Cooking With Gas

I beg you not to judge Engrish and me.  Yes, during our time in Turkey we ate with the enthusiasm of a Mormon singles' ward at a break-the-fast potluck.  Or a Muslim at Iftar.  Or, if those metaphors hold no meaning for you, we were a two-girl horde of locusts, devouring everything in sight.  Because here's the thing about Mongolia in 2022: we're between a rock and a hard place.  China's closed their borders.  Russia's off playing king of the mountain.  Meanwhile, we can't just go to the store and buy things.  Admittedly, when I first came to Mongolia ten years ago, the rule of thumb was to buy rare items when you found them, because there was no guarantee they'd be there when you came back.  However, it was never to this extent.  Back then, we were talking about cherry coke...now I'm lucky if I can buy a can of coke.  I haven't seen flour tortillas in probably six months.  Hell, Korean food was one of the things I could always count on, but these days I can't even seem to find sesame oil.

So that's the situation.  For an entire, glorious week, nobody told us "bahkwei."  (I knew I was well and truly back last weekend when I tried to go to LaRosa for dinner and left without eating because they didn't have anything I wanted...and I tried to order three different things!)  Instead, each dish was more delectable than the last.  However, no meal we ate the entire trip was as tasty as the one we cooked ourselves.

Okay, let me back up.  After returning to Hidden Cave from our balloon ride, we chilled a bit before being picked up again, this time by Tolga, who whisked us off to his family home in Ayvali.  Their family business is a restaurant called Cappadocia Home Cooking.  And they very kindly let you be the chef!  Sure, they did most of the hardest parts of cooking, like grocery shopping and washing the dishes, but still.  You know me - I'm kind of addicted to this sort of thing.  But I feel like I should get some points for getting Engrish hooked on it, too - not only did she buy the family cookbook, but when we got back to Istanbul, she stopped us at a shop along the street to pick up a Turkish rolling pin.  Now that's dedication!

When we got to their home, they treated us to tea and these amazing little...heaven help me, I'm going to sound like a pretentious British git...biscuits (sorry, there's really no better name for them - cookies just isn't accurate), dusted with powdered sugar and cinnamon.  After chatting with us they brought us to the kitchen, which was huge and made of stone - like a barrel vault?  I actually know pretty much nothing about Turkish architecture.  There were plenty of jars of canned, home-grown produce - they actually own these huge apricot orchards.  It felt really inviting - they told us, "Our home is your home!" (I'm not that easy to fool, guys - if this was my home it would be a huge mess - but thanks for playing!)

Over the course of two hours they showed us how to make SO many dishes.  As we cooked they let us in on a lot of little secrets, like not adding the garlic til last (otherwise it overtakes the other flavors while cooking) or peeling the eggplant in stripes (although I can't remember the reason for that one).  By the way, I just want you to recognize the restraint I'm showing in holding off on eggplant jokes, in spite of how often Engrish ordered it on this trip.  Probably because I need those jokes for tomorrow's post, but I digress.

The dish I was most interested to learn was the so-called Turkish ravioli.  It was amazingly simple to make, WAY easier than Italian ravioli.  I'd actually eaten it the night before at Seten, but it was just okay.  It was served warm, rather than hot, and the sauce just didn't wow me.  Well, Tolga explained that dishes that are served with yogurt - Turkish ravioli, for example - have to be cooled off before you put it on, or else you end up with a big, runny mess.  As far as I could tell, though there was no excuse for the sauce - Cappadocia Home Cooking tossed theirs in butter with some paprika and...maybe some parsley?  Something delicious.

When we finished our chores, they brought us back into the dining room where a host of dishes was already laid on the table, including the tastiest vine leaves of the whole trip.  We were both a little worried that they'd want us to eat everything...we'd had to finish the biscuits earlier, although they were so tasty that I, at least, wasn't complaining...but they didn't, and somehow we managed to make it all the way through dessert.  It was scrumptious, but I could hardly move when it was all over!  I doubted we were going to need our dinner reservation that night, after all.

That trip 14 years back was the first time I went to a cooking class, at Petra Kitchen in Jordan.  Since then, I've learned to cook Nepalese, Chinese, Thai, Italian, Indian...not to mention all the dishes taught to me by my OG masterchef, Bronte.  Over the years learning to cook has become one of my most favorite traveling activities.  There's something about food that is so fundamental to who a people are.  There's something about cooking together that draws people together.  Oh, and there's the fact that my family is a little more understanding of my rock-and-roll lifestyle when I come back ready to cook tasty meals for them.  

