Tsagaan Sar Food

MONGOLIAN TSAGAAN SAR

This is a huge national holiday celebrated by all Mongolians.  It is a time when relatives and friends visit each other and share lots of food and gifts.  The traditional food is buuz, but there were other foods that were served at each home as well.  The tower is built with large, elongated biscuits and always has an uneven number of rows.  The bottom row is HAPPINESS, the next row in UNHAPPINESS, and so on and so the top one always has to be an odd number which is always HAPPINESS and is the wish for the new year.  The tower is called an Edah (closest spelling I could come up with).  Then there is usually a back of a sheep which is left out and the man of the house cuts slabs of meat off and hands (literally) it to visitors.  The last day they put the meat in the hot harem.  Then there is a variety of other foods--potato salad, fruit, fruit salad, stershun (spelling) which is jelled bone marrow that is boiled out of sheep legs and then carrots and potatoes are added--their version of jello I guess, and rice.  The first item eaten must be something white, and rice, harem, sugar cubes or candy were generally that first item.  Everyone expected us to eat at least four buuz, but LaNice ate less than 10 buzz the whole three days and Alan ate about 17.  We found out we like salami with pickles though, which was really pretty good.

                                    

 There was no man in this household, so Alan got to do the honors of cutting the sheep.  It wasn't all that easy he said.  We didn't eat much of the meat, but only about one piece at each of the 13 places we visited. People got a little offended if we didn't eat enough of their food!

This picture shows the buuz, the sturshen, fruit salad and harem.

LaNice got a little sick the third day and so didn't eat too much that day.  People seemed to understand that maybe Americans just don't have the stomach for so much food in such a short period of time. Our translator, Gambold,  said he ate about 50 buuz over the three-day period.   That's alot of buuz!