Food of Many Nations day
by sumpteretc
Today’s Mongolian word is actually a phrase: Цаг хэд болж байна вэ? (Tsog head bolj ban way?) Literally, it means “Hour how many becoming is?” which naturally means “What time is it?”
I promised that I would blog a little about the food here. At this point, I am hardly an expert, since I have eaten very little Mongolian food. However, we did have a Foods of Many Nations day at language school the other day. I forgot to take a camera, but my friend Chris brought his, and he was kind enough to share some pictures with me.
We started out by learning about white foods. One of the central elements of the Mongolian diet is dairy. We were amazed by the astounding variety of foods that are made from milk and milk products.
They helpfully made flow charts and arrows to show all of the various things that can be made from various dairy products. We got to taste a lot of them and they varied extremely in taste, although most of them were quite good.
This one was a cheese that had been aged for about a year. It had a sharp but good taste.
In my next post, I’ll share some pictures of the “meat” we sampled that day.
Why is the cheese hairy?
Bravery required for some of those!
Howabout a girls (or guys) of many nations day?? See http://www.thedailycrazy.wordpress.com …
The word meat should never, ever be in quotation marks. There are also way too many arrows branching out from what looks like yoghurt. And why does the teacup lead to Dead Baby Sheep #1 which leads to Dead Baby Sheep #2?
Matthew, the cheese is not hairy; it’s inside a stomach or rectum or some such organ.
Dwain, when I post the pictures, you’ll see what I mean. What looks like yogurt is actually sour cream, and the cheeses, or whatever they were, made from that were some of the best things on the table. The teacup has “yellow water” in it, which is a byproduct of some process done to milk. Our teacher said the yellow water is the most useless part of milk, but they still use it for several purposes. They drink it as a laxative, and they rub it on skins (dead baby sheep) and leathers to soften them. Apparently, some people even put it on their own skin as a type of lotion or moisturizer.