Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Nam Khao

Nem Khao...Nam Khao?



Growing up, my mom always called this dish 'nam'. That is what I knew it to be called all my life until I moved to San Diego. I had never had this dish outside of my parent's home. I never saw another Lao family make the dish at any of the gatherings we attended. As an adult, I had never seen it on a restaurant menu. Apparently I was not going to the right restaurants. When I stumbled across mmm-yoso I found Kirk's post about nem khao with a picture. I thought to myself, 'Aha I finally found it'.

I never asked my mom where she learned to make this amazing dish. I had never seen my grandmother cook it. I only knew that whenever my parents made large batches of som moo, we were always treated with nam the following days.

I wanted to learn the origins of this dish and of course I could only find it on wikipedia, the best source of information on the web (sarcasm). This is what wikipedia had to say about nam. I giggled a bit after reading it. Is this a 'true' Lao dish? Whereever it may have originated, I'm very lucky that my mom made this dish for us.