Jeao Kai

Big Saht, little coke, cute cooker


I always hear jeaos described as a dipping sauce, I’d say more accurately they’re a mopping up sauce, as in when you use the sticky rice to mop some up. Jeao Kai is exactly that kind of jeao. It’s dry, drier than say potato salad, but it none the less sticks to the rice well especially when smushed. (smush: to smash and mush at the same time)


Some of the ingredients, that white stuff ain't salt

I never seem to hear of people eating or making jeoa kai despite it being so easy and being made from such common ingredients. It’s another one of those dishes passed down from great grandpa Kahman, probably an improvisation from times in the Soviet Union spent without access to padek, or maybe just a Lao adaptation of an egg salad.


the greens

It’s as simple as boiling an egg.

Boil a half dozen eggs or so, cool, pulverize some hot peppers in the bottom of the coke add just a couple green onions, dent them, throw in salt, bang nua, fish sauce, then the cut up eggs, stir, then lots of mint and a little cilantro, voila.


I like it with mint on the side also and thick coffee in those cheap plastic mugs from Thailand

The Napalm Post

I was surfing YouTube looking for jet airplane videos for my 4 year old to watch. You know how it is, like a lot of four year old boys he likes pretending to sword fight and fly toy jet airplanes.

So I clicked on this one and was surprised at his reaction. Violence on movies never seems to bother him. He didn't think this video was fun at all. He was put out. "That's Laos!" he said. When I said it was probably Vietnam he said, "what's Vietnam?"

A close look at the video reveals houses and paths and fields not very different at all from Uncle Butts place out past Tat Luang.

I've seen this video before, or one very similar, probably a long time ago. I too view it differently than I might have before. No longer do I see an aircraft dropping bombs. Now I see many people burnt to death inside their houses. People and houses not very different from me and mine.

Two Ways To Steal Land and Timber In Laos

Strangler Fig.... First it uses the original tree for support in it's climb up to the sun, eventually it surrounds the host tree and chokes it to death.

Get healthy forests to be designated as infertile degraded land and therefore available for sale. Buy the land, cut all the timber while making a token effort to employ locals cutting and replanting, and then as soon as the timber is cut declare bankruptcy and disappear back to the country you’ve come from.

Or, again using the effort to eliminate swidden agriculture entirely by 2010, get fallow land reclassified as degraded, buy a 50 year lease and plant rubber. Bear in mind that 9 out of 10 given acres are at all times allowed to lie fallow in traditional swidden agriculture.

Oh, I forgot one more. Start a company to build a hydroelectric plant on a river, cut all the trees which grow thick and tall in bottom lands, then disappear after the trees are sold. Also known as how to turn a timber company into a hydroelectric company then into thin air.

Ban Sok Ngam on the Nam Ngam, a tributary of the Nam Ou. Is this village slated to be drowned for one of the five dams being built on the Naom Ou?


Old Growth burnt, then cut, then planted in rubber. Luang Namtha Province

The following is by Rebeca Leonard, of The Foundation for Ecological Recovery I've added the link to my sidebar.

Over the last two years, Laos has seen a dramatic increase in foreign direct investment for commercial tree plantations. The Lao Committee for Planning and Investment shows 21 projects worth US$17.3 million value were approved in 2005, which rose to 39 projects approved with a value of US$458.5 million in 2006 and by February 2007, 9 projects had been approved and 16 were pending, with a total value of US$342 million. To give a somewhat simplified overview: Chinese investors are investing in rubber plantations in the north of Laos, Vietnamese rubber companies have set up in the south of Laos and four companies are establishing pulpwood plantations in the central area (Japan's Oji Paper, Thailand's Advance Agro, India's Grasim and Sweden- Finland's Stora Enso). The reasons behind this year on year increase are complex, but a key set of government policies have been instrumental in promoting industrial tree plantations. There have been a series of national forest plans and strategies implemented since the 1989 ban on exports of processed wood and the 1991 decree to ban commercial logging.

