Peter Green

We leave the day after tomorrow for three weeks. I've got some great suggestions from Fengyi on Beijing. Anyone want to weigh in on Xi'an, Chengdu, Guilin, Yangchao, or Shanghai? So far, the Chaine connection is coming up with good rec's in Shanghai. Does anyone have any must eats in Chengdu or Guilin? Yours in hunger, Peter

Pufferfish.

On the Asian side.... I just rewatched the Korean flick, The Art of Fighting. Besides the expected fighting, there are a huge number of wonderful bits of the old fighter and his mentee sitting around grills with bottles of soju, beer, chopsticks, and things grilling. There's a beautifully shot scene of a clam just poppoing open.......of course, it costs someone an eye.......

Stocks. Fish. Chicken. Beef. And especially vegetable. Some work in the skimming, but how hard is it to have a big pot of water handy to through the odds and sods into? Then you leave it alone to cool, and bung it into the freezer in a bottle for later?

Ease...what is "ease"? I'm challenged by scissors and getting things open. I abhor the idea that people are spending serious money on ready made polenta. Just twist off the top of the corn meal container, blend the corn meal into some boiling salted water, add in some pork fat as it plops, drop in the mushrooms, and finish it with some fresh parmesan (that I would've added anyways). There, I didn't have to wrestle with any plastic seals or anything. (we won't mention the 3rd degree burn marks I have all over my body from hot polenta)

Alright! I've been waiting for guinea pig photos!

There's an interesting story in there (one I'm not qualified to write) that could trace the food of Peru back through the Japanese emmigration to Japan in the 20th century (remember, Fujimori was head of state of Peru until 2000(?) and then fled for Japan where he was granted citizenship. Peru was one of the areas that saw large Japanese immigration, and it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect that they brought with them the tastes of Empire, particularly from Korea, which they had taken control of back in the 1890s, and China, which they took over some time later. It'd be a fascinating story to trace.

I hadn't noticed that with snake, but we only had scraps off of the rattler, and the one in Taipei was mainly for the bile for the soup. Many of my Korean friends have had dog, and all talk of a rush of heat that comes with it, running up and through and out your pores. Taegu is supposedly one of the best places for dog, but I only had one night there, and I was after the sunde which was another speciality. But, here's another dish! In Sip Sawng Panna they told me to have the "salad". What I got was a big bowl of congealed pigs blood loaded up with chilis and herbs......quite good, but slow going.

We were talking about this at dinner last night. Even though they're both dairy products, there's something just not right about cheese on ice cream.

I came home from work to find a very-tired wife and a kg of pig belly. I was presented with a simple ultimatum "Make me something good, and make it now" I bisected the swine,chopped up half, then cut the other half into nice slabs. I took the chopped stuff, and did it up in a red curry with some of the basil I'd found at the commissary. Typical Thai preparation with coconut milk, kaffir lime leaves, garlic, sugar, onion, and a bit of stock. Slice up some zucchini and toss them in because I like them. Finished by letting the basil wilt in a the end. Meanwhile I did a moo wan "sweet pork". For this I used the outer layer of pig fat to get some grease layer going in the wok, then tossed in a bunch of garlic. Then the pork. Then season with nam plaa, sugar, and a bunch of white pepper. Stir fry for another minute, and the pork comes out and the sauce gets drizzled over it. Served with white rice. The verdict was that the curry was too evilly hot (I forgot to mention the extra red chilis) for anyone but me. but the moo wan was judged to be quite repeatable.

There's a place near St. Catherine's, a little almost-portable looking lean-to that sells a great (really great) supply of mushrooms. I wish I could remember the name. They had stuff from everywhere, and it was all good. I bought some Italian black trumpets from them that I can still taste. If I can find my Brussels notes from 2005, I'll get the name in. But if you're around St. Cat, ask for the mushroom people. That'd be a great name for a band. Back and editing..... I found it! Champigros, Rue Melsens 22 They're closed on Sundays!