Shokugeki no Becky

Yesterday-ish (depending on what side of the international date line you are on), I graduated with my MA in Art Education.  It was pretty anticlimatic.  With covid still being a thing, there was no chance of me making it to the ceremony, and in fact, I couldn't really even go out and celebrate, because Mongolia still shows few signs of getting their cases under control...although restaurants DID reopen yesterday for takeout and delivery, and I'm at least allowed to leave Zaisan, so Engrish and I got together for Indian and beverages and bitchin'.  I thought I'd at least have my name published, but as the grad office had to remind me, I checked the "no publication" option when I applied for graduation - my cyberstalker may be on his best behavior due to his custody trial, but I wouldn't put it past him to act up in the future, so least said, soonest mended.

Homemade salsa

The true upshot of this change in my status is that I no longer have to confine myself to APA format and can use as many four-letter words as I want, which means that it's about time for me to start blogging again.  Yes, I'm going to blame my ongoing delinquency on grad school, which, coupled with a pandemic that never seems to end, robbed me of pretty much all motivation to write "for fun."  It's true that the pandemic is ongoing, but this is probably something that I actually should write about, so I'll pick up where I left off:  Food.  As mentioned WAY BACK in my last post, I have finally learned the fine art of cooking your own damn meals, every damn day (ah, yes...those four-letter words!  How nice they feel!).  This last lockdown was our fourth, and let me tell you, they suck major balls.

Note: Note how I normally stock my fridge.

You may have picked up on this if you're one of my six regular readers, but the kitchen is where the most evidence of my status as a counterfeit grown-up is found.  In a typical year, a close inspection of my refrigerator will reveal coke, a pitcher of lemonade, condiments, and eggs (which may or may not be edible, because even a 6-pack of eggs goes pretty slowly for me).  Typically my freezer has ice and frozen chicken breasts.  Sometimes bread, if I've been on a French toast kick.  It's not that I can't cook...it's more that there's very little reward for cooking food that you're only going to eat by yourself.  I mean, think about it - after doing all the cooking you STILL have to do all the cleaning, and not once during the meal does anyone tell you how tasty it is (unless you talk to yourself.  Which maybe I do).  The reasonably rational side of me thinks that cooking your own food should be healthier and cheaper, but after the last six months, I have very little evidence to back that up.  Although maybe (probably) that's just me.

Newest culinary discovery: Homemade chocolate sauce

However, at the very least, I've unlocked this particular adulting skill.  Although my first week and a half of lockdown I subsisted on a rotation of pasta and red Thai curry, I've gradually opened up all sorts of new worlds of culinary discovery.  My fridge and cupboards are stocked with a variety of ingredients that I can use to make single servings of different things, throwing in a handful of this and a splash of that.  Turns out, there are cheats I never knew about.  I finally figured out that chicken wasn't the only meat I could freeze a single portion into a ziploc baggie, quick and easy to defrost in a can full of hot water.  I've also learned to chop or grate my veggies or cheese, FINALLY reusing those take-out containers I've been collecting the last year and a half to store them in the freezer.

Another cheat: indoor weenie and/or marshmallow roast

My bags of groceries look less and less like an eight year-old turned loose at the checkout with a big wad of birthday cash.  Okay, I'm willing to admit that, more often than not, restocking my coke supply is what forces me to go out shopping, but along the way I've found good meat at our Rosie's, mozzarella cheese at the little shop in Enkhjin apartments, and Korean ingredients at almost all of the shops in Zaisan, ensuring that, at the very least, I can make that spicy marinade that Bronte taught me, back in the day, and - BONUS! - I can make a whole bunch of it at once and freeze that into ready-to-go portions (the smaller, round takeout containers are best for that).

Throw in cabbage and tteok-beokki and it's basically dalkgalbi 

I've also braved the pitfalls of ordering your groceries online.  I wasn't quite convinced about this one...last summer I attempted to make Good Price bring me a flat of Coke, and that didn't work out.  The idea of letting someone else pick out your veggies just seemed like asking for a bag of produce that was about to go off.  Just before the first lockdown ended, though, I got to missing pizza pretty badly.  I dug up my old recipe for flatbread (or the closest recipe I could find), threw some pasta sauce and mozzarella cheese on it, and called myself a culinary genius...but had to admit that it was missing something.

V3: Using homemade alfredo for sauce and with jalapenos added.

Which is crazy, because I actually love cheese pizza, but my own just needed a bit of something more.  Pepperoni is basically non-existent in Mongolia, so I went for the #2 pizza topping, Italian sausage...mainly because I knew Rosewood Market made it AND that they delivered.  

And that's how I ended up down the rabbit hole.  About once a week I make a big list with all sorts of things I could live without, but since I'm already living without human contact, seem a lot more necessary.  Big baked chocolate chip cookies?  Better have two.  Huge jar of tahini?  Much better than making my own!  Avocados that I will forget to use until they have gone bad?  Sounds good to me.  They usually have salsa, but the last couple of times it didn't show up on the website, so I even got all of the ingredients and made salsa myself, which may be the first time in five years I've done so.

