Back in the kitchen

23 July 2010
Day 16 – Vientiane

I went to Makphet this morning to meet up with our cooking teacher Madame Vone, to go through all the dishes and recipes we have collected during our travels.

It took us a while since we as well had to make sure that we have the right name and location for each one of them. We did have to make same phone calls to the people we met during the trip south and north to double check. I also needed to send some emails to thank people for all their help and to follow up on some of the recipes they gave us.

We wrote the first recipe from the Hmong village up north. It was a simple pumpkin flower soup, we cooked it with some pork and mushrooms which the Hmong people add for special occasions and festivals.

In the afternoon we cooked the dish to make sure the recipe actually works and apart from a couple of small changes it was a delicious but simple which it is exactly how it is supposed to be.

Ghislain took the first photos of the students cooking in the kitchen at Makphet and the first photo of a finished dish. There are about 60 dishes we need to photograph, but we’ll have to do this on our next visit in August because our visa needs to be renewed and we still have lots of work with Friends in Cambodia that needs to be done, as well as sorting out all the pictures and I working on the text for each page of the book.

We were all excited and in the evening Ket took us to a new beer garden restaurant to celebrate our successful trip and on how great it was to work together as a truly international Friends team.

We had some interesting dishes to go with our beer, such as crocodile stir fried with cashew nuts, spicy frog legs and crispy duck chin (yes that’s right) and it was all good.