The latest is the Lao National Forestry Strategy to the Year 2020, published in July 2005 after a 5 year process. The 2020 Strategy plans to increase “forest” cover from 40% to 70% by 2020, involving the planting of over 1 million hectares of bare land with industrial tree crops. Tree plantation businesses are exempt from land taxes and fees, and gain rights of land use for 30-50 years or longer in special economic areas.

However the roots of the plantation boom cannot be explained without a discussion of the land and forest allocation programme which has been (and remains) instrumental in making land available for commercial plantations.

Land allocation activities began in the early 1990s, and were eventually consolidated into a national programme for forest land allocation in 1996. The Land and Forest Allocation (LFA) programme was established as the primary mechanism for delineating customary village boundaries, giving villagers temporary rights to utilise forest resources, as well as land resources with a (mostly unfulfilled) promise of granting permanent rights in the later stages of its implementation.

The Land and Forest Allocation process soon became one of the major tools to achieve the target area of tree plantations. The land within the traditional village’s boundary was consolidated and reclassified to fit a new map. This new village map was designed to accommodate the current population of the village with some reserve land kept for future generations. Agricultural land was allocated according to statutory entitlements per labour unit, and the forest land was categorised according to the five forest types identified in the forest law.

While there were many progressive elements to this programme, this reorganisation and reallocation had serious impacts for the traditional communities who form 80% of the Lao population. This is because it was implemented hand in glove with the policy to stabilize and then eliminate traditional shifting cultivation by 2010.

With pressure from this ‘national goal’, unfarmed swidden fields were no longer recognised as a valid land use and they were systematically designated under the LFA process as ‘degraded forest’. In fact, this represented a stark deviation from the terms of the forestry law which states that degraded forest land is land where the forest will not regenerate naturally. Fallow land is normally just the opposite – land which has been set aside under the traditional rotational swidden farming system specifically for the purpose of regenerating the land and returning it to its natural state, which in most cases is forest.

The area classified as unstocked and degraded forestland under the LFA reached one third of the total land area, that is, vast tracts of fallow land were erased from the maps and reallocated for tree plantation development across the country.

This of course served the tree plantation companies who were keen to gain access to the fallow lands, rather than being constrained (by law) to the worst and most infertile degraded lands where no forest would regrow. In some cases companies actively influenced the classification of fertile land as degraded. The Decree formalising land and forest allocation programme allowed both Lao groups and foreigners to gain rights to forest land for tree plantation.

One such company was BGA, a New Zealand based company, whose plantation concession was later taken over by the Oji Paper company from Japan. Although there are examples of villages refusing to allow Oji to establish tree plantations on their land, in many cases plantation company staff were able to get the choicest lands by joining the land and forest allocation team at the local area and then pointing out which land should be considered “degraded” according to satellite images. Then the government officials helped the company to obtain the land from the village people.

The Lao government’s enthusiasm for tree plantations has been shown time and again to be misplaced. In far too many cases companies who applied for land for plantation simply exploited the rules, obtained healthy forested land, logged it for the plentiful and valuable timber species on the land, replanted with a sorry looking tree crop, folded up quietly and fled. Earlier this year, the government acknowledged the problems and the government declared a moratorium on new land concessions larger than 100 hectares.

By 2003, a total area of 113,000 ha of plantations had been established in the country. The area rose to 146,000 ha of plantations in 2005, with a 66% survival rate. As the Strategy 2020 itslef acknowledges, the productivity is lower than anticipated. Unfortunately the plans for improving the situation include improved tree growing technology, and larger plantations. This is likely to lead to another wave of problems for local people who have little opportunity to voice their opposition to these changes.

On a more positive note however, the latest news is that government has now taken stock of the decline in forest areas and the massive increase in land concessions handed to both foreign and domestic companies across the country. In 1982 forests covered 47 percent of land in Laos; this has now been assessed to decline to 35% of the country. The new National Land Management Authority has called a moratorium on land concessions for agriculture and tree plantation projects in order to reassess the policy and review the past projects to ensure they are in line with the law. The Laotian people will be anxious to know the results of this review.