I was going to put this under Dinner!, but this is a better place..... Living abroad, you miss those bits of home......strangely, as my wife points out I miss things from home that I never had when I was there. The worst case was when my mother visited us in Egypt and Yoonhi found out that I'd never had those handmade pancakes with maple syrup I'd always moaned about. But I digress. When I was growing up in Vancouver, in Kitsilano, like most people of my background, we didn't eat fish unless it was sole, and then it had to be rendered almost unrecognizeable in a white sauce of some sort. ....I'm being uncharitable....my mother actually once made an halibat ("a halibut?")with a very nice crispy coating made from corn flakes, as I fondly recall. But, we didn't eat salmon. I probably hadn't had any salmon until I started dating and got onto the sushi bar circuit. But, once we moved away, I had to have salmon. My fondest memories of Egypt are sitting out ont the beaches on the Gulf of Aqaba with a bbq going and everyone's contributions of wine, beer, and other ingredients, and our salmon grilling over the fire for the common good....... Now, every year the wife totes back a cooler full of BC salmon, generally Spring, caught by her brother-in-law. This works out to about 30 kg, roughly 5 or 6 fish. Fully frozen, it's good for the 35 hours door to door run. And the fish has enough oil in it that the freezing doesn't affect it. For cooking, we maintain the law of simplicity. Take the salmon away from the bone, with the skin on. Lightly salt. Put it on the grill for a quick sear on the flesh, then turn it over onto the skin and let it slowly cook. Take it off when the juices and fat on top are getting frothy. Toss down some fresh dill to serve it on, and a twist of lemon and some good salt and pepper for the heathens amongst us. The meat just squirts at you slightly, the extra oil in this fish keeping it from drying out. Meanwhile, the head and bones are back in the kitchen, being stocked up with tamarind and some fresh vegetables for a nice, tangy soup to go with rice. When she goes home this summer (I'll stay out here and make money to pay for her shopping) I'm tempted to have her bring back some cedar planks and give that a try. Anybody have any comments on planking? It seemed to be the big thing last summer. I've thought a lot lately of salt encasing a salmon (what do we call this technique?), and seeing what happens, but I've been threatened with a slow death if I waste any of the fish. I may buy some of the farmed stuff from Scandinavia that we can get here, and see what happens.

One of my Vancouver friends had become very fond of another natural tea....I think it was yerba matte or something like that. Any comments? What is it?

In 1982 there was a flick with Scott Glenn (star of such excellent films as "More American Graffitti", "Khan!", and "Wild Geese II") called The Challenge (aka Equals aka Sword of the Ninja). This has a fantastic food scene early on where Scott is served a Japanese meal with all the great delicacies such as tadpoles, served live in a cup with a lid that he had to slip off just right so they wouldn't escape...... 25 years on and I still remember that scene. But, all time favourite would be a tie between Babette's Feast and Tom Jones. There's nothing like a period piece to set off good food.

I was glad to see Raoul finally getting in here.

John, I had a great meal a couple of years ago by a visiting chef from Peru, Blondet Moreno (I think....I'm old) from La Rosa Nautica in Milaflores off of the beach. The food was fantastic, and justifiably qualified as food porn. And the setting, from what I saw, looked like something from a Miyazaki anime, built out on a pier out on the water. Soo........What I'm getting at is, if you can fit it in, please give us a review and some pictures! This has been a country (and a restaurant) I want to hear more of. Cheers! Peter

Yes, please run up some of the photos! Good choices in Penh. Khmer Surin's fish amok is one of my favourites. The dish is called a khnom khrok, it's often used in Thai food for desserts, but that dish is an amazing appetizer. And Friends is a nice little spot. I like the work they're doing with the street kids, and they play around with things on the menu. But, again, photos! Especially of Vietnam! I do need to get back there.

Back on the subject of how munching down on Rover can elicit a certain cultural reaction....... As Gastro88 has said, much of the thing about dog is the heat burst that comes with it. Many years back (when I had hair) I'd heard that the best dogs in Korea were the ones that were raised on their own faecal matter. So, with a trip planned (which didn't materialize as would happen), I'd memorized my one key phrase for the trip. ttong-ke shiktang odi issumnika? This left my Korean friends rolling in laughter, falling off the couches for quite some time (I think one of them is still chuckling a few years on). I had literally asked "s**t eating dog restaurant, where is it?" We won't go into the reaction as to when I asked where the penso is........

I was banned from the kitchen, but the wife did up some of the truffles with gnocchi tonight. I've posted the results here in the Dinner! thread. Following the advice given, we've kept things simple, giving the truffles a chance to show through. I'm thinking a risotto next.

All credit for this goes to the madame, as I'm temporarily banned from the kitchen due to a lack of help to do the clean-up. What we were looking for was a preparation for our truffles that would be mild enough to showcase the truffles, avoiding any other ingredients that might overpower them. We decided to go with gnocchi (I'd been holding out for risotto, but that'll be another day), and match it with chicken, onions, and butter. A touch of salt, and no other distractions. For greens, they had some nice looking spinach in, so we separated the stems from the leaves to try two different approaches. First, we start with a bowl of desert truffles - fuqa (for more on this go here Then we slice them up.... Then we make some gnocchi (in a method very similar to the Korean kalgetsu preparation...which I find oddly unsettling at times) And presto chango you have a meal on the table and on the plate spinach stems done Korean with sesame oil, salt, and garlic spinach leaves fried in olive oil and garlic gnocchi with desert truffles, chicken thighs, garlic, onions, butter, and chicken stock It's amazing how much easier a meal can be when you have someone else do all the work. the gnocchi worked well with the truffles, giving plenty of contrast in texture and flavour with the firm bodied fungi. The spinach stems, being Korean, were very good, but the pan fried spinach came off a touch bitter, and would've been better done just blanched, with some sesame sead to set it off. Maybe they'll let me back in the kitchen tomorrow.

