Mm... Food

Mongolian food is delicious. Believe it or not. I think the entire Mongolian cuisine has been shaped by the winters here. Which are really frigging cold. UB is the coldest capital city on earth. So Mongolians only eat what can survive the winters, and they only eat things which will allow them to survive the winters in turn. So no fruits or vegetables or any of that nonsense. Just meat and potatoes and milk and mayonnaise and fat.

The national food of Mongolia is khuushuur (hosher), and I think a metaphor is the best way to describe it. Imagine a letter, a sweet, tender love letter, written on sweet, tender mutton. This letter is mailed in an envelope of dough and the postage is grease. And we're shipping this thing overnight express. So hopefully that gives a good picture: a delicious, greasy dough envelope lovingly filled with mutton. Some are crispier, some are doughier, all are delicious. I could live off these things, and I often do. At the Naadam festival, there were about a million khuushuur stands. The best I've ever had I bought from two little kids carrying a bucket of the stuff around. Other foods are buuz, which are mutton dumplings, tsuivan, a noodly dish, and a lot of dishes with various combinations of rice, potatoes, mutton, and sauce. I once had a soup that was literally just cubes of fat in broth. It was disgusting.

Salads here are interesting. They call anything that's drenched in mayonnaise a salad. So you have potato salad, coleslaw, and that's about it. Suutei tsai is the traditional drink - it's milk tea and it basically tastes like melted butter. It grows on you. It's kind of like hot chocolate but instead of a chocolate taste it's a butter taste. Mmm. Then there's airag, the famous fermented mare's milk. I've had airag of both the horse and camel varieties. The taste is pretty unique - kind of like a lemony, milky yogurt. It's really invigorating. We keep a bottle of it in the office to increase productivity.

There are some pretty good restaurants in town: American, French, Japanese, good Indian, and a ton of Korean. My favorite is Zochin Buuz, which is a Mongolian fast food chain. They serve up cheap, dirty Mongolian food. It's great.

Things I have not yet had that I am intending to are: boiled sheep's head, roasted sheep, and blowtorched marmot. Actually I think I'm going to avoid the marmot because they're endangered in Mongolia. Because people blowtorch them all the time, I suppose.

And that's about it for Mongolian cuisine. I think my stomach will be in shock when I head to Thailand.