Fortunately the lockdowns have usually had some break in-between them, and usually come with some warning before.  This means my cooking has gotten progressively more extravagant.  Rather than just making a bit of taco meat, throwing melting cheese on it and slapping it onto a tortilla with some salsa, I could pick up a can of refried beans, or find a jar of something approximating guacamole (it's not actually guacamole, but unlike those avocados I keep wasting, this crap doesn't go bad)...because I'd have a week or so to prepare.  Not so much THIS time, but some of the others.  That said, if you find yourself in Ulaanbaatar the day before a pandemic lockdown, you're better off not planning to go anywhere if you need a car to get there.  I mean, unless you REALLY like your car and want to spend hours in it not moving.

Lockdown masterpiece: Cheesy baked alfredo tortellini

I guess I should probably end this on some kind of positive note, and talk about how using the recipes that I learned in my friends' kitchens made me feel closer to them in my isolation, or that the recipes I picked up traveling somehow helped me to relive my experiences in other countries while I was grounded...but that's bullshit.  If I weren't fairly introverted by nature, I feel like there's a good chance that I would have done something irreparable a long time ago.  By the time I got to Engrish's yesterday I was pretty much starved for attention - I had verbal diarrhea to go with my potty mouth, and was probably telling the most boring, inane stories of all time.  Lucky for me, she'd had almost as little human contact, so either she didn't notice, or she was willing to live with it.  Maybe a little of both - Engrish is a lot kinder than me.

Grub at Home: Korean (Part I)

I.  Love.  Korean food.  One of the best decisions I made when I lived in Korea was to ask Bronte to teach me how to cook some things.  Not only did the time we spent in her kitchen make us great friends, it means that in the five years since I've left I've still been able to cook some of my favorite dishes.  And I have quite a few recipes from her, so there will be future Korean posts, when I find all the ingredients I need.

 

One thing that Korea was great for was helping me grow up and eat my damn vegetables.  Instead of steaming them or cooking the flavor out of them, Koreans often pickle them, packing even more flavor into them and making them spicy, salty, sweet, and/or sour.  An easy pancheon, or side dish, that you can make is cucumber kimchi.  Here's how you make it:
Chop up a cucumber.
Chop up some green onion.
Mince in a small clove of garlic.
Add about a teaspoon of salt.
Add about a teaspoon of sugar (Bronte called this Korean candy).
Add about 2 teaspoons of red chili flakes.
Throw in a dash of pepper.

Taste it and see what you think.  You may prefer it saltier, or with more garlic.  Let it chill a little before you serve it - that's why I put this part at the beginning of this post.

Now that you've got your pancheon ready, you'll want a main course.  Among the simplest, yet tastiest, of all the dishes she taught me was...err, this one.  I don't think it really has a name.  It's kind of like bulgogi, because you make a marinade for your meat and stir fry it with some vegetables, but it's spicy, like dalkgalbi, yet doesn't have so many vegetables in it, and to add to the confusion, although she taught me to make it with pork, I haven't managed to actually do so even once.  If you need to call it something, go with gochu seogogi.  Spicy stir-fried beef.

You start with the marinade.  Bronte taught me that there are several ingredients that make up the base flavor of most Korean food.  Red pepper paste (gochu-jjang) and sesame oil are among them.  I started with about 100 grams of red pepper paste (sorry, I'm not sure what that is in standard measure - I bought the smallest package of paste and used half of it), 1.5 tablespoons of sesame oil, 3 tablespoons of sugar, and a bunch of green onions.  It should have a thick, paste consistency.  Mix all that up, and then add a pound or so of beef, or pork.  Mine was cubed beef, because that was what I found in the freezer, but it's better if it's sliced a little more thin.

Now for the vegetables.  Slice up a bunch of mushrooms, a green pepper and a red one (capsicums - I told you I use them for just about everything, didn't I? - not the small, spicier ones), and a small onion.  I suppose you could add some cabbage, if you wanted more roughage or a dish more like dalkgalbi,

You're also going to need to throw in several minced cloves of garlic, about half as much minced ginger, a dash of salt and a couple of pepper, and a sprinkling of sesame seeds.  After that, you just need to stir-fry until the meat is cooked.  The red of the pepper paste becomes more of an orange as it cooks.

Et voilà!  You have a reasonably healthy, incredibly delicious meal.  Regrettably, my presentation is not what it used to be.  During my final stint in Korea Bronte's influence resulted in my purchase of a really beautiful set of ceramic dishes.  Getting them home, however, was problematic, and the ones that made it there whole have stayed in my long-suffering parents' basement ever since.  I have not replaced them, buying only very cheap dishes if it was necessary.  Someday maybe I will be a real adult with a house and everything, and I'll crack out the good dishes.