Lao comes to the Kitchen It’s been two months now since we left Lao. There were a few days in Bangkok, but I can talk about that elsewhere. What I wanted to do was get back to my kitchen and try some things out. As usual, I’d topped up our luggage with bits of food. Along with the usual collection of dried mushrooms and fungus and eggplants, I’d bought some Sa Khan – the peppery wood used as a substitute for chili – and some of the river weed I love so much. This stuff goes under a variety of names. Hsimay has the name from a local source as chai penne, which may refer directly to the prepared matter sold in plastic bags all over town. Going to Phia Singh as a reference, here’s what Alan and Jennifer Davidson (the editors) have to say: “In the market at Luang Prabang one used to see white enamel bowls full of a dark green semi-liquid stuff, which was algae collected from ponds and other stagnant waters during the rainy season. The name at Luang Prabang was thao; at Vientiane phak thao. These algae apparently belong to the genus spirogyra. But the matter is uncertain. Vidal, in his Les plantes utiles du Laos, refers also to two kinds of algae in the north of Laos, both known as khai. The first of the two is described as a mixture including Cladophora spp. and also Spirogyra spp. Vidal believes that the second sort, which he identifies as Dichotomisiphon Tuberosum, is much rarer and found mainly in the vicinity of Luang Prabang.” I thought Spirogyra was the name of a band. Whatever the name, this has been extremely popular at the last few dinner parties. Cut into small rectangles, and quickly washed in very hot oil, it’s gone done very well as a bar snack with aperitifs before dinner. I reckon I have an adequate supply to get me through the several months. Once that’s done, I’ll have an excuse to go back. The Sa Khan I’d specifically bought in order to do an Or Lam. We cleaned the wood, and then broke it up into segments for long term storage. It’s a “soft” bit of tree, and I can see it easily going moldy, so we opted to freeze it once it’d been worked down into portions. This “working down” gave me an opportunity to break out my beloved Japanese saw and make more of a mess in the kitchen. Mind you, I did this only after failing miserably with a cleaver and a serrated blade. My problem with the Or Lam that we had in Luang Prabang was that it came across as too thin for my taste. Luckily, they had ox tail in the commissary, so I grabbed about six packages and then set about making stock in the morning. I figured that this should give me a fluid with the richness and depth that I was looking for. The other thing I did was to rely more on Phia Singh’s directions. At school, the eggplants had just gone into the soup. Phia Singh calls for them to be first lightly charred, then soaked in the broth, and then removed and pounded down to mush. This mush then goes back into the broth, distributing evenly through the fluid. This worked just the way I wanted it to, and I was quite happy with end result. (Sorry, but with a dinner party and the rush in the kitchen, I failed to get any pictures. I’m better at shooting when I don’t have guests). As the book says, there is no authoritative recipe for an Or Lam. Everybody does something a bit different, so it’s just a matter of finding what fits your taste. Interestingly, in the notes below the recipe, there’s reference to Or Ho, which is a catch all, allowing you to “throw in” – ho – any fresh vegetables you may have at hand. I really liked the method for preparing minced meats for laab, and for prepping the fried rice salad. I’ve done this in the kitchen a couple of times now, and it is a big improvement over my earlier approaches. Rolling up baseball sized spheres for frying is giving a nice range to the meats, rather than the usual everything-kinda-dry approach of frying I’d done in the past. Laabs and the fried rice salad have been regular dishes for the last month (especially as the fresh herbs here have been very good). The stuffed lemon grass was a big success. Any seasoned mince works well, and I’ve played with different seasonings, but at the end its something breaded and fried. I’ve got some Thai knives for carving, and these work well for accordioning the stalks to create the basket. What hasn’t worked as well is the equivalent stuffed bamboo shoots. The problem here is just in the material. I can either get shredded bamboo, or else chunks of bamboo. What I can’t get is the whole stalk to work with. I tried doing “cups” from the bamboo – sort of like Sergi Arola’s tatatas bravas - and frying these, but it doesn’t work. I’ll just have to think of other things to do with bamboo. I’d done hor mok before (steamed seafood mousse), but not as kranab (grilled in banana leaves). This was an unfortunate disaster, as I used some banana leaves I’d had in the freezer. This effectively destroyed the competency of the material, and when I tried to remove the food from the grill, everything disintegrated. I salvaged enough of the meat to assure myself I was on the right track, but I haven’t had the opportunity to get into town to buy fresh leaves since then, and we can’t get them at our local store. The stir fries have all been successful, with more of an eggplant background starting to creep into much of what I’ve been doing. And I’ve broken the habit of preparing my dressings ahead. I’ve also gone back and looked through Charmaine Solomon’s book. She has a few pages on Laos and Cambodia, unfortunately combined in one section, with the recipes overlapping. However, it’s easy enough to separate the dishes based on the phonetics, and there are some interesting fish recipes in there that look to be worth the attempt. I’m having a lot of fun now with Phia Singh’s book. It works well as a complement to Fergus Henderson’s Nose To Tail Eating (the St. John cookbook). Both have a high regard for their ingredients. Live and learn.

