An unusual competition…

Last Saturday, The Makphet team was invited to take part in a local competition to create dishes made with insects. The event took place in Vientiane and many restaurants competed.

Madame Vone and the Makphet students created Honey Bee Larvae Amok with Quail Eggs. The team went along to support them and we were all pretty proud when they won second place!  The winner was Sticky Fingers restaurant, with their Cricket Tacos. Our entry will be included in our cookbook, don’t worry!

Mr. Eh is helping us with the Lao translation of the recipes in the book and he has been working with us everyday with us to see each recipe that we make. He has even become a food critic and gives us some interesting advice on how to present the food! He also has good knowledge of the history of Lao food, which has been really helpful.

The rest of the week we spent cooking recipes, tasting them and taking pictures. Have a look here to see some of the photos, they are great!

We are looking for different locations to include in the book, so went to see the abbots in different pagodas to see if we would be able to shoot inside the temples and fortunately, they agreed. I am very excited about this because the temples here are absolutely stunning and I am sure they will make a great backdrop to our dishes.

So far we’ve finished about half of the dishes for the book, so we do have a very heavy week ahead of us since this is our last week here in Laos.