Hoi An foods

Tra Que vegetable farm is just outside Hoi An and it was the first stop this morning on the shopping tour of the cooking class I had signed up for. Typical herbs of the Vietnamese cuisine like Asian basil (a.k.a. Vietnamese mint), Vietnamese coriander and sawtooth coriander are grown here using traditional methods, all organic and by hand. Wandering through the fields we smelled and tasted loads of different herbs, you'll be surprised how many different varieties of basil are grown here, one smells fishy actually. We stocked up on fresh herbs and were treated to a herbal refreshment before moving on.
Next stop was the local market where we bought veggies & spices including banana flowers and water spinach, typical for the Vietnamese cuisine and locally sourced.

fresh organic herbs

organic farming, outside Hoi An

if the grass is greener on the other side: water your own grass!

refreshment

We unloaded the purchased produce after a short drive to the red bridge restaurant and cooking school, which is located on the Hoi An river and got started in the kitchen right away!

Appetizer: Lemongrass Shrimp

Fresh shrimp marinated in a paste of lemongrass, shallots, garlic, chili, salt, pepper and sugar and then grilled on a BBQ. Properly done they are actually wrapped in banana leaves and then grilled. The dipping sauce is very simple yet delicious: 1 teaspoon each of salt, pepper and sugar mixed with the juice of a lime.

grilling lemongrass shrimps

Lemongrass shrimps with a lime, pepper, salt and sugar based dipping sauce

Starter: Grilled Chicken and Banana Flower Salad

Chicken breast is marinated in soy sauce, sugar, pepper and five spices mix and grilled until golden brown. The salad is based on banana flowers, grated green mango, green papaya and carrot, with a bit of chili, spring onions and water spinach stems and tossed in a dressing of lime juice, fish sauce, garlic and sugar, topped with some fresh Vietnamese herbs: Mint, Vietnamese mint, Asian Basil and some fried shallots and roasted sesame seeds.

Grilled chicken and banana flower salad

Phở:

Probably the best known Vietnamese dish in the west, this rice noodle soup is originally from Hanoi. 
Phở Bo is topped with beef (Bo) and the proper broth should also be a beef broth. To make the broth get a kilo of beef bones and fry them for a few minutes to reduce the fat, add cinnamon, ginger, onion, star anise, cardamom and shallots to the fry then add water and a pinch of salt and sugar and let it simmer for an hour or more, skimming off the fat from the top.

preparing the broth for the Phở

Next we were taught how to make rice noodles: It's basically rice soaked over night mixed with water and a pinch of salt and put in a blender until it's a smooth white batter. A cotton cloth is tight over a pot of steaming water, a spoon of the batter goes on top and after a minute you can lift it off with a bamboo stick and cut into strips about a cm wide.

making rice noodles

Noodles go into the soup bowl, topped with thinly sliced beef filet, cover with the stock and serve with fresh herbs and pickle to taste. In the street food places of Hanoi the herbs are on the table for everyone to help themselves to pimp their Phở with Asian basil, sawtooth coriander, Vietnamese celery, chili, lime, bean sprouts etc. Delicious.

Phở. The best ever.

sizzling fish stew in a clay pot

Main: Clay pot fish with fresh dill

Fish filets marinated in turmeric, salt and pepper for an hour, briefly fried, then simmered in a clay pot with a sauce of garlic, shallots, chili, oil and water. Topped with fresh dill and peanuts and served with rice noodles.

Clay pot fish with fresh dill

P.S.: got the munchies? you can find the recipes here.
P.P.S.: it's a blog post that belongs to my trip from January 2012. I was lazy. I'm catching up.

Khmer cuisine and the state that I am in...

They great couple running the Siem Reap Rooms Guesthouse asked whether we were in an adventurous mood for dinner. So they recommended a place with no English menu and asked their staff to write down the names of the dishes in Khmer. The place was just off the main touristy area of Siem Reap, the waiters spoke no English and we handed them over our menu. This was one of the dishes we ordered:

beef with ants

It was quite dark at the place, so you could not really see what you were eating. Anyway: Beef with ants is delicious, the ants taste slightly sour, almost lemonish. It may just be difficult to recreate the dish at home...

Took another cooking class organized by the Frizz restaurant in Phnom Penh. Here's the menu:

banana flower salad with chicken

fish amok

another version of sticky rice and mango

Finally after a lot of travelling I reached the beach in Sihanoukville and indulged in seafood. It is also the winner of the fastest visa ever issued competition: got my visa for Vietnam in 10 minutes at the Vietnamese consulate there, and that included filling out the forms.

