We booked ourselves into an evening cooking course at the Tamarind Cooking School which was held in a beautiful out of town location overlooking a lily-filled dam.
The cooking school was really well organised with all ingredients washed and prepped.
On arrival we were issued with an apron and handtowel and then we made our way to a fully equipped workstation. Over the next couple of hours, our teacher demonstrated each dish and then we pounded, chopped, grilled, peeled, wrapped and stuffed our way through each course.
We were first shown how to make sticky rice (white and purple) in Laos bamboo steamers.
Then we made a couple of dips (Suzie made a smoky eggplant dip, Keith made a Lao tomato salsa), fish steamed in banana leaves, chicken stuffed lemongrass and finally dessert - purple coconut sticky rice served with fresh local fruit.
Charcoal roasted ingredients for eggplant dip and tomato salsa
The finished product
Fish steamed in banana leaves
Chicken stuffed lemongrass
Purple sticky rice served with fresh local fruit
After cooking all the dishes, we all sat down together to eat. In addition to the dishes that we had made, on the table was bamboo soup, sour peanut dipping sauce (for the stuffed lemongrass), steamed pumpkin salad with sesame, and a minced buffalo and herb salad.
It was all totally delicious and even though we had been to a couple of really nice Laos restaurants in Luang Prabang, we felt that it was the nicest food that we had eaten in Laos. Just before we were transferred back to Luang Prabang we were each given a little cookbook containing recipes for everything we had eaten and more. We were really pleased because all of these ingredients are readily available in Australia so we should be able to reproduce these dishes.
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