

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Up early to meet @ 9.45am at the restaurant "Tamnak Laos" meaning the three elephants. This is a restaurant that is run by a local Laos family who also run the Cooking School with proceeds going to help the local orphanage.

We met our teachers and learned there would be only three of us in the class today. We climbed into a tuktuk and headed to Phousi Market with our teachers for ingrediants. We saw tonnes of chillies, yams, baby asian aubergines,galangal (bit like ginger),lemongrass, tamarind, fruits, rice (sticky, plain and purple) and also the famous Laos padak sauce (smelly fish sauce made from bits of fish; mainly the head).

Back to the restaurant we watched our teachers make two dishes and then it was our turn at the masterchef style stations!
We were told to prepare all our ingrediants first and put them into little bowls before we made each dish - I'm relieved we weren't doing the washing up and I'm never going to convince Ree not to do that when we get home!

The first dish was salad with a homemade spicy mayonnaise using boiled egg yolks followed by tofu noodles. We got to eat after making the dishes and both were delicious (even if we are biased!).
Next three more dishes were demonstrated; Papaya Salad, Chicken Laab and Tofu Casserole followed by chiili paste and sticky rice. We then had our turn, Ree loved his Chicken Laab.

They sent us home with a cookbook with 12 recipies and very full tummies.

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Photos

Superbly Prepared Lao Lunch
Loas Salad with Home made Spicy Mayo

Loas Supper by the masters
Laos master chef round 2 - Spicy Chicken Laab, Spicy Green Papaya Salad, Tofu and Egg casserol, Loas Chilli Paste, and sticky Rice