Disgusting? One of the topics that's come up is odd ferments. This can dismay people on two fronts. In the first case, you're basically dealing with things that have been left to rot. Wine, beer, fish sauce, bean curds....this is stuff going bad (consider the noble pot of kim chi). On the second front, in the instance of alcoholic products, what we're interested in is the waste product of a living organism, in this case yeast. A wine's terroir is as much the scrying of a spoor as anything else. And in spirits we're going so far as to concentrate the product. Not that any of this is going to slow me down. Where'd I put that Pinot?

Vientiane - Leaving Lao What a difference a day makes. We’d left in the late morning from Luang Prabang - heavily laden with luggage -flying down to Vientiane on Lao Aviation. The flight was indifferent, which meant that nothing bad happened. I did note that Icelandic Air did not appear to have the operating concession anymore (years earlier I was intrigued to see 6 foot plus blonde pilots and stewardesses about – the air sickness bag gave away their affiliation). The plane was small, but well kept. As opposed to my earlier flights in-country, there were no poultry or large rodents roaming the cabin at will (it was a bad sign when those big marmots from Xieng Khouang gnawed through their cage in the back of the car). Also gone are the days when the Chinese knock-offs of Russian twin props were banned from Thai overflights – based upon their unfortunate habit of falling out of the sky on Thai homes. This made trips down to the Panhandle a pain. But I digress. It was kind of fun coming through the domestic terminal at Wattay. The new international terminal looks too much like all other international terminals. The old one still has character (and good begneit, to dip in Lao café), the upper deck packed with Lao who have come to watch the planes land and take off. Reminiscing…. My second trip, coming out of Penh just before the coup season got going in ‘97, I’d wanted to avoid the hassle of getting a visa in advance. Typical Laos, I just called some people and they had a man waiting for us when we came down the ladder from the plane. $40 each, both our passports, and he was back and walking us through before the first person in the “normal” line had even gotten half way through. A sabaidee to the nice people in immigration, and we were in a Mercedes before you could say “Bob’s your uncle”. This time it was nowhere near so flash. I’d not even arranged for a pick-up from the hotel, assuming that taxis could be found easily enough in Vientiane. I was correct; I was only off in my calculations as to how many would be required. No van was available, so we split ourselves between two ramshackle taxis for the ride into town. We arrived at the Settha Palace soon enough, and were ushered into the soothing calm of their lobby. From there we made it to our connecting rooms on the ground floor….and we were in love. Beautiful wood floors, and ceilings that were way, way up there…somewhere. And windows. After our week in the guest house, I’d become accustomed to frosted panes shadowed by bars, but these old French style shuttered windows were clear, and as tall as the ceilings. And there was a bath tub. We were all entranced. Okay, honestly, all the kids cared about was that there were cartoons in English, and an internet connection. We gathered our bags in one place and did some unpacking, then we pried the children away from the screens and headed out into the mid-day sun. Vientiane has a reputation as an unlovely town. Dusty, flyblown, and subject to all the sensible civic planning you might expect from, say, Houston…or Dodge City. The sidewalks are intermittently seeded with open sewer covers, and the general style of architecture is graciously described as “concrete pillbox”. There is not enough shade, and not enough green space. What green space there is is often just growth jutting out of the sewer trenches, like hair from a pensioner’s nose. Okay, maybe it’s not as pretty as Luang Prabang, which benefited first from the protective embrace of the old leader, Kaysone, who would not allow new development in the town proper, and after him from UNESCO, who listed the town as a world heritage site and ensured jobs for bureaucrats for years to come. But Vientiane has a certain air about it, and not just from the traffic congesting the streets. It’s fun. It’s not as formal as LP, more given over to pubs and shops and restaurants. In a word…affluent. That affluence comes not only from the Lao elite (many educated abroad – before in Paris, Moscow, and East Berlin. Now from Harvard, Stanford, and the London School of Economics), but also from the plethora of foreign embassies and their hangers-on; the aid workers (can you spell “contractor”?) and the ubiquitous NGO’s, all with other people’s money burning a hole in their pockets. Like I said….affluence. Also it suffers, as does Phnom Penh, from the Open Skies Syndrome. This policy has proven a boon to tourists, allowing them to fly directly to a country’s real attraction – LP for Laos, and Siem Reab/Angkor for Cambodia. While this is great news for the tourists, it has been a disaster for the capital cities, draining off much of their medium to high end tourist revenue. What they are left with, however - aside from the mouths and bellies of the foreign aid machine - is as steady stream of visa runners over from Thailand. While not exactly the top end of the travel business, they do have a certain amount of cash to spend, so the level of pubs and small restaurants is at a reasonable support level. Vientiane does much better at this than Penh, given that it’s accessible by rail