Reading notes: "seasons by rice"

There is something magical about staying in one place long enough to watch the seasons change, getting that chance to notice the gradual changes as they happen, day by day.  Since I read it almost a month ago, I have been wanted to share this particularly beautiful account of watching the rice fields around Gaselo  a village in Wangduephodrang come to life over the course of a year. It comes from  Brick in Bhutan a blog by an expat teacher. The post includes some wonderful pictures of the rice fields in different season as well as some very evocative descriptions of the changes. Here is one of my favorite paragraphs just to give you a taste:

" Very soon, what appears to be random paddies turn a dense almost emerald green, vivid in the evening light against the brown winter backdrop of the empty fields. As it turns out these were densely planted with rice seeds and seedlings sprout very close together forming a thick carpet of a new green growth."   

Reading notes: Beer in Switzerland

I just wrote about beer from Southeast Asia when this interesting article on the beer industry in Switzerland popped up in Feedly.  For a brief couple of months in my early twenties when I was between ideas about "what" or " who" I wanted to be when I grew up, I worked as a waitress in a small town restaurant in Switzerland where I served a lot of beer and learnt that names for the different size glasses that the beer could be ordered in. At the time you could get a glass of beer, a glass of red wine or a glass of coke or a cup of coffee for the same price. Considering very little coke got ordered during my days as a small-town waitress I wasn't surprised to learn that Switzerland has the highest concentration of breweries per capita. Below is the great little graphic from the article ( which has several other very cute beer graphics-- worth checking out)  to demonstrate this fact, I suppose it is somewhat surprising that the Swiss beat the Germans on this.

However as the article also points out Swiss beer drinkers are not very adventurous when it come to what they drink, they tend to stick with what they know. In fact that restaurant I worked at only served one kind of beer.  The article is basically bemoaning the lack of craft beer in Switzerland but it doesn't really sound like the Swiss feel like they are missing out. Perhaps this is why its so telling that the main point of comparison for the article is the US which tends to be so novelty hungry.

Reading Notes: The Matsutake Mushroom Festival

My job keeps me tied down to Thimphu for large chunks of the year ( thought admittedly for now I get a lovely long winter break) so I am always grateful to be able to read about other people's travels. All year I have followed this blog by an Australian teacher living in Bumthang with her family. She recently wrote about traveling eastward to attend the Matsutake Mushroom Festival in Ura.  Bhutanese collect Matsutake or Sangay Shamu ( Buddha Mushroom) to sell on the lucrative Japanese market where this particular mushroom apparently heralds seasonal change.  Her post on the festival is delightfully rambling ( its a little like listening to a work friend talk about their weekend over Monday morning coffee) so not all of the post is focused on mushrooms but  its worth a look for the absolutely wonderful photos of the festival in general and the mushrooms in particular.

Low tech apple harvesting

It apple season in our garden and unfortunately the birds are getting to the applies faster then us. Below is a sample of the damage.

My father ( a bit of a bird watcher) has been known to  comment that he wouldn't mind sharing the apples if the birds actually finished  an apple instead of leaving half of them uneaten! 

Sadly we have no tree climbers living in the house at the moment so apple harvesting has not been as smooth a process. This year we low-tech-ing  it. 

Allow me to demonstrate: 

Brother on a ladder using a long stick to shake the branches .....

...plus sister and father below holding a sheet to catch falling apples ....

 .....equal limited success. Far too many apples miss the sheet and land up bruised and smashed 

Still to have a couple of these tasty beauties ... it's worth it!

Happy Blessed Rainy Day

Today is