Grub at Home: Evil Gazpacho

Two years ago, I turned 32 in DC.  I was visiting the Evil One, who was waist-deep in Spanish classes, a language she needed for her next (current - remember when I visited Peru last year?) post.  We had a picnic and watched Casablanca at Wolf Trap.  The next day after church we had a little birthday dinner with some of her DC friends, and she made me...something.  I don't remember what it was, but she decided it wasn't healthy enough on its own, so she made gazpacho as well.

I was not entirely sure that I was down with this.  I had no idea what gazpacho was - it's a Spanish soup, she reassured me, which was not altogether reassuring because I'm not much of a soup eater - but, hell, Evil is a pretty good cook and of the recipes I've collected, maybe a quarter of them come from her family, so I went with it.  And when all was said and done, I ended up adding this recipe to my book, as well.

It's two years later, and I've just made gazpacho for the second time.  It's a great recipe for summer, because it's one of only two soups I know that are served cold (the other one is Korean naeng-myeon, but I can't tell you how to cook that - sorry!)  Anyways, I decided I'd share the recipe for it with you today.  Here's what you need to do: chop up 5 tomatoes, 2 cucumbers, one red onion, and a green pepper.  I didn't want to eat gazpacho for the next two weeks, so I halved the recipe.

Next you have to start adding the juicy stuff.  Specifically, 2 teaspoons of garlic (I used two small cloves, and this was too much for my half-recipe), 4 cups of cold water, 1/4 cup of red wine vinegar, 4 teaspoons of salt, 4 tablespoons of olive oil, and 1 tablespoon of tomato paste.  I went out looking for red wine vinegar, but couldn't find it at either of the two closest grocery stores, so I decided to wing it with balsamic.  Was this a good choice?  Wait and see...

So after you've put everything in the bowl, mix it up, then let it chill so the flavors can mingle.  Doesn't look too bad, eh?  On the other hand, if - unlike me - you've actually eaten gazpacho before, you may be thinking it looks NOTHING like this.  That's because Evil's mommy (from whom the recipe originally came) doesn't blend it.  I like it just fine chunky like this, but since I am now the proud owner of Domestic Goddess' blender, I thought I'd give that a try.

As you can see, blending it changes it a LOT.  It tasted fine, and I didn't even mind the consistency; it changed it from being a really wet Greek Salad sans feta into an actual soup, although honestly I prefer the crunchy texture of the unblended version a lot better.  However, this is where substituting the balsamic was a bad idea.  It just doesn't look very appetizing anymore.  I had to do an image search to make sure this is what actually happened, and sure enough, it is not supposed to have this brown-ish color.  I think apple cider vinegar would have been a better substitution, although I didn't have any of that, either.  Thinking on your feet and making clever substitutions is something you have to do a lot as an expat.  I'll talk about that next Wednesday, so be sure to check in then.

Food of the Gods

Marika's in da house

Pretty much no matter where you go in the world, Italian food will be tasty.  Cultures that will fuck up everything else (I'm looking at you, England) will manage to get pasta right.  This is mostly attributable to it basically involving boiling noodles and adding sauce, but the fact remains: if you're afraid to eat anything else, put your trust in pasta.

That said, I didn't cook the month I spent in Venice in 2001.  Mostly I was being lazy (heh, I really didn't cook much the month before I went to Venice...or the month after...or really much during my college years...or in the years since then...) but there was also intimidation factoring in there.  I get along pretty well in Italian, in spite of never learning it, but I can't rely on it.  At this point in the game I can look at a package, make some inferences, and 9 times out of 10 I'll come out ahead, but I didn't have those coping skills fourteen years ago.  I'm making up for it this week.  My final AirBnB host, Lorenzo, showed me my shelf in the refrigerator, and I thought to myself, "Heh, not likely."  And then I went to dinner and spent 25 euro on gnocchi and water, and had to reevaluate.  So I'm experimenting, and it's been nice.

Fresh gnocchi - a new way I'm willing to eat potatoes

Taking cooking classes has kind of become one of my things, and I was desperately scrambling before I left to figure out where I could do one.  Acquolina Cooking School was actually the first one I came across, but I putzed around before I actually contacted them (in retrospect, I'm not sure why).  More than anything else I was interested in learning to make homemade pasta, and when I finally emailed them, they said they'd do the pasta class on Friday, July 3, even though Monday was ordinarily pasta day, so I was ecstatic (in fact, so ecstatic that - in the ensuing emails - I skipped over the part that said cash only and had to run out to an ATM, grumbling at myself all the way).

Ravioli stuffed with fresh cheeses

Fortunately the bancomat wasn't that far and in 10 minutes I was back and meeting Marika, our chef for the day.  Villa Inez, where the cooking school is held on Lido, is her home, and the kitchen was fantastico - hey, you know you're in Italy when you've got  frizzante on tap.  We started by making three kinds of dough - regular, basil, and gnocchi.  She had all sorts of great Kitchen Aid machines and things to make it less time-consuming.  A crew of 8 of us were cooking these things for FOUR HOURS, but in the old days yo mama'd be up at 6 to start making everything.  Once the dough was wrapped up airtight and setting in the fridge, we started making sauces and fillings.