and road, whereas only a true masochist would go overland to the Royal Capital of Cambodge (which says something about some of my relatives that do so). For Cambodia, most overnight in the casino belt and then come straight back. Vientiane is cheap and cheerful enough that they can do a weekend of it. Enough of all that. We were afoot and our communications were back on-line…..sort of. Inside the Settha Palace, for some strange reason, things would cut out. But as we wandered about our phones would come alive. This was of some benefit, but didn’t do us much good for staying in touch with the kids if we abandoned them to go out at night. In walkabout mode, we stopped at one of the major tourist attractions in town; the international ATM. We’d heard of this legendary device while up-North. “You may not be able to get money in LP”, they would say, “but once you get to Vientiane you’ll be fine. There’s one by the Lao Plaza Hotel.” It was out of order. Or at least, it wouldn’t work with any of our Canadian accounts. Luckily, I happened to have my Bangkok Bank card. Unluckily, I wasn’t exactly sure how much money I had in there. Figuring it was probably a few thousand baht, I drained the machine and breathed a small sigh of relief. From there we stumbled down towards the Mekong, where there were some minor differences to be seen (including a nice looking creperie), but nothing startling until we arrived at the Fountain, the Nam Phu. The beer garden was gone! I was in shock. I stood. I gaped. I blinked. L’Opera was still there. The Swiss Bakery was there. Diethelm was still on the corner and the Lan Xan Hotel (last hold-out of the Russians before they were finally kicked out of the country) still filled up space across the street with the Library. And the shallow bowl of the fountain was there. But the beer garden was gone. In a daze I sat down at the patio seating in front of the Swiss Bakery and had Yoonhi go and fetch me a ham and cheese baguette and a beer Lao. This was not doing my wa any good at all. The beer garden, when I was here before, was always the place to be, exerting a gravitational pull upon one and all, bringing us into its orbit. You could show up in the day or evening, order a pitcher of draft beer Lao served up in a plastic jug of the sort you’d keep orange juice in at home in your ‘fridge, and find another traveler or local or termite to while away the time with. Come dusk and the locals would all congregate in front of the fountain in order to have their portraits taken with old 60’s vintage cameras. The Hammer and Sickle would glare down from the government office on one corner, and you would learn all sorts of interesting things. I learned here that Lao (at the time) was one of the best places to buy silver. A Canadian with a silver shop in Katmandu was here on a buying trip. From someone else I learned about the secret Chinese silver mines somewhere up the Mekong that were being hunted for. The Australian Embassy was the place to be on a Friday night. I played go (or padduk) with an older Korean fellow (who beat me soundly), and I heard about the owner of the beer garden, a foreigner with a returned-Lao wife who had restaked their claim to the concession. I cracked forlornly through the baguette, hardly noticing my food (although the Bakery is quite famous, having been here in the circle for ages). The baker, Sune Wissmar, had followed his wife Inger on the embassy circuit, and found himself baking in her wake. They came to Laos in 1993, and he opened the bakery in 1994, just after my first trip. I remember it as a pleasant, well-established place in 1997, where you could buy excellent Lao coffee, either in a cup or in the form of beans. I won’t go into too much more detail – you can read more about the Wissmers at http://www.scandasia.com/viewNews.php?news...62&coun_code=se Leaving the family to finish their lunch, I poked about the restaurants. As I did so, I struck up a conversation with one Lao family. I had to ask them what had happened, and they sadly advised me that the beer garden had been moved out by the government a couple of years ago. There was no good reason, and they obviously missed it as much as I did. We commiserated over the event, and then went our separate ways. But, I have little time to spare for wallowing while on vacation. I took my family down to the riverside to admire the Mekong, wider and more placid this much further south. The riverside – the corniche – was a mess. It was good to see some things hadn’t changed. I was here last in ’99 it was pretty torn up already (that was the trip down the Panhandle). They’d cleared out the stilted bamboo anarchy of the Russian Club (with some of the finest sunset views of the Mekong), and a petition was circulating to try and halt the planned development of a parking lot that would have cleared all of the restaurants off of the embankment, these then consisting of the traditional “metal chairs and equally ugly metal tables”. We found the park towards the palace nicely done up with children’s swings and such-like, and Serena took ample advantage of this. While she frolicked under Yoonhi’s watchful eye, Scud and I meandered along the main road. Did I already mention “dusty and flyblown”? Still, there were some interesting places. Chinese restaurants. Some Lao spots. More Thai eateries…..and even a Russian spot offering shazlik. We cut back up from the Mekong into town proper, and, the lunchtime beers calling to us, we stopped in at what turned out to be a Korean restaurant, although named the Dok Champa, after the Lao national flower. I’d actually chosen it based on the add for “pool”, but that turned out not to be an option, as the owner was playing