THE FRENCH WERE HERE

My hotel stay includes breakfast.  My choice for bread included toast or baguette.  I'll have the baguette thank you.  It came with bacon and eggs.  The eggs although sunny side up were cooked through.  Fortunately the baguette was slit down the middle.  So I opened it up and in went the bacon and egg.  Voila, a good old fashioned bacon and egg sandwich.

Speaking of French influence, I haven't seen a menu for a long time that lists dessert crepes.  The restaurant menu lists no less than 42 different crepes.  What's not to love about this place!

Cooking class is tomorrow.  Restaurant eating is today.  Aside from a nice bowl of soup with noodles and ground water buffalo meat for lunch (washed down by the obligatory Beerlao) I really want to tell you about dinner.

When I made my cooking class reservation at the Tamarind Restaurant yesterday I noticed they had a special dinner on Friday nights.  I signed up for it and tonight I started eating with 14 other folks at 7 pm.  We finished about 9:30. 

The meal starts with sticky rice (without sugar), four different dipping sauces and dried deep fried Mekong River seaweed with sesame seeds.  You roll up a wad of sticky rice and dip it in the sauces – smoky eggplant, spicy chili, savory tomato, and roasted green pepper.

Next is the piece de resistance – a whole fish steamed in banana leaves prepared over charcoal.  It comes with no less than ten toppings.

Dessert rounds out the meal.  There were about a half dozen different fruits (some of which I have no clue what they were) accompanied by black sticky rice.

Oh, yes it took two big bottles of Beerlao to wash it all down