Tortellini with meaty goodness filling

We finished the gnocchi by cutting them into little pieces and rolling them against a fork, and then learned how to roll out the dough.  The tagliatelli reminded me of how the Tsataan made their noodles...rolling up the dough and then cutting strips...but you had to wait until it had dried some or else the dough just stuck to itself.  The ravioli and tortellini could be made right away, though.  The ravioli was pretty straighforward, but the tortellini...oh gosh, that was hard work.  You had to cut the dough in a square, sprinkle it with semolina so it doesn't stick together (you cut them all at the same time), keep them covered so they don't dry out, brush the semolina off, put the filling on top, moisten half the sides, fold it over, seal it up, then fold the two acute angles together and pinch them into a little sitting shape.  It was exhausting.  It was also my absolute favorite dish.  Once upon a time, Evil got me addicted to Trader Joe's tortellini, and I used to think they were pretty good.  Now, I don't know if I can ever go back.

Alright, probably I can.  Remember: I'm lazy.

One finished product: tagliatelli in buttery sage sauce

Finally, at long last the time had come for us to dig in.  The food was superb, in spite of the fact that we noobs did most of the work.  Attribute that to Marika's AMAZING recipes and guidance.  The table was set with what I recognized as Murano glassware, and when I asked Marika she explained that her husband's family is one of the original "secrets-handed-down-from-father-to-son" glassmaking families, dating back to, like, 1400 AD.  We were also served special prosecco that either her sister's in-laws made or her sister-in-law's family made (I don't remember which, because by that point dessert was on the table and it kind of derailed my brain a little bit, and all I could think was, "I wonder if Enkhaa knows a good place for us to hunt wild strawberries this fall so I can make this...")  Part of me kind of wanted to try it, but fortunately alcohol's never been the hard part of my religion to live up to.

The grand finale: panna cotta alla fragolina di bosco

As I mentioned before, Villa Inez in on Lido, and it was SO REFRESHING to be there.  I'd been putting off heading out there; I went to Lido several times when I was here before, and loved spending a morning or an afternoon at the beach, but there were far fewer tourists here back then, and I had visions of beaches in China, where the sand AND the water are absolutely packed.  After all, Burano used to be a sleepy little island - when I went in 2001 I was pretty much the only tourist there, but this time, there were people everywhere with their freaking selfie-sticks.

So I walked straight across the island to the beach.  I had time before we started cooking.  I didn't have to go that far to tell that there was a difference.  Almost all the people I passed were living there - having a breakfast espresso and brioche, moving slowly and enjoying life, not taking shitloads of photos.  Out at the beach, there were a handful of people.  Admittedly, it was 9:30 in the bright and early, and I'm sure it was busier the later it got, but I don't do the beach in the afternoon, so this was good enough for me.

I went back the next day.  I was a little pissed at first - apparently I was too early for the first #2 vaporetto, and had to take linea 1 instead (which stops at every freaking point along the way.  I could have SWAM there faster than that!)  But it was a cool morning, and I had a chocolate brioche before hitting the beach, where I laid out my towel before walking into the water.  It was chilly, but I've been taking partly cold showers at Lorenzo's (mostly because it's so hot here that it actually feels good), so I adjusted quickly enough.  I relaxed, floating in the water, rocking to the rhythm of the waves, and when I decided I'd had enough, laid in the shade under a boardwalk (which, as far as I could tell was built for no other purpose than to throw shade) and read.  If that's not a great way to start a morning, I don't know what is.

Cooking Ruins Restaurants

One of the things I try to do when I travel is learn to cook something.  Bronte helped to nurture this in me - about halfway through my first year in Korea I asked her if she knew somewhere I might learn some Korean cooking, and she volunteered to do it herself.  I'm pretty sure the time we spent together in her kitchen, cooking sundubu, cucumber kimchi, mandu, and many other things cemented our friendship.

Since then, I've taken cooking courses in Jordan, China, Nepal, and here in Mongolia, as well as picking up Greek dishes from Bronte after she moved to Piraeus.  In fact, not learning to cook any Thai cuisine when Curly Sue and I went in 2006 was one of my great travel regrets, and I decided that I really needed to rectify it when I went to Chiang Mai last winter.  Baan Thai was recommended by Lonely Planet and had brochures at my guesthouse, and when Dougie Poo spoke glowingly of the cooking lesson he once did, I decided I had to go for it.

 It was heaven.  I learned to make pad thai, spring rolls, tom ka gai, panaeng gai, and fried bananas.  They also gave us a cookbook with all our recipes, all the other ones that were offered, and ones that weren't offered but that I'm incredibly grateful for.  Once upon a time I went to the Thai place in Yuldong and ate bananas in steamed coconut milk, and thought it was a dream, because I'd never seen them anyplace else.  I now know how to cook them.