on the table. A minor downside, but the facilities were our primary requirement. They had beer Lao on tap (albeit served in glass jugs), so having made room, we settled into refilling our bladders. They also had an excellent coconut milkshake – at least by my standards; Serena didn’t care for it; and red fire ants on the menu, but as guests crawling between the pages, and not as the usual salad item. We moseyed back to the Settha with the kids, they being at about their limits of no-TV time, and Yoonhi took the opportunity for a long bath. I checked with the concierge on restaurants, knowing better than to push my luck dragging the family on a hike, only to be turned away. I walked first to Krua Lao, an upmarket, slightly touristy Lao restaurant near the That Dam and the American Embassy. But they were closed. From there I walked over to the Patuxai – the Vertical Runway. Legend has it that this version of the Arc de Triomphe – modified with a Lao flourish slopped onto the top – was created with funds and cement originally intended for a new airport runway. Be that as it may, it is something I had to stop by and see again while I was in the neighborhood. What I was looking for was Le Na Dao, a longstanding Lao French restaurant that I had passed by some years before, with a fairly loyal following. I found it, conveniently located next to Le Parasol Blanc, that wonderful rambling hotel that is located just a little too far out of the thick of things. I say “convenient” as it appeared that Le Na Dao was closed, and the kind people at the Parasol were able to confirm this for me. It would be worth more than my life for me to have dragged Yoonhi and the vermin over here just to be turned around. Disconsolate, I headed home. But, I was happy to see, I was not without options. Near to the Morning Market was an interesting looking little place – Le Grillot. This, I decided, would be dinner for Yoonhi and I. It had a certain charm from the outside, and, of great importance, they took MasterCard, which would allow us to husband our dwindling hard cash resources. Yoonhi agreed readily enough, and we turned the children loose on the room service menu. The two of us dressed, and walked the five minute trek over to Le Grillot, taking in the evening ambience of outdoor pool tables, glowing tv screens playing Thai soap operas, and motos belching out fumes. At Le Grillot we took a seat outside, but found that we’d chosen the local tuk tuk mafia engine-reving point. Still, we would not let this interfere with our night out. I asked for the wine list, and was pointed at a rack by the bar……. Somehow, I had expected something more from a French restaurant in Vientiane. Like a wine list? When the dazed waiter came by, I asked him for one, which caused a minor panic on his part. He mumbled something, and disappeared. After a few moments I decided I’d best take the initiative, walked over the rack, and chose a rather non-descript cabernet sauvignon Bosquet Cannet 2002 which I plonked onto our table. I figured he’d work it out. We returned to the menu. The food itself looked quite pleasant, very farmhouse French, and I planned out the meal with some enthusiasm. I ordered the prawn bisque for soup, while Yoonhi wanted to try the creamy spinach. For appetizers we had the asparagus wrapped in salami with tomatos, cucumber, and “bread baked with cheese”, and the Panier de crabes en salade. Mains would be duck fillet with a creamy sherry sauce over tagliattelle, and a rabbit with mustard sauce for myself. Aside from the tuk-tuk drivers seeing at what point they could blow the pins out of their engines it was a pleasant setting. The evening was cool, yet not so chill as Luang Prabang had been. The low tones of French came from a table in the back, two bureaucrats discussing an upcoming meeting with the Foreign Ministry. Some cats slinked about. And the candle at the next table broke off and fell to the ground amongst the unswept kindling. Yoonhi pointed this out to our waiter in mime. He responded with alacrity bringing a candle to our table and lighting it for our benefit, ignoring the burning mess on the ground. It was going to be one of those nights. But the food was quite good. The asparagus was just right, and there were no complaints regarding the portion sizes, the salad that came with it was quite a bit more than expected, but I will never argue with an abundance of fresh greens, although I’m not certain how the corn crept into the dish. The bisque was done well, nice and thick. The creamy spinach was beautiful to behold, but turned out not to be spinach. The flavour was much more of morning glory. Perhaps they meant “water-spinach”? Be that as it may, it was a good soup, albeit on the gargantuan serving size. This was really getting to the point of “don’t eat anything larger than your head”. In typical Asian fashion the food was coming out as it was ready, so our table was buried under the asparagus and soups when the crab tarts came out. The crab was a pretty little fancy. It’s a shame the picture didn’t focus properly. It was a mince of crab and tuna meat baked into six little pastry barques, or canoes. The canoes themselves formed from crisply baked pie dough. And again, it came atop a mountain of greens (and corn), with a base of cabbage down below somewhere. The rabbit carried the mustard sauce well. There was enough meat on the animal to more than satisfy me, given my gorged condition from the earlier courses. The little bow-tie pasta were lightly herbed, and there were “kebabs” of zucchini, tomato, and yam. Yoonhi’s duck was likewise a good hearty meal, which isn’t exactly what we needed at this point of gluttony. A drizzle of cream on over the