Nam Phou San Gao (I think the "nam" reffers to the fact that there is water on the mountain "phou" rather than the name of any river.)

The Foundation for Ecological Recovery

Som Pak (gaht) or pickled mustard greens

I’ve no idea why we call these greens mustard greens. In Laotian they are called pak gaht. They grow pretty well in the cooler part of the year, and are a common winter vegetable. Here in Colorado they are one of the first plants up in the spring, and one of the last to die in the fall.



Mustard greens are the ingredient for the som pak you see sold in bags wherever kao neeow is sold. Typicaly a small bag costs twenty cents or so, combined with sticky rice and something barbequed they round out a meal.

The following is mama’s method.



The leaves are washed then sprinkled with salt which is worked in with lots of turning over of the leaves and gentle squeezing to push the salt into the vegetable. A benign bruising if you will. To test for saltiness taste some of the water that collects at the bottom of the bowl. If too salty drain and add fresh water. Remember the rice water has salt too.



Rice is boiled with water and salt so that the rice breaks down, cooled, and then pushed through the fine strainer when added to the mustard greens. The whole concoction is put in a large jar and set on the counter to sour for a day or two. The reason for the screen is to keep out the rice grains themselves, they don’t look good.

I like the som pak plain with ginger and sticky rice, with scrambled eggs, and especially in the stock for the thin sour soup called gaeng som pak.

Environmental Destruction a Go Go

I read a couple of online sources of information about Laos and lately it seems like I should leave my computer off. Every time I log on a new source of eco destruction awaits me.

Within the last month I have learned of;

A proposed lignite (soft sulphurous coal) power plant to be built in Xayabouli province at the site of the former annual elephant ho down in Hongsa. New Mandela



Ferry Boat at the Thadua crossing Xaiyabouli

A hydro power dam on the Nam Tha, would flood out 15 villages some of which are resettled Lao seung. You know those people brought down to the river valleys to “modernize” them and wean them from growing opium. It’s all in Nalae district, which I’m unfamiliar with. More Mandella

I found out about an intended 1410 mega watt plant in Luang Prabang while trying to find a link for this post. Reuters

The one that hits home the hardest is the dam on the Nam Ou of about 600 mega watt capacity with three more in the plans. It’s the most beautiful big river I’ve seen in Laos. Pnomsin Blog


Kids making ripples on the Nam Ou above Hatsa

In Vientiane the Tat Luang marsh is slated to be developed by a Chinese investor into an instant city. When driving out of town this tributary of the Mekong called Houay Mak Hiao was always my indicator that the city had been left behind. It’s beyond the two big markets of Ban Tat Luang. When driving over the bridge you can see all the rice growing up and down stream. The Lao government proposed a site further from downtown, but the Chinese insisted. Whose city is it anyway? I guess the person with the money’s.

One ray of hope is the simple math of this message posting to an online group, sorry can’t link.

"Given that the Lao Government budget revenues amount to around $500 million a year, a simple calculation indicates that a 20% investment in the hydro scheme would amount to around a third of government budget revenues for any given year. Given also that the government is concurrently signing several such agreements I wonder where the government contribution is coming from. Is it simply a gift from the developers in return for government complicity? "

The writer is referring to the one hydro plant on the Nam Ou, estimated cost $700 to $800 million.

My worry is that modernization will mean that corrupt officials are now better able to quickly strip Laos of it’s existing timber, poison it’s watersheds with effluent from various mines, and flood all the lowlands for exported electricity? Is China the example of what Laos will look like in twenty years?

Laos Opium Free?.....Not quite yet

Recently I read on a blog called Imaging Our Mekong that Laos is no longer “opium free”. Of course it never was anyway. The piece goes on to state that overall hectares under cultivation in Laos have increased 40% in 2006, from 1,800 hectares to 2,500. In tonnage that translates into 14 to 20 tonnes, vastly down from the 2001 estimates of 134 tonnes, but a long way from zero.

