Mongolian Cuisine

I thought I would do a few pictures of the food we eat here.  We don't have much variety in vegetables, and our staples are potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage and the other day I found red and green peppers and a squash of some sort at the Zax.  We are getting by fine on these foods, which are all pretty healthy.

I was getting ready to put this wonderful bread I had made into the oven and the power went out.  It was out for several hours and I just kept punching down the bread.  It got a little light, but baked fine when the power came back on.

   I actually made four loaves of bread, but I only have two bread pans and the oven will only hold 2 pans, so I did two batches.  The second batch also turned out well.  I have had problems with the bread sticking to the pan, but of these four loaves, only one stuck.  The other two almost came right out of the pan when they fell out of the oven.  I keep forgetting that I have to pull out the pan underneath the wire rack they bake on.  I only pulled out the wire rack and one loaf went on the floor and the other landed on the oven door.  They both survived the fall.

This is how we buy flour--in 1 kilo packages.  There are different grades from 45 to 140 which determines how fine the flour is ground.  I made the bread with the red bag.  I made other bread with the green, which is whole wheat, but it didn't turn out as well.

I just had to have a picture of our "Premium" canned hot dogs.  I got a can just to see how they were, and they weren't too bad.  I used them in fried rice the other day and will probably use them in Ramen as well.  The German cereal on the left is one of our favorites. Alan mixes it with regular oatmeal and we have it almost every day.  The white container at the top is our milk.  We buy it off the shelf and not out of a refrigerator.  It's not too bad, but we also have a milk maid who delivers fresh milk to the apartments every morning.  She calls out "milk for sale" or some such words, and people take their containers down and get fresh milk.  We have bought it several times, but didn't know until after we didn't do it the first time, that we were supposed to boil the milk to kill any bacteria.  We were fine, so I guess we either have strong stomachs or we got a clean batch of milk.  I understand the Mongolians also boil their milk, so we probably  just experienced a tender mercy.  The pot in the top corner is what we heat our purified water in to wash dishes, etc.  It is great.  It heats about 1.5 liters in less than 3 minutes.  

  Fresh fruit is a little hard to come by here, so we found this dried fruit that is generally pretty good.  We really like the apricots, and the yellow one is mango we think.  We didn't like the kiwi very well, but some of the missionaries do, so we will get rid of them one way or the other. The dried fruit is only a couple dollars a bag. We also drink juice for breakfast almost every morning.  We really like this mixture above of pineapple, orange and banana.  It interesting to get apples in a can (we haven't tried those yet) but we did buy some canned strawberries which were pretty good.  I made jello with them and we had them on our cereal.  We also eat quite a few canned peaches, pears and applesauce.  They don't taste like the home canned ones, are sometimes a little hard, but they are better than nothing.

This is the kitchen after we repainted it.  It doesn't look much different in the picture because the color was almost the same, but it is much cleaner and the blue smeared paint under the table doesn't show any more.

We have discovered this wonderful Russian (we think) candy.  All varieties are wonderful.  I haven't tried any yet that I didn't like.  And they are not all chocolate either!

  Here I am checking out of our favorite grocery store.  Alan thought the  "I Love NY" bag was really interesting! They show us how much our bill is on a calculator.  We are getting better at understanding, but I guess they can't understand us so they always show us.  It actually is very helpful.

The aisles at the grocery store are generally pretty well stocked.  Some days are better than others.  The red and blue boxes on the right are milk.  The different varieties of flour are on the left.

 

This little market is good to carry a variety of canned goods and our favorite cereal.  The vendors in the front are selling pine nuts.  Everyone here loves them, and as a result, there are pine nut shells all over the sidewalks.  Alan said the pine nuts are about $.50 for 12 ounces.  We bought some because he said his mom liked them.  We didn't like them much--too much work for a little nut and it's hard on the teeth--so we gave most of them to the Mongolian missionaries. 

I about forgot this picture.  This is the largest bag of chips we can find, which is fine because we don't buy them often anyway.  I bought these to make an American dish for the branch president's family over Naadam, and then couldn't find the rest of the ingredients for Hawaiian Haystacks.  The chips are really pretty good.  Butter is on the right in the gold package and the blue package at the top is cookies.  We bought the ham because they say you can't get them very often so we bought it when we found it.  We'll probably save it for Thanksgiving!

Overall, we are doing fine with the food here.  The sisters picked up a goats head the other day at the Zax.  I'm not so sure I am ready for that yet, but Sister Largin said it was actually pretty good, and she's American.  Maybe after we're here for awhile I'll get brave enough to try it.  We found that we really like dried fish, which may turn out to be our meat staple (besides these yummy hot dogs!) because the beef is pretty tough and we haven't been able to buy any chicken yet.  Actually, the horse meat isn't too bad!  We get that about as much as we do beef!