Transit Day and Thoughts of Mongolia

Making Buuz with Pagmaa (our guide)

Today has been a quiet day of transiting to French Frigate Shoals. All of our safety drills, dive preps and the like were completed yesterday so there is not much to report for today, other than continuing to study the algae and coral. In the down time, I thought I would post something that I wrote during our last trip but wasn't able to post in Mongolia. I hope you enjoy!

Have a good evening and take care,

Cristi

We came to Mongolia with concern over the food we would encounter and filled with horror stories of Mongolian cuisine. Meat, noodles, a bit of broth, maybe the occasional root vegetable and the dreaded milk tea were what we expected to encounter. Even the guidebooks warned of the blandness of the food and the need to fill your backpack with contraband seasonings, dried fruit, vitamin supplements and anything that would relieve the inevitable malnutrition and boredom that was supposed to come with prolonged exposure to Mongolian cooking. The diet was reported to consist of mutton, dairy products rendered unrecognizable, potatoes and noodles. I fully expected to either lose 10 pounds or gain 20 during our month long stay and for a couple whose travel plans revolve around food - San Francisco for Dungeness Crab, Chicago for beefs and gyros, Cape Canaveral for rock shrimp, and France for the cheese (thank you to all the powers that be for France's obsession with cheese) - we had reluctantly decided that magnificence of landscape outweighed (barely) the downfalls of not eating for a month.

So when we were greeted on the Trans-Mongolian Railway by a thermos of hot water and small packets of TeaKing 3 in 1 Instant Tea Mix with no other Roman script, we thought the food trials and tribulations had begun. It was in fact an International Cafe-type version of Mongolian Milk Tea. But after one cup we thought we might like this stuff. After 3 cups we were certain that we liked it. I found that sugar enhanced the experience, as it so often does, but was firmly reprimanded in Mongolian for my audacity of adding sugar to milk tea. I even had my example sugar packet that I was using to convey my request - my Mongolian language skills are on par with the babbling of a 6 month old - confiscated in disbelief.

But we supposed these tame packets with shiny gold writing were only a shadow of what was to come, as each passing ger brought us closer to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar and our first true Mongolian meal. By the time of arrival, we had steeled ourselves and sought the recommendation of a restaurant favored by locals. This led us to a a bright sign boasting 'Traditional Mongolian Fast Food', a short flight of stairs leading below street level and a Mongolian-language menu with meager English descriptions. Pointing to a few items brought us plates big enough for 3 and filled with fried dough stuffed with meat and onions, various salads of grated carrots with mayo, cabbage seasoned with vinegar, potatoes, tomatoes, and a broth soup that held luscious, steamed dumplings. We later learned that these were called buuz. Overwhelmed by the amount of food and the wonderful tastes, we ate as much as we could in an attempt to not appear rude and barely made it back to our youth hostel before falling into a protein and carb-induced slumber.

Through out the rest of our trip, we found that the quality of the food greatly increased when our hosts were not attempting to cook what they thought westerners ate. After 3 days, we convinced our first guide, Pagmaa, to prepare things that she would normally eat and this led to wonderful mutton stews, dishes of mutton, carrots, onions and potatoes cooked with hot rocks, breakfasts of hot milk and rice soup, jars of pickled vegetables - a culinary remnant of Soviet occupation - yak-milk cheese, fried pancakes with savory meat filling and our first exposure to homemade Milk Tea. With each meal we wondered when the horror stories would become a reality. But other than a slight longing for brussel sprouts - normal for me, even in Hawaii - we found that each dish brought mouth-watering aromas and even better tastes. Not that Mongolian cuisine can rival the intense flavors of Boeuf Bourguignon or a good fish taco, but it doesn't try to. It is a culinary heritage in and of itself that has combined available ingredients with cultural influences of Soviet and Chinese occupations and a local preference for simple flavors. Salt, garlic, onions and butter were the seasonings that I saw employed.

During our stay, we were exposed to the differences between Kazakh and Mongolian dairy products and greeted by tables filled with delicacies of homemade yogurt, mild cheese, hard and soft milk curds, clotted cream, fresh butter, mountain-berry jam, fried dough cookies and plenty of cups of Milk Tea. All of these made possible by livestock herded by children, fed solely on grass and milked within hours of food prep. This was the ultimate organic milk source. I did find that I preferred the style of Kazakh milk tea - they encouraged the use of sugar - and that yak, camel and mares milk all have distinct flavors, with the only one that I would avoid in the future being fermented mares milk. It tasted like a cross between tangy yogurt and the spoiled taste grape juice gets when it is left to sit too long in the sun. We even got to help in the preparation of buuz, cooked a Mongolian-style stew on the slopes of a mountain overlooking a Buddhist monastery at sunset and received a cheese-making lesson from a family near Terelj National Park. All of the recipes had been handed down from parent to child with even less attention to measurements than that paid by my italian Grandmother. When I asked if each person had their own secret ingredients that were added to dishes, the women chuckled and said that the food has been the same for generations and is part of a common knowledge. They seemed to say this is what you know if you grow up in the countryside. They laughed even harder when I told them that I am still unable to exactly match the taste of my Father's or Great-Grandmother's Pasta Fazzoli and have been told that I am still not old enough to be given an exact recipe.

Mongolia's endearing tastes and flavors are ones that I will attempt to prepare at home, especially the cheese, although I know it won't be quite as authentic. During our cheese tutorial, we were told to place something heavy on the fresh cheese to squeeze out remaining whey, such as a carriage. We thought this was a miscommunication until the curd-filled cheese cloth was taken outside the ger and placed under the wheel of a horse cart. I'm not sure where I'll find a horse cart in Honolulu, but I guess we'll work something out.

All in all, the utilitarian approach to food prep lends to the uniqueness of Mongolian cuisine. The flavors are simple and fitting for a country where the landscape dominates daily life and the nearest grocery store may be a 3 day drive over rough terrain. I think we appreciated the food mainly due to our love of food in general. We aren't overly adventurous - Ben and I both still have an aversion to roasted insects - but we find it difficult to pass up new opportunities. Even our search for horse meat was rewarded in Mongolia, a country that has surprised us in so many ways.