Lao Food

There is a joke around the MCC office that you can tell people from home as much cultural stuff as you want, but no one really gets excited about the fact that you are living abroad unless you can freak them out with weird food you've eaten. As Lao has been such a rural subsistence culture people basically eat whatever they can find.  There is a family here that has some potted plants on their porch just because they look nice.  I guess it is not infrequent that Lao people come up on the porch and take a bite of one of the leaves or flowers and ask each other how to cook it.  I found this picture gallery on BBC...it explains it well: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/07/asia_pac_unusual_lao_cuisine/html/1.stm

 

So to add to my collection of different animals and bugs and their various by products, at the boat races I had the opportunity to try "kai luu", which is a duck egg that already has a baby duck growing in it.  Although the baby was small (about the size of a quarter) and there were no feathers (the only way my family got me to eat it) it took a few tries and pep talks to get it down, followed by some Beer Lao of course.