Khàwp jai lãi lãi means thank you very much in Laos (sounds to me like hop jie la lie – but then again, I got some laughs so that might not be right!).

Tamarind is a delicious brown lumpy thing that tastes waayyy better then it looks. Also, the name of my new favorite restaurant in Laos. (Sorry, JOMA!)

Our guest house was only a block down the road from the restaurant so on our first night in town we strolled in to have dinner, and were turned away because they were full. (Must be good!) We made a reservation, and noticed a posting saying the next vacancies for the cooking class was the night class two nights away. So we signed up for the cooking class right then, too. We ate the next night, and then the class was the night after.

We began our quality time with Tamarind at dinner with a set Laos specialty menu. Lao people love them some sticky rice. They eat it with everything. The most common utensil they use is their hands, which was a nice break for my on-again, off-again chopstick skills.

The set menu started off with several kinds of jeow, which are dipping sauces for the sticky rice. There were also some sausages, water buffalo jerky and other relishes, along with these river seaweed-stuff chips that I was really digging.

Next was vegetable and bamboo soup. It was alright. I didn’t really like texture of water-logged bamboo.

We had herbal fish steamed in a banana leaf.

Stir fried young pumpkin with kaffir lime and ginger and lemongrass stuffed with chicken. It looked crazy complicated. It came with this great peanut sauce that I couldn’t get enough of!

Purple sticky rice in coconut milk with tamarind sauce and some Lao “cat poop” (terrible nickname) candy – palm sugar and rice flour I think – for dessert!

The next afternoon, we showed up at the restaurant for class. We had a glass of super-bomb lemongrass/lime aid (a lime lemongrass twist!), then hopped into a songthaew to be transported to the cooking school. It was about ten minutes’ ride to the school grounds, where the employees also live. It was besides a bubbling stream, next to a pond filled with water lilies. There were cooking stations set up under an awning in the fresh air, with a nice breeze and the sounds of the stream filling the air. There was also a garden where they grow their own fresh herbs, and stations set up with traditional flower-pot grills (hey, I just call em like I see em).

It turned out that we learned to cook the exact menu from the previous night, including the standard sticky rice and my favorite, the sweet purple sticky rice. I could eat that every day, so no complaints here!

We also got to chose which jeow we made – I went with an eggplant based one and Ma went with the tomato one. There are different eggplants here than in America, and I like these much better. We grilled the vegetables before mortar-and-pestling them, so it was nice and smokey. We also gift wrapped those fish in banana leaves and steamed ’em.

The lemongrass stuffed with chicken was much easier than it looked. Mom’s gluten intolerance was the only food allergy, although one lady couldn’t (or wouldn’t) eat pork, and one simply refused to eat any chicken (two of my favorite things!). They simply switched ingredients around for the ladies, and even let me stuff my lemongrass with pork since we had chicken the night before.

After all the cooking, we feasted! Besides Mom and me, there was an Australian lady planning on making the lemongrass chicken for her family’s Christmas dinner, a girl traveling solo from Singapore and a couple of older Dutch women who rolled their own cigarettes and smoked with reckless abandon (as you do). The water lillies opened up while we were eating, which I had never seen actually happen before. Magical.

I’ve really enjoyed both the cooking classes we’ve taken, but they were both two different experiences. It was nice to have other people to chat with this time, and our instructor, Chai, and I are big pals now. At dinner, we all talked about our travels and future plans, and in fact ended up on the same airplane later to Hanoi with the Australian lady and her husband.

We totally went back to Tamarind for lunch the next day to try something different – don’t judge! We had pork wrapped in lemongrass skewers, my favorite jeow – jeow bong, which is a sweet and spicy chili paste. Mom had a pumpkin & coconut milk soup, served with a giant rice cracker. We also got some little candies for dessert, and some cold dessert soup – coconut milk with jellies and tapioca in it.

Before Laos, I had decided that I didn’t particularly care for the taste of lemongrass, but after the past few days I have come to like it. Maybe it’s the combinations I’ve tried here that I hadn’t had previously. I was also really into that lime lemongrass twist!