Amidst my embarrassing attempt at karaoke at a back-yard party about a month ago, I had some really delicious baby green mangoes dipped in a funky brown sauce. One of the key ingredients of this sauce is a toasty goodness known as khao khua, which is a fancy way of saying toasted rice powder. It’s also the one thing I forgot to buy when I went to the market yesterday. So, homemade it would have to be. It’s also a somewhat tedious process, so you’ve got to be ready and willing to stand in the kitchen for a good long while, preferably without any young children tugging at your pant leg to play My Little Ponies or read another chapter of Captain Underpants.
So, khao khua is what happens when you decide that you should really be doing something slightly more productive while drinking Johnny Walker and catching up on those episodes of Westworld that you missed, and then you end up hovering over a hot pan in the kitchen for an entire hour, stirring rice as you watch semi-human androidy thingies murder people in horrific ways. Well, I suppose it doesn’t have to be like that, but that’s how it was for me. It starts out like this:
One of my favorite Lao cooking resources online, Cooking with Nana, says that she puts a bit of kaffir lime leaf and lemongrass in with her sticky rice during toasting, to add extra flavor. This seemed like a fantastic idea, so that’s what I did.And about one sweaty hour later, it was super toasty and my kitchen was entirely full of smoke. I cooled the rice and then ground it up in my spice grinder, and now I’m one step closer to enjoying funky dipping sauce with my green mango.
Constance, what's cooking? 
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