On the flight from New York to Hong Kong, Matt was catching up on magazine reading (hard to maintain pace with so many subscriptions during school!!) and came across the recent Gourmet issue that rated cooking schools all over the world. The article was great, covering schools in countries around the world ranging from 1 day sessions to week long, in-depth courses. There just happened to be a recommendation for a cooking school in Luang Prabang, and since we’re spending four days here, we decided to sign up – Tamarind Laos. Tamarind is a café, as well, that focuses on traditional Lao cuisine. The class started at 9am, with the requisite market tour. The market in LP is not so different than other markets we’ve been to in these parts, except it had a bizarre wholesale/retail aspect. Most of the fruits (Thailand) and 
vegetables (Vientiane) come from outside LP. There’s one section of the market where people bring it in to LP to sell, but they leave around midday. Then there’s another section of locals that buy from the early market and then resell later in the day. Very curious. There was, of course, the pig butcher – with the entire pig from the head, to the brains, to congealed blood, and more. The one new ingredient for us, though, was buffalo bile. Not sure who has the job to collect the buffalo bile, or how one would even start to go about that, but anyway… here it is.
vegetables (Vientiane) come from outside LP. There’s one section of the market where people bring it in to LP to sell, but they leave around midday. Then there’s another section of locals that buy from the early market and then resell later in the day. Very curious. There was, of course, the pig butcher – with the entire pig from the head, to the brains, to congealed blood, and more. The one new ingredient for us, though, was buffalo bile. Not sure who has the job to collect the buffalo bile, or how one would even start to go about that, but anyway… here it is.
At Tamarind, all of the cooking is done in the traditional style, so you ground everything in a giant mortar and pestle, and everything is cooked over charcoal – quite cool. First, we made some dipping sauces. Matt’s (tomato and red chili) was very spicy, and Viv’s (eggplant and green chili) was less so… but still too spicy for her. Next we made amok, a classic dish of fish steamed in a banana leaf. We followed that with lemongrass stuffed with chicken. Of the four lemongrass we stuffed, two were deep fried and two were grilled. The grilled versions tasted best to us. As a class, we also made Orlam, or Luang Prabang style stew. This was a lot of vegetables and herbs, so tons of prep work, with some grilled chicken thrown in at the end. Finally, we made buffalo meat salad. And yes, for one of our two dishes, we used the buffalo bile in our course. Supposedly it helps to tenderize the meat, but we didn’t notice a major difference. If we didn’t know it was there, then we would have never have guessed it was there.
After our time at Tamarind, we made it over to see some of the major wats in town – Wat Xieng Thong and Wat Sene. Both wats were very nice. Xieng Thong is a large complex, almost at the tip of the peninsula in LP, with many buildings in the complex housing some great statues. 
Wat Sene was actually just down a block from our hotel, and it is famous for its large standing Buddha statue. After a quick pass through of the two wats, we took a quick break at the hotel and then had a Lao traditional massage (great deal at Spa Garden – 90 minutes for ~$10). When our 90 minutes was up, we were relaxed and ready for more shopping, so we went to the night market. We browed the whole market (pretty huge, but mostly the same stuff) and came away with a handful of t-shirts, some wooden spoons and a skirt for Viv. We were starving, so we opted for a quick dinner at The Pizza, a very popular place with the westerners, serving up good pizza and mediocre pasta.
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