meat lightened the dish, and improved it’s looks. The flavour was excellent, and I forced myself, groaning, to help her finish the dish. Mistake number one, underestimating the size of the dishes. Mistake number two, underestimating the ability for things to go sideways in Vientiane. We called for the cheque, feeling quite content. This arrived vertically on a small standing clip. I removed the paper from the clip, and our waiter reacted in panic. As Yoonhi said, you could read the reaction on his face. “Oh my God! They’ve taken the bill off of the clip! What’ll I do? What’ll I do?” I put the bill down, and he immediately reattached it to the clip, an audible sigh of relief coming from him once the paper was in place. Then I gave him my credit card. This led to an almost complete melt down. After some time spent of him going back and forth and becoming more and more distraught, it became clear that they didn’t take credit cards. Yoonhi was able to clarify matters in that it appeared the sign on the door was just a sticker “for décor”. Yup, sideways it was. The final straw came for the waiter when we asked for the cork for the wine so we could take the rest of the bottle back with us. I believe I heard a “sprong” as a sprocket ratched out of position in his head. Luckily, we had enough cash upon us to cover the meal, but we were now in dire straights again. Still, it’s not an expensive town if you’re careful about your money. Vientiane – Day 2 – Spend Spend Spend (with apologies to Haruki Murakami) Things started off well enough, with our taking breakfast in the Settha’s dining room. A fairly typical hotel breakfast, hardly worth the comment except for the shear beauty of the room, the crisply starched white linen, and the fresh morning light through the windows. I savoured my coffee, the kids filled up on pork products, and we enjoyed the fresh fruits and juices. After this was done, Yoonhi and I left the kids in the room with instructions on using the pool, and we went to the Talaat Sao – the Morning Market. Things had changed a little bit. There was a bunch of new construction going on on the south side of the market, a whole new wing going up where the open air market used to be. Across the street from this was an “ethnic market” which drew us in. The street was alitter with little blankets topped with animal bits obviously at odds with the international treaties on endangered species. (this one's a video capture; apologies for the poor resolution. It would've been good to get some translations from the signs) There were probably about a dozen small “shops” set up along the streetside, selling barks, medicinal herbs, horns, paws, and some other moderately disturbing items. This was in front of the Ethnic Market proper, a covered series of stalls that existed as a marketing point for the minorities to sell their goods. If you have an interest in sowing, this is the place to be. Yoonhi settled down for some serious shopping, picking up material for collars and detailing. With a few bags of trimming material in hand, we went into the market proper. This is shopping central for Vientiane. Stall after stall of “antiques”, silver, silk, cotton, coffee, running shoes, t-shirts, you name it. After a bit of looking about on the ground floor we went upstairs to the silver and gem shops, where we came to rest for awhile, or rather, Yoonhi did. I stayed long enough to enjoy a very nice, rich cup of Lao coffee with condensed milk. It tasted more like hot chocolate than coffee. Thick and rich as it is, it comes with the ubiquitous cup of weak tea to help wash it down. I was tempted to ask for a second, but figured I'd better do some pre-emptive shopping while Yoonhi was distracted with sparklies. I found my niche downstairs, a woman with some very nice pieces from Sam Neua up in the far North. She had a couple of her mother’s pieces from the the 60’s, and more modern goods. As we went through the shopping motions, we talked about the market a bit. It appears the Talaat Sao is being completely redone. Some bright young stars in the government have decided to rebuild the market (as I’d noticed already) with Singapore money and use this as an excuse to skyrocket the rents when they move everyone to the new “mall”. As most of the current tenants see business working out just fine with them as is, this move isn’t being well received. At the start of this amiable bit of shopping, I’d asked if she took credit cards. She assured me “of course”. Why was I surprised when it was time to pay and it turned out that I needed to go across the street to the bank in order to make a cash withdrawal on my Visa? And from there to find out that I needed my passport with me to do so (locked up back in the hotel). When I finally turned up back at the market to finish the deal, Yoonhi was well on the way to needing food. We took our bags of silk, coffee, needlepoint (Yoonhi bought a dozen hand-stitched purses while waiting for me), and gems and jewelry and made our way back to the Settha Palace. I asked at the desk for lunch recommendations, and was told that Kop Chai Deu was quite popular. This turned out to be just around the corner from the Nam Phu. A nice, restored building, with a good sized patio in front; tables and chairs clustered about the bar. Inside was a serviceable pool table, so we settled down in the interior shade and I ordered a jug of beer Lao. As usual, things never go to plan. Serena really wanted the grilled pork tongue. As this was to be cooked at the table, we needed to go outside, so we gathered up our cameras and equipement, and shifted tables. But the waitress dealt with this with aplomb, there was no melt-down as there’d been the night before