Food! хүнс

Hello All!

Rochelle here. I thought I would give you a little bit of an idea of what food is like here. The traditional Mongolian food available everywhere, but Ulaanbaatar has a huge selection of various types of other cuisine!

The extremely cold climate affects the traditional Mongolian diet, so the main cuisine consists of dairy, meat, and animal fat. Root vegetables and cold hardy crops (carrot, daikon radish, potato, onion, cabbage, and beet) are widely available in grocery stores, and they are quite tasty! The root veggies come with a healthy coating of dirt! It's strange to see dirty veggies in the grocery store, but it's no problem to wash it off at home. The traditional type of food is grown locally and free range! No factory farms needed here, there is plenty of space for animals to roam!!  Mongolian nomads sustain their lives from their herding animals such as horses, cattle, sheep and goats. Meat is often cooked over the stove or made into dumplings. The most common rural dish is cooked mutton, often without any other ingredients. "Buuz" is another common dish; it is dumplings filled with mutton, then steamed. Other dumplings may be boiled in water (bansh) or deep fried in mutton fat (khuushuur). I had quite a bit of mutton (sheep) dumplings during our visit in Darkhan, and I have to admit I was a bit muttoned out! Usually the mutton is a bit chewy and gamey, but it can be cooked in different ways to make it taste better as with any meat.
On very special occasions, meat and veggies are cooked by stones (that have been preheated in a fire) inside a can or abdominal cavity of a goat or marmot!!This is called horhog. Matt ate a meal prepared in this manner a few months ago and he got sick all night, but no one else did. According to Matt, the "traditional" way to cook marmot out in the countryside is to cut it's head off, stuff the body with rocks, tie the head hole together, burn the fur off with a blowtorch, and cook it over a fire. It expands like a balloon. It's really a sickening spectacle. Matt ate this once and thought it was disgusting, even though he likes most of the food here.
The most common traditional drink (aside from Chingis Vodka) is called airag, which is fermented mare's milk. Matt has experienced this as well and said it was like very strong and sour plain liquid yogurt. He said he liked it, but couldn't drink a lot of it; the Mongolians, on the other hand, drink it like a monkey eats bananas.
An everyday beverage is salted milk tea. This is what they offered us when we visited the gers near Darkhan. The salt varies by whoever makes the drink, but all the ones I had were too salty for me. I prefer sweet drinks over all others besides water.
We were also offered a biscuit/cookie called boorsog. It was pretty hard and bland, so it was best dipped into the milk tea to add a salty taste and soften it up. I thought that was very tasty!

As for the city grocery stores, the majority of the food is imported, and therefore pretty much the same price OR MORE as products in the USA! Stuff comes from Japan, South Korea, Russia and Germany, among other places. I've been eating and liking Korean food a lot; we found some really good spicy Korean sauces that we add to rice, tofu, and stir-fry vegetables. We've been making a lot of sauces with paprika and a liquid yogurt (similar to kefir) to add to stir-fry and rice. I've been trying to use grains other than rice to diversify our meals a bit. I found that "triangle rice" was common in the grocery stores but didn't know what it was called because the package was only in Mongolian. I had no idea what is was, but a little google search of grain pictures and I found out it was called kasha or toasted buckwheat. I guess it is often used for breakfast cereal, but there are some great dinner recipes as well. Millet is also common here, and although I've used in the USA before, it was only to add to bread. So I've been broadening my use of it here to use in the meals.

Here are some pictures of imported packaged products:

Matt's favorite treat! It has soft breading with marshmallow in the middle and is covered in chocolate. This is the best brand, the other brands are really terrible, according to Matt. It's from Korea and Orion is pronounced with an emphasis on the second "o". He is a Choco-Pie connoisseur!

 

 These cookies were awesome! They had chocolate drizzled over them and big peanut chunks. These crackers were also very tasty, they are covered in crushed pumpkin seeds. Both of these foods were pretty expensive, so I am going to try to do some homemade versions. It might be hard because we don't have an oven, but it is worth a try on the stove top! I already made chocolate chip cookies on the stove top and they turned out to be quite tasty, but looked a little bit like pancakes because I had to flip them on both sides! Looks aren't everything!

This is a tasty and sweet sunflower seed bar. Just a little piece is very satisfactory! It's written in Russian and says "peanut brittle"

I haven't even tried this yet because Matt said it wasn't very good. Way too sweet!  I'll try it someday...

These weren't very good on their own, but we ended putting them on some stove-top pizza we made (the pizza turned out really well, by the way) and they turned out really good when heated a little bit.

Look some stuff that is American!

Spices! I really need to learn how to read food labels, but the pictures on the packages help a lot. It seems as though I am going to have to learn Russian to understand a lot of what the food packages say. A lot of the food that looks like Mongolian writing to me, Matt says is Russian! They have pretty much the same letters ( Mongolian 2 more), but the letter combinations are very different.

Sometimes there is a mix of languages! I like that! This is Korean writing.

Famous German brand: Gut and Gunstig,  meaning Good and Favorable

We have to treat this like gold! Peanut butter is, unfortunately, very expensive here. This 18oz container was about $7!!  :(

I'll post up some recipes sometime. Bye, Bayartai, баяртай!