However, there's a caveat to this story.  When I was younger my cousin used to talk about how she could make alfredo better than any restaurant she knew.  I found this obnoxious because - hello! - it's a restaurant.  If it wasn't good at what it serves, it wouldn't remain open.  I didn't get it until after I came back from Thailand, and considered going to Bangkok for dinner, until I realized I could make a better pad thai than they could.

It stopped me in my tracks - I had become that food snob who didn't want to go to a restaurant because my food is better.  The ironic thing is, I don't really "like" to cook.  About once a month I invite my friends over so that I have an excuse to thoroughly clean my apartment, but if I don't have someone to tell me how delicious everything was, all the effort of getting ingredients and putting them together only to have to clean it all up seems like too big a hassle.

And that thought helped me to get over my food snobbery.  In the end, my laziness is my redemption.  I may be able to cook a better pad thai, but on any given day, it's less work to order on Songo.

WHICH REMINDS ME!  Sorry, I haven't been much of a blogger lately, but ohmygosh, one of the bestest things to happen in UB in a long time is the arrival of our own Sherpa's!  In Shanghai, Sherpa's was a company that delivered food from a variety of restaurants, and it kept my lazy ass from starving on more than one occasion when it was too cold (haha) to be bothered going outside.  Well, here in UB it's Songo, but the fact that I can get lunch delivered to the school from somewhere other than Round Table0 is a lifesaver.  Apparently Pizza Hut and KFC are both coming to Zaisan, but why would that matter when someone will bring me sushi from Miko?!?

People Smell Better Than Reindeer

The problem with pooping outside is not the fact that you are pooping outside.  It has nothing to do with the challenge of balancing long enough to evacuate the waste from your body (rather than daintily perching your ass on a porcelain throne).  It is not that you might get stuck without a supply of toilet paper, or that you're leaving behind a pile of dookie on the ground, rather than cleanly flushing it away, although, of course, all of those things are inconvenient, to say the least.

No.  The problem with pooping outside is the mosquitos, which will find your undefended pale white ass an irresistible target.  However, that's a temporary issue, and if you are lucky enough to be a once-in-three-days sort of regular, you may manage to get away with only a few bites.  On the other hand, a friend who will be unnamed because I'm not sure she would want me to mention this, once got her period while traveling in the Gobi.  Girls, can you imagine having to deal with that when you don't have real toilets or showers?  Or, for example, in an area where you are expected to pack out your own trash and "leave no trace?"  That would be hell, wouldn't it?  I hope you never have to experience it.

You have possibly all seen Frozen a bajillion times by now, so I hope you get the reference to Kristoff and Sven's duet I made in this post's title and the last.  (I like to think I'm clever with my titles.  Most of the time, this probably isn't true).  I thought it was funny, because although my nose seems to be getting more sensitive as I age (which I attribute to the possibility of becoming a werewolf), I didn't notice a strong smell from either the reindeer or their herders.  I did, on the other hand, pick up on the pong radiating from my own body, and if they thought the number of wet wipes I went through washing my hands was funny, they probably would have been even more amused to see me using them to give myself a sponge bath on the second day at camp.  My days-without-a-shower record is 8, by the way, but that was - damn - ten years ago, when I was a young and crazy twenty something working for a month and a half for Anasazi.

The way that the Tsataan live seems so amazing to me.  The kids still have chores (although rounding up the reindeer on reindeer-back seems even cooler than mowing the lawn on my family's riding lawnmower - lucky kids), and can amuse themselves without iPhones or video games.  Hell, I can't even do that, as evidenced by the fact that as soon as I got home I went into full-on internet addiction mode.

And the fact that I dislike cooking, in spite of all the modern conveniences and running water to wash up with, seems really ridiculous when I look at the Tsataan's lifestyle.  They milk the reindeer.  They make cheese, butter, yogurt, and of course, the trademark milk tea with the milk.  Using just a simple stove they make flat noodles and some of the most delicious bread I've ever eaten (seriously!  I could have and actually did live on that bread.  It blew my mind).  They can do so much with so little and it makes me ashamed that I do so little with so much.  Possibly it's time to change that.

Grub at Home: Chili

Chili is one of THE great American foods.  Now, don't get me wrong, I don't really plan to start focusing on American cookery, not only because this is sort of a travel blog, but also because I am not a meat and potatoes sort of girl, and that's what America's famous for.  However, I was lazy this week and didn't feel like coming down from the Lonely Mountain to get what I needed to cook Korean, so suck it up (no one's making you read this, after all).