Seafood in Sihanoukville

When the French came to Cambodia they settled in Kep and called it Kep sur mer. The village is situated in the area of Kampot where they grow Kampot pepper. And there's a lot of crab in the sea. Hence the village's signature dish is crab with Kampot pepper. Go to the crab market and order one for $5, they take it right out of the water and serve it to you with green Kampot pepper. It doesn't get any fresher than this!
They also love big concrete statues in Cambodia, almost every roundabout has one. Kep has a crab made of concrete. A blue one.

Crab statue in Kep

Kampot pepper

and Kep's signature dish:

crab with fresh green Kampot pepper

Now regarding the state that I am in:


I don't know what day of the week it is. Sometimes I have to think twice to be sure what town I'm in. Or what the name of the country is. When I get to a new place and walk the streets I look out for familiar faces. Most of the times I find someone I met before. I am not certain if it's kip, riel or dong I'm paying with. I say “No, thank you” without looking what somebody is trying to sell me. It is normal when I pay that the shopkeeper walks out and goes to find a neighbour who can break that 100000 note. I see where the food comes from and eat it anyway. And most of the time it's delicious. Everything less than 10 hours is a short ride on a bus or train. I ask people I've met five minutes ago whether they can watch my bag while I go to the ATM for ten minutes. I travel with people I met two hours ago for the next three days. Whatever is on the table belongs to everyone. We like it. Life is good.

Laos, Please Don't Rush.

Laos P.D.R. People's Democratic Republic. Or rather, as they say: Laos, Please Don't Rush. Crossing the Mekong from Thailand's Chiang Khong to the other side is where the chaos in Laos begins. 
A slow boat takes you in two days downstream to Luang Prabang. No life vests, smokers sitting on gas bottles. That's the safe travel option. The not so safe option is a fast boat that gets you there in a day. The captains of the fast boats wear helmets. The passengers don't as they speed down the Mekong which is during the dry season now full of rocks peeking out of the water. Accidents waiting to happen...

slow boat on the Mekong, no rush

Mekong, please don't rush.

boat people, they don't rush

chicken run, Pak Beng, what's that rush?

Mekong girls, never rush

4 monks join the slow boat ride on the Mekong, they don't rush

sun sets over the Mekong, Luang, no need to rush

Luang Prabang is a laid back town on the Mekong. Coming from Thailand this is the first place where you can get a decent glass of red wine and proper bread. oui, c'est vrai, les Français étaient ici. merci! I took another cooking class with the Tamarind restaurant and cooking school. Laos cuisine is slightly different from Thai cuisine, less spicy, balanced textures, sourness, spicyness and salt. No coconut based curries. The menu consisted of sticky rice with Jeow Mak Len (Lao tomato salsa), Mok Pa (fish steamed in banana leafs), Ua Si Khai (stuffed lemongrass with minced chicken) and Khao Gam (purple sticky rice with coconut sauce). Flavours exploded in my mouth...

Laos kitchen equipment

Fish in banana leafs

Chicken in lemongrass

Laos menu

I moved on to Phonsavan, home to the Plain of Jars, sites with huge jars, no one really knows who left them here, estimated to be older than 2000 years.

Plain of jars

It was in an Indian restaurant where I met a friendly bloke in a Joe Strummer t-shirt working for one of the NGOs. He suggested I take a look at the Mines Advisory Group centre in town. The MAG supports the people of Laos to clean the country from the explosives and save lives by educating the locals in how to act when UneXploded Ordnance (UXO) is found and giving on the job training to teams so that they can defuse them or blow them up in a controlled way.

During the secret war between 1964 and 1973 the USA dropped about 2 million tons of bombs on Laos, although the country has been declared a neutral nation at the 1954 Geneva convention.
What remains of it today are still around 30% of UXO that will take ages to clear. It's advisable to stay on the beaten path. 
More bombs were dropped by the U.S. on Laos than the U.S. dropped on both Germany and Japan combined during world war II. And while the Vietnam war was probably the most televised war in history thus far and everyone heard about Cambodia, the bombings on Laos were not known to either the public nor the U.S. congress at the time (hence the name: the secret war). During the Vietnam war, when planes coming from airbases in thailand or southern Vietnam could not drop their load in Vietnam due to enemy fire or weather conditions they would detour and drop it on Laos instead since no pilot would want to risk landing plane loaded with bombs. 

The fact that the country is still littered with bombs slows the building of even simple infrastructure such as roads, schools and hospitals down and kept Laos among the poorest countries on the planet. Most of the bombs used were cluster bombs, spreading small explosives (they call them "bombies" here) that are too small to cause damage to tanks, but their only purpose is to kill or injure people. They are of the size of a fruit or a ball, some are coloured and have nicknames like "pineapple". In Laos it is a common game between boys and girls to throw balls to each other. Kids are curious if they find a ball shaped object in the fields. That's why there are still many accidents happening today.

Let's hope that the work of MAG helps to clean the country at a faster pace of UXO. Laos, just here, please do rush.

