To Laos and Back in One Night

As anyone that knows me or follows this irregular blog knows, every so often we visit a country at random and I attempt to transport us via cooking to that country for the night.  This is a challenge as there are some items that simply are not available from time to time and then there are the palates of the subjects for these experimentations to consider as well.  The last random country that was picked was Laos, it's located out by Vietnam, Thailand, China so in general you are looking at an Asian inspired menu.  The wonders of the internet means you can find a treasure trove of information on line for the selected country of choice.

Laos's biggest challenge oddly came from dessert, a lot of which contain coconut in some form or another, not a good choice given my dinning guests, this was solved in the form of a cake although I was missing starfruit.  So the menu...(take out egg rolls and thai iced tea) as much as I would have loved to do the whole meal I know my limitations when it comes to juggling the kids and cooking and their toleration for how long I spend cooking.  I followed this up with Laos Style BBQ ribs and Koua Khao (fried rice).  I was a little worried about the chili sauce that was to go with the ribs as I'm still always put off by the smell of fish sauce and not sure about the heat level either, however I figured it's a sauce if we don't like it we don't have to use it right?  I was surprised!  It was in fact a wonderful accent to the ribs and I was not the only one to enjoy it, in fact the only complaint was there not being enough, good for me.  The ribs however I didn't plan well and should have had on much sooner so I ended up par boiling them which just added to my kitchen pain, however the end result were great well cooked ribs so I'm not going to complain.  Fried rice, I didn't have enough chili's so I used sirracha hot sauce instead, not the best substitute but it worked, somehow I pulled off a great dish despite a few challenges which I will not go further into other than to say when my girlfriend showed up and saw my frantic state she just leapt straight in and helped get the meal onto the table.

So having indulged in the ribs and rice and egg rolls we moved onto dessert.  This was a Fresh Fruit Cake - Laos recipe and instead of adding starfruit I just added extra mango and bananas in to make up the difference.  Can I say YUM?  The cake was heavy and moist from the fruit puree and I was given an A for presentation.    A great finish to a fantastic meal and I will have to remember these recipes for the future.

Oh and my lesson for the day?  I finally figured out the best was to handle mangos!  You can still teach an old dog new tricks.