This was really interesting! I'm doing Book Riot's Read Harder challenge this year, and one of the tasks was to read a food book about a cuisine I hadn't tried before. I don't think I've ever eaten food from Laos, so I was lucky to come across this. The author, who is a food obsessive on a level far above even me, goes to Laos for what is essentially a food holiday: the entire purpose of her trip is to seek out new food and new civilisations, and to boldly eat what they've all been eating for some time now. There are small bits of history and culture thrown in there, as you would find in most travel books, but really there is a mono-focus on cuisine. There are also quite a few recipes scattered through the book, gleaned after the author has talked her way into many a professional and domestic kitchen to observe. Helpfully, in a lot of them she gives potential (and more easily available) substitutes for ingredients that it might be difficult to source in other countries. But as entertaining as this book was, I don't think I'll be trying them. (Maybe if she'd put in the recipe for green coconut jelly.) My vegetarian self is not going near pig lung salad, for instance, no matter how much the author enjoyed it.