One of the great things about chili is there's no "right" way to make it.  When I was in college I had a great job working for the financial aid office, and every year for Halloween we would host a huge chili party for all of the administrative offices, and there was no end to the varieties of chili.  There are, however, a few things that will normally be in it.  First, meat.  You can make vegetarian chili, of course, but it's just not the same without the texture the meat gives it.  Ground meat, of any kind - I usually use ground beef because it's cheap and simple, but my Uncle John makes it with Italian sausage, which gives it additional kick.  I have to say that I'm not a fan of ground chicken, for anything, because it doesn't have enough fat in it.  It cooks too fast and tends to stick to my pans.

I also chop up an onion and - when I think about it - some garlic and cook those along into the meat.  The onion is a pretty standard part of chili, too, although you could leave it out; I have, on occasion, since neither of the two Evils in my life like onion.

Two more crucial ingredients are tomato sauce and beans.  I don't like my chili to be too thin, so I generally use one large (15 oz) can of tomato sauce if I'm using a pound of meat.  Red kidney beans are typically what people put in chili, but while I'll eat them, I prefer black beans; they're a little bit smaller, and have a nice taste.  I use bell peppers in almost every dish I make, but my last one went bad before I made my chili.  However, I did have some jalapeno peppers in my freezer that needed used, so I thawed them out and threw them in there.

So you put all this into the pot, and the meat and onions when they're cooked, but your chili's not finished yet.  It's supposed to be spicy, and normally you do this by going to the store and buying a packet of chili seasoning.  I didn't have any chili seasoning, but once upon a time in Korea I ended up using taco seasoning because I had no other choice, and it turns out that has most of the same spices in it, and the chili was as good, if not better, than usual.  There's probably a certain amount that you're supposed to put in, but I just shake in as much as I need to get the flavor right.

You can stop there if you like, or you can add other things.  Chili being a kind of Tex-Mex sorta dish, I sometimes put corn in. 

Once you've narrowed down what you want to put in your chili, you have the delicious task of what to serve it with.  Growing up, it seemed like everyone ate chili with crackers.  I don't like how mushy crackers get.  Instead, I like eating my chili with tortilla chips (did I mention how it's kind of a Tex-Mex thing?), although at the Financial Aid Halloween Chili parties someone introduced me to eating it on rice, and in spite of being a white bread kid who grew up thinking rice was a Chinese food, I really, really liked chili served on rice.  Cheese is another standard, and it's one that's hard to improve on.  I like adding a bit of salsa, too, or if that's not available, vinegar adds just a hint of complexity to the flavor (that's also a good idea if you make lentil soup...Bronte and her hubby were not the first ones to clue me in to vinegar, but they were the ones to teach me about it with lentils, and...wow.  I'd kill for Vasilis' lentil soup recipe).

I thought I'd leave you this week with a shot of my teeny tiny little freezer.  Strangely enough, this is normally more than enough space for me - the bottom would be filled with chicken breasts and a couple pounds of ground beef.  However, I've inherited a lot from my friends who abandoned ship.  I imagine in the next month or so of not really having any money I will use up most of this.  It's made the last month of it a little easier to get through, at any rate.  There's a bag on top of cubed beef that I'm planning to use making Korean for next week's post, so if you like spicy stuff, check in then.

Grub at Home: Lasagna

Alright, so I mentioned last week that as an expat you have to get used to making do with what you've got, and there's nothing better to make that way than lasagna.  Living in Asia, especially Korea and China, apartments rarely come furnished with ovens.  Most of the time that doesn't bother me, because I don't really bake, and GDA had a kitchen for doing cooking class with the kids, that we could use after school if we wanted to bake cookies or cakes or whatever.  But what are you going to do if you actually find cottage cheese, and you want to make yourself lasagna in the comfort of your own home?  You're going to improvise.  Lasagna was the first of several recipes I "baked" in my rice cooker, and it turned out delicious.

Well, times have changed.  Here in Mongolia I actually have an oven.  However, I have never seen cottage cheese.  Normally for lasagna you would use ricotta, but I'm a big fan of what the Evil One calls "Poor Man's Lasagna," and it substitutes cottage cheese for the snootier ricotta.  But here I am, short on cash, and I have to eat something, so I started digging through my freezer, and found that when people left somehow a pound of Italian sausage from the Meat Man, Joel, ended up in there.  I also had lasagna noodles in my cabinets.  But what to do about the lack of cheese filling?  Actually, I had a block of some kind of cheese in my freezer as well.  I'm not sure what it actually was.  I bought it last fall thinking it was feta and used it for Greek night, but it wasn't quite right, and I never used it again.