Update Oct 17,07
Stop the presses! Today the Lao government announced figures for 2007 as being down to 1500 hectares, they also compare to 1998 to further make the figures rosy. Further fudging the numbers they claim a more than 50% drop in tonnage from a 40% drop in hectares. Maybe the most productive fields have stopped growing. Or maybe the numbers are total bunkum anyway.
Vientiane Times


Above is Lung (uncle) who let us stay in the extra house he had for trekkers above Chang Dao in Thailand back in 96. When Thailand started to clean up it’s trekking program the guides stopped staying at his place for the obligatory smoke fest. During a months long wait for a visa I stayed at his extra house to get away from the city for a few days. The setting was idyllic, and I’m not bothered by opium smokers, they are quiet and harmless.

Lung married a Lahu girl back in the 60s and has made Thailand his home. Originally a KMT soldier, he told me he had fought all over China before he and many in the KMT army made the retreat into Thailand and Burma. He had a very modest business selling opium. Like many long time smokers he was thin. He spoke Thai with a decidedly Mandarin accent. Once in a while he would lapse back into Chinese and make his point by jabbing the end of his pipe in my chest. He was a splendid host, and pretty hilarious having a lifetime of stories to relate. Two of his daughters were working in Chang Mai as were seemingly all the girls in the village. When I think of him I think of how life takes it’s twists and turns. How does one end up living in a hill tribe village up on the side of a mountain in Thailand. I hope he is well.

Back to Laos.

I assume they must have ways of counting hectares using satellite imagery and they extrapolate tonnage based on those images. Of course this all is a drop in the bucket of the estimated 6,610 illicit tonnes produced worldwide, a fraction of a percent. Taipei Times All figures are for 2006. This also isn’t counting the legal opium produced by Australia, France, Turkey and India, for pain relief.

The respected Senilis Council goes on to estimate that only 25% of the worlds pain relief needs are being met. The short story is that people, especially in poor countries, are dying in pain and at the same time we are encouraging countries like Laos to impose the death penalty for crimes like opium sales.

Even more ironic is that in Laos a common cause of death is liver cancer. The worm found in fish of the Mekong watershed, imbibed raw in the fermented fish of padek, over time, while residing in the liver of it’s victims, causes enough liver damage and irritation to cause liver cancer, a very common form of death for people in their forties and fifties. I’ve heard liver cancer is very painful.

So here is a county that until the mid 1990s had no laws banning anything to do with drugs, who then under pressure from the USA and the UN, has now criminalized opium to the extent of making it a capital crime, and there are many people dying in pain from a lack of those self same drugs.

The issue of abuse and addiction must also be considered and opium addiction does occur. From the viewpoint of this observer, and bear in mind I seem to do no drugs these days of any sort, that when compared to the violence and poisoning caused by alcohol or the very real life shortening affects of cigarette addiction, it doesn’t seem very threatening.


Above is a photo taken by a young Canadian adventurer called Rudecam who traveled through Laos in 2006 looking for excitement. First he tried to hike up Phou Bia the highest point in Laos. Unfortunately Phou Bia is also at the centre of the Xaysombone Special Zone, and was still heavily contested between the Lao Army and Hmong insurgents. Complicating things further it is probably mined pretty heavily by the government forces and the approach begins at the old not so secret CIA airport at Long Chen. He didn’t get far.

His other objective was to hike up to Lima Site 85 on Phou Pati. He didn’t have much luck with the government tour guides on that one either. He did take the photo though. Oh to be 20 yrs old and on the loose in Laos.




Bringing the whole thing back to a personal level the Vientiane times, which is the official English language mouth piece for the Lao government, blames the ruination of Laos’ opium free status on Luang Namtha province which produced 40 of the 25,000 nationwide hectares. They claim plantations in inaccessible valleys are difficult to control. Plantations sounds much different than a subsistence farmer trying to grow a cash crop.

Well, my immediate thought is good for them. I of course think of the villages of Nambo, Mongla, Jakune, and any other villages left in the Nam Fa watershed. The ones that haven’t been relocated down to the lowlands. I can’t think of any area that would be less accessible in Luang Namtha Province. Access is relative. I think what is meant is that areas under cultivation can’t be reached by way of Toyota Landcruiser. I can’t imagine any place in Luang Namtha province being more than a days walk from the road, no more than 25 km, hardly remote from my perspective. Probably that is why Luang Namtha became the early target of eradication efforts.

