Thursday, July 28, 2011

Cooking Meat in Western Mongolia

 The Steps:
1. Buy some meat. Between the 5 people on my trip we bought 22,000MNT (18USD) worth of meat.


I was satisfied that two giant hunks of meat would no doubt prove to be a feast for the nights dinner. 


Our guide Mada said that we were buying beef, but like most of the beef I've eaten here it tasted suspiciously like mutton.

2. As you leave the butcher shop, take note of the authentic decor.

This butcher shop a freshly beheaded sheep's head next to a leathery sack that looked like skin, and a bottle of blood.

This is the stove.
3. Put some firewood in the stove along with the cooking rocks. The idea is to heat up the rocks until they are incredibly hot-- hot enough to cook the meat on.
4. When the rocks are hot enough, put them in a separate metal basin with the meat and other things you would like to eat. For us we had the hunks of meat cooking with potato and carrot.

5. Remove the rocks. The guy who was cooking our meat told me to put out my hands, and then he put one of the rocks into them. Those things are HOT!

I played hot potato with myself, tossing the rock from hand to hand until I had had enough, and gave it back to him.

Before calling us to dinner, the guy who cooked our food made off with half of our meat as well as the delicious soupy broth that you generally find at the bottom of the pan. Is this custom or thievery?
6. Eating!
To make up for our stolen meat, Mada brought us extra coleslaw...

:/

Good thing we bought vodka!
The aftermath:

1 comment:

  1. Good morning how are you?

    My name is Emilio, I am a Spanish boy and I live in a town near to Madrid. I am a very interested person in knowing things so different as the culture, the way of life of the inhabitants of our planet, the fauna, the flora, and the landscapes of all the countries of the world etc. in summary, I am a person that enjoys traveling, learning and respecting people's diversity from all over the world.

    I would love to travel and meet in person all the aspects above mentioned, but unfortunately as this is very expensive and my purchasing power is quite small, so I devised a way to travel with the imagination in every corner of our planet. A few years ago I started a collection of letters addressed to me in which my goal was to get at least 1 letter from each country in the world. This modest goal is feasible to reach in the most part of countries, but unfortunately it’s impossible to achieve in other various territories for several reasons, either because they are countries at war, either because they are countries with extreme poverty or because for whatever reason the postal system is not functioning properly.

    For all this I would ask you one small favour:
    Would you be so kind as to send me a letter by traditional mail from Mongolia? I understand perfectly that you think that your blog is not the appropriate place to ask this, and even, is very probably that you ignore my letter, but I would call your attention to the difficulty involved in getting a letter from that country, and also I don’t know anyone neither where to write in Mongolia in order to complete my collection. a letter for me is like a little souvenir, like if I have had visited that territory with my imagination and at same time, the arrival of the letters from a country is a sign of peace and normality and a original way to promote a country in the world. My postal address is the following one:

    Emilio Fernandez Esteban
    Calle Valencia, 39
    28903 Getafe (Madrid)
    Spain

    If you wish, you can visit my blog www.cartasenmibuzon.blogspot.com, where you can see the pictures of all the letters that I have received from whole World.

    Finally I would like to thank the attention given to this letter, and whether you can help me or not, I send my best wishes for peace, health and happiness for you, your family and all your dear beings.

    Yours Sincerely

    ReplyDelete