If you're interested this is a clip of a good documentary: bombies

Areas that were cleared of UXO are marked white. Always stay on the white side of life...

Mines Advsory Group

Thai food, Thai flood

Meet Poo:

Poo lives in the Klong Toey slum in Bangkok. Her mum taught her how to cook. After having a small restaurant in the slum for some years Australian NGO helping hands supported her to start up her own cooking school. It's obviously called cooking with Poo.
We met up in the centre of Bangkok and drove to Klong Toey market to do the shopping for the class and learn about the ingredients of the Thai cuisine. Loaded with bags of food we moved on to the kitchen in the slum and put our aprons on. What I liked particularly about this class is that everyone is doing their own dish and not a part of everyone's. This way you get to do all the steps to the final dish yourself, can adopt the spicyness to your likings and vegetarians can do a veggie version of the dish. What started as a small project supports now about 200 people living in the slum with food and a small income. Shopkeepers, women sewing little bags that you get to keep your recipes in, a driver etc.

fishmonger at Klong Toey market

Batman and the other superheroes from Klong Toey slum

starter: spicy green papaya salad

soup: Tom Yum Goong

main: Pad Thai Gai

dessert: sticky rice with mango

Krua Apsorn is a restaurant in Bangkok that according to this list published in the guardian serves the best Thai curry. It's not easy to find and I had to walk the streets close to the national library up and down a few times and ask the locals about its whereabouts. It was worth it. Plastic table cloths, no frills atmosphere, and the best Thai curry I had in my life. Ever. Whenever I am in Bangkok I will go back. Well balanced spicy and sour tastes that stayed on for more than an hour after I finished my dishes. I can die happy now.

Lotus root yellow curry with river prawns

Stir fried crab meat with yellow chili

'nuff foodporn.


I left Thao Khao San, the capital of Backpackeristan, for Ayutthaya, the former capital of Thailand about 2 hours north of Bangkok. This region was hit severely by the recent floods in the country and is still recovering from it. The Baan Lotus guesthouse I stayed in had just reopened about a week ago, the water levels have been so high that they reached the first floor of the buildings. Trees have been knocked over by the floods. The region is slowly recovering and in many places the high watermarks are visible up to where the flood levels rose. The probably most photographed Buddha head in the roots below was completely submerged. The temples have just been opened for visitors again.

aftermath of the flood in Ayutthaya

Fallen tree, Baan Lotus guest house, a victim of the flood, Ayutthaya

Buddha head in tree roots, Ayutthaya

Ceremony at Wat Phanang Choeng, Ayutthaya

There's an аппаратчик for that! Part II - getting around, getting by, getting what you want

Some more travelling аппаратчикs I installed on my iPhone before setting off:

Metro plans:
Metro Minsk (iTuneslink): Not the most sophisticated tube app, but it should do the job for a day. Also contains some POIs, restaurants and a map.

Moscow: Metropolitan (iTuneslink) and Moscow Metro (iTuneslink) are two apps I tried out to navigate the Russian capital.

Beijing: Beijing Metro (iTuneslink)

Currencies (iTuneslink) tells you how much your hotel room, bus ticket, souvenir, blini or beer is. Make sure to update exchange rates once in a while (done automatically when the app is started, but you're not always connected to wifi, are you?). Easy to use, good interface:

Mandarin phrasebook (iTuneslink): When I traveled China about 8 years ago the LP Mandarin phrasebook came in very handy, in particular when it comes to buying train tickets etc. It was also very well organized in sections and had some background information on all topics. Unfortunately I can't say the same about its electronic cousin. While it has the big advantage that you can quickly access the relevant topics and can actually play the matching mandarin voice, it lacks much of the background information the book comes with and seems to be less complete. Well, as long as it helps you finding the right party and a female doctor, I guess it does the job...

some food apps: On my first time in China I met some volunteers working for an NGO who gave me a "generic menu for Chinese restaurants". Basically a list of typical dishes written in Chinese with the corresponding English translation. The waiter had always great fun indicating what they could serve up from the list, called their colleagues and we all had a laugh until my gong bao jiding arrived. Now there are some apps that do the same, some better, some worse. I'll see how it works. I have not found one yet, that lets you take a picture of the Chinese writing on the menu and looks up the dish. That would be something, wouldn't it? Check these here out: China Menu (iTuneslink) easy to navigate lots of pics, cnMenu read (iTuneslink) reads the dishes in Chinese for you, but no pics, Chinese Food Menu (iTuneslink) good selection, but requires data connection.

some other useful аппаратчикs:

shazam (iTuneslink) works surprisingly well to identify music that is being played if there is not too much background noise. So if you plan to take the soundtrack home, play the song to the app and have it analyzed. Needs a data connection, so watch your roaming costs.