I hope the people of those villages have made some money.

A Lao Food Blog I've been reading

But first a photo, have to have something to catch the eye right?


I thought this pepper was a habanero turns out the shape is slightly wrong and the way the fruit stem attaches to the pepper itself is different. I think this is a rocoto but I can't tell for sure. Never can tell what's going to come up in our garden box or where the seeds come from. Sometimes the seeds are from the actual fruit at the grocery store, sometimes from the mothers of my wifes Lao buddies, and sometimes from Laos. (Turns out these were hot peppers sold in a Super Walmart)

Anyway about the blog.

In my explorations of Lao cooking blogs I keep returning to one the same few to read more. Lately I’m intrigued by this one called Lao Cook.

The name itself is indicative of what’s underneath, not that is about a Lao Cook, which it is, but that it’s understated and doesn’t toot it’s own horn. I mean they could just have well called the blog Lao Fusion Haute Cuisine, or “The Most Modern, Avant Guard Interpretation of Lao Food On The Planet”, even Lao Chef, but no, they stuck with the humble “Lao Cook”. Vienne the head of the Lao cook team in keeping with his character calls his food Lao “new style“.

The more I read, the more excited I get in that here for the first time is Lao food not only prepared but also presented in such a way as to take it’s place amongst the finest foods of the world. I used to worry that the flavours of Laos would be lost before they were even known. I’m not so worried anymore.

I knew that the background for the website was a restaurant in Europe, I’d always assumed France, a more thorough reading reveals a restaurant at a very posh Spanish resort.
Bear in mind that normally I am a reverse restaurant snob in that I don’t eat at any place that has a menu, and seldom spend over a dollar on any meal. In Laos I steer clear of all tourist type restaurants. Actually I usually eat either at the market, very small mom and pop foe places or at home and at friends houses who are Lao. Reading the web site and watching the videos makes me wish that I somehow had a table between the kitchen and the dining room so that I could watch the food being cooked and grab some dishes as they go by on their way to the customers out front.

I also saw a link on Lao Cuisine to a video called “Lao Cook TV“, or LCTV. The video was about soured Lao Pork Sausage by LCTV. Som Moo with Alexandra saying "hi" and "by" In the video, I assume it must be Vienne speaking with a pronounced English accent. It has to be Vienne in that the speaker obviously knows Lao food. The video isn’t rehearsed and the speaker understands what’s going on with the break down of the texture of the pork as it’s being kneaded. The video begins and ends with a hello from Alexandra the Lao Pop star. Maybe my blog needs a hello from Paris Hilton or something. Notice though that the background music is classical.

Check out this recipe called Duck, Liver, and Mango

Foie Gras is covered with wafer thin slices of raw Duck Breast, and dressed with Yuzu Sauce that has been heated in Olive and Sesame Oil with some Peppercorns. Shreds of ripe Mango adds sweetness.

Duck, Liver, Mango typifies Mr. Viennes cooking style, background, and attitude. The influence is Lao, with a Euro twist, and a very unassuming presentation. I mean isn’t foie gras not so different than the pig liver pate that is in the baguettes sandwiches? Raw duck in laap is famous in Laos, and the mango is everywhere, especially in April. Mr Veinne could have called this dish many things, instead he chose the simple name to describe it.

If you followed the link you would have noticed that below the duck is some Nahm Dtok, you know that yam called waterfall after the way you are supposed to cook the meat only until the water starts to come out. They use tenderloin. I’ll bet the meat is a lot tastier than the hormone antibiotic feedlot raised beef I’m used to, and much much more tender than those cows in Laos that more resemble goats. The photos make me want to grab a piece with my fingers and and make it disappear.

Below that still is tom yum. Check out the lemon grass. It’s the leafy part. Great for soups, do they sell it that way in Spain? I doubt it. I suspect chef Vienne has a large patch growing out back. Bai kii hoot and kah too.