By Jeremy Cherfas
February 3, 2014
Eat This Podcast
Karen talks with noted food blogger and audio producer Jeremy Cherfas on Eat This Podcast about the wonderful food of Laos (it’s not Thai food!) and the effects of the American bombing campaign on farming and food in Laos today.
“The story of unexploded ordnance in Laos was an eye opener, for me. But I also wanted to know about food in Laos, and so that’s where we began our conversation,” writes Cherfas. READ AND LISTEN
By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
May 3, 2010
Rambling Spoon
A while back, I posted my account of eating for nine days in the northern Lao village of Sophoon. That was an example of what comes to the dinner table when the hosts know they have guests to feed. A few days ago, we trekked to the Hmong village of Ban Pakeo, several hours on foot from another Hmong village outside of Phonsavanh. We went there for a variety of reasons (old jars, for one), and you’ll have the opportunity to read much more about this in the future. But first, let’s consider dinner.
Ban Pakeo has no electricity (though that might change if villagers agree on allowing solar panels into their community). When we visited five years ago, villagers had to walk up and down steep hills to retrieve small buckets of water (that’s changed, thanks to a couple of water taps installed by Engineers Without Borders and a man named Don May at Fort Lewis College). Ban Pakeo has a cell phone, but it takes an afternoon hike to charge the phone in the nearest roadside village. Bottom line: no one knew we were coming for dinner. READ MORE
By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
Feb. 23, 2010
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
It’s a nippy night in Wausau with snow crunching beneath boots and cold air prickling skin. Not a hint of green, not this time of year. But I enter Ka Xiong’s home, and suddenly winter ends. Her furnace is attuned to the tropics, and four generations of family help kindle the warmth.
I’ve come to ask Xiong about Hmong elders and their food. She guides me to the basement, where last summer’s bounty is stashed amid tables and chairs, boxes and batteries, a cooking pot, a water heater and an empty aquarium.
There, in the corner, is a heap of pumpkins, cucumbers and three types of squash – tan, green and bumpy orange. Ginger grows high on the windowsill, and the room exudes green – herbs to boil with chicken, others to mend an ailing bladder, and a plant that resembles taro with big, fanning leaves.
“My parents passed it on to me and said it’s a good medicine to have in the house,” says 62-year-old Xiong, who left a refugee camp in Thailand in 1993, bound for Wisconsin. READ MORE
By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
May 12, 2007
Rambling Spoon
A few weeks back, while my stomach still suffered from the pasty and other Midwestern delights, I went hunting for familiar food. Asian food. Chile and rice, spicy and nice. The stuff that makes my gut feel at home.
I went straight to 35th and National, a nifty little block of Milwaukee where the flavors of Mexico and Laos mingle, door to door. Actually, I was looking for the Vientiane Noodle Shop, which came highly recommended by friends with good noses for good Asian eats. But by twist of karma, I ended up across the street at the Noodle House, where I stumbled upon a community of Hmong refugees who had settled in Milwaukee via the refugee camps in northern Thailand. READ MORE