at Le Grillot. Once outside and settled, we found that the pork tongue wasn’t available, so we switched to the tripe. Then it seemed this wasn’t on. In short order the fried spring vegetables were stricken from our order, and was the Hor Mok Gai. But, it was a nice day, the beer was cold, and we’d been assured that, yes, they really did take credit cards. Third time was the charm. Scud went for the largest thing he could imagine on the menu, the German pork leg. Our grill had devolved to strips of beef, and we’d added on a pork laab (salad). They also had crickets and larva on the menu, so I had a plate of this brought out for snacks while we waited. The crickets were good bar food, albeit a little oily. And the legs can get stuck in your teeth, making you wish for some handy dental floss. The laab was good, well herbed up, and, while laced with chilis, not overwhelmingly hot. Our boy the Neanderthal was content enough with his meat, and bypassed much of the rest of the food to concentrate on his daily protein supplement. The small dish of pickled cabbage on the side seemed to be adequate vegetables for him. The grill was nice enough, but you really need a level table to do this sort of thing, and it was hard going keeping the liquid up on all sides. It’s nice that you get big strips of pig fat to grease the grill with, not something you see often enough in the West anymore. Lunch out of the way, we relaxed a bit, making use of the pool at the hotel and the pool table in Kop Chai Deu, which Scud and I returned to later for beers and a few games with some of the older Lao Chinese who were hanging about and shooting. Dinner was a return to L’Opera, the Italian place at the Nam Phu. I’d enjoyed meals there in the past, and with our Lao lunches and French dinner under our belt, we felt Italian would be a good change for the kids. The meal was okay, but unremarkable. The restaurant was quite dead, with our table being the only life to be seen. We had a half bottle of the Quceto Chianti, gnocchi with fontina cheese sauce, carpacchio, penne gorgonzola with walnuts, and a salad Russa, with meat, salmon, caviar, and a vodka and cream sauce. Serena, the heathen, had a pizza. As I said, the meal was serviceable, but not outstanding. The carpacchio made for a nice opening, the thin slices of meat fitting my mood. But, while there was nothing wrong with the pasta dishes, they all felt a bit heavy for us. Perhaps we were becoming jaded? Or maybe it was just Yoonhi and I, as the kids were quite content with their food, Scud hoarding the salad Russa. I’d had the penne gorgonzola, which had plenty of cheese, but perhaps not enough walnuts for my taste. This malaise could not be tolerated. It was obvious that measures needed to be taken to salvage the evening, and so I called for the cheque, bypassing dessert. We packed up, and moved to the creperie we’d seen back up the street. The Ty-Na creperie is a work of art in its own right. The restaurant is beautifully decorated in soft tones, with comfortable, uncrowded seating. As opposed to L’Opera, there was a good buzz to the room, with most of the tables occupied. We settled down and looked over the menu of desserts they were offering. We ordered a selection of crepes, the kids concentrating on the chocolate versions: one with chocolate sauce and whipped cream, another with vanilla and chocolate ice cream with whipped cream and chocolate sauce. Yoonhi and I were more interested in the flambéed marmalade and cointreau, which came out and was lit with the appropriate “oohs” and “aahs” from our table. I’m ever a sucker for Calvados, so I had the caramelized apple, vanilla, and calvados crepe, a pretty thing on the table top Sated, the children abuzz from the sugar rush, we made it back to the hotel, luxuriated in the bathtubs, and nestled into our respective beds. It would be a leisurely awakening the next day, breakfast in that beautiful room, and then a couple of cars to take our loot and ourselves to the airport. Our time was done. When we left Luang Prabang, I was wishing I’d had more time there. Now that I was leaving Vientiane, I was wishing I’d had more time here. I guess I just need more time.

In case I ever get to Mongolia, what IS the tooth-breaking white stuff? ← It's a cheese they make from mare's milk. You can take the stuff and beat large creatures to death with it. It falls into what the Mongol's call White Food, which are things that can be made and stored for most of eternity. It is not on my list of "must eat" items, by any means.

I dunno......by not eating you put pressure upon the others in the party. They assume that you're suffering by not eating, and then your suffering transposes onto them. At some point they take responsibility for your decision. It may be your life, but it's theirs, too. It also depends on the culture. For most Asians it would be unacceptable not to eat. You cannot visit with people and not eat something. I've been told pretty much point-blank in Mongolia that if I value my skin I'd better eat that piece of white stuff, regardless of whether it's hard enough to stone bears with or not. The polite thing to do, as above, is to order something small (and inexpensive), and keep up the appearances of eating, while not doing much real munching. That said, the above only matters if you care about the people you're dining with. I get subjected to these horrible "appreciation luncheons" at work, which consist of fried foods left out on the counter to chill, and various hosting points for food poisoning. I've just let it be known that I have better food back in my office, and I'm doing just fine until then, thank you. Some people get their backs up, but they're learning.