You may be thinking that after nine months that cheese was probably freezer burned.  It may have been, but the end product didn't taste like it, and one of the tricks I learned from improvising in Korea is that freezing cheese makes it crumbly (which on an unrelated note means you can get away with not grating it), so it turned out to be a perfect substitute.  I assembled the whole thing into my baking dish and popped it into the oven.  With the end result:

If you'd like to make it and you don't know how (not all of my six readers are middle-class Americans!) this is how you go about it: Brown a pound of ground meat (I like Italian sausage for this one, but beef or even pork would be fine).  Add some pasta sauce to your meat - enough to make it moist but not to the consistency you would actually use for pasta.  Get yourself a pan, not too big, and a couple of inches deep.  Put a layer of noodles (I use the no-boil kind, but if you really want to torture yourself, go old school with those puppies), cover it with your meat mix, cover the meat mix with ricotta/cottage cheese/some kind of crumbled feta thing, and then add another layer of noodles.  Repeat.  Pour a whole lot of pasta sauce over the top, and then cover the sauce with shredded mozzarella (pizza cheese - pijah cheejuh - in Korean).  Stick that bad boy in the oven at 350F/177C and let it bake until the cheese on top is all melty and preferably just the slightest bit golden (you can see that I got impatient and didn't quite let the golden thing happen).  Serve it with a nice salad and bread.

Grub at Home: Chicken Masala Curry

Well, I've finished writing about my trip, and Grub Club is disbanded for the summer (until I get paid again, actually).  The question of what I'm going to write about til then is one that I've given some thought to over the last week as I've been shuffling around my apartment, bored (no money and no friends is not a good combination).  Finally, I decided that I should do some cooking posts.  See, I hate cooking for myself.  It's fun to cook for others - it means there is a purpose behind all the toil - but if I don't have money to go to a restaurant, most of the time I just cook pasta, because it is pretty much the simplest thing in the world to cook for one person.  While I HAVE eaten pasta for a month straight (when I was an indigent immigrant the 6 weeks before we first got paid in RAK), I'd rather shake it up a little, and writing about it here gives some purpose to the toil.  And it just so happens I have some recipes I am dying to try.

So without further ado, I give you chicken masala curry, as taught to me by the boys in the kitchen at Monumental Paradise.  When there's an inset photo, it shows what it looked like when they cooked this dish.  Today was my first attempt, and it was not bad, but it needs some work.  Here's what you do: start with a little sunflower oil in a pan (I didn't feel like buying more oil when I hardly cook, so I used the olive oil in my cabinet, and I think that was okay).  Throw in some cumin seeds, a bit of cinnamon bark, one crushed cardamom seed, and a bay leaf, and start it heating up.  Julienne-cut a small onion and add it to the oil and spices, and let it caramelize.

While it's doing that, chop up a chicken breast and when the onion is done, add in the chicken and sauté it.  I cut my chicken much smaller than they did, because I like smaller pieces.  While it's doing that, add 1/2 T garlic/ginger paste.  They pre-made their own.  I took one piece of garlic and an equal-sized piece of ginger and pressed them, and that seemed to work pretty well.

You'll need to julienne a medium tomato for the next step, and a little bit of spicy green chili pepper (I forgot the pepper today).  Add these when the chicken turns a nice golden brown.

While all of the above is simmering, you're going to add about (and this is a very rough approximation...I think I had a bit too much of these spices today because it was definitely a little spice-ish) 1/2t turmeric (that's the orangey one, if you bought all your spices from a guy on the street in Kathmandu and they weren't all labeled), 1/4t dried chili powder (or you can try taco seasoning, if that's the closest you've got...not that I would ever do something like that...), 1/2t cumin powder (which is the brownish colored one and also smells like the cumin seeds you added at the beginning), 1/2t chicken masala, 1/2t meat masala, and 1/4t salt.  Keep lowering the temperature as you add these.

When you get to the end of ALL the above instructions you're going to add some water.  Maybe about a half cup - I put in a whole cup and it had to simmer quite a while to get the right (ish) consistency (like I said, it was a first attempt and it wasn't quite right).  One thing I forgot to do, as you can tell from the finished picture is add cilantro (coriander), in spite of the fact that someone planted a bunch of it down in the school greenhouse while I was gone.  You need to chop up the leaves of about 4 sprigs, and add half of them at the very end of cooking, and the other half as a garnish on top.  It wasn't nearly as painful as I was afraid, although I haven't gotten around to cleaning the dishes just yet.  And speaking of which...

I want to leave you with an idea of what my mother had to deal with, as I was growing up and beginning to cook.  I am not the neatest person when it comes to the kitchen.  At the beginning, everything is nice and neat, but then I start cooking and it's like Pandora opening that damn box.  At the end, there are ingredients scattered everywhere and I've used at least half of my utensils.  Sometimes there's food on the floor - this time I managed to keep my mess on the counter.  I would like to say that now that I'm all growed up and on my own, that I clean everything up right away...but the honest truth is that living alone means there's no one to witness your bad habits.  We will not be speaking of this again...just know that I've never had bugs, so let that suffice as witness that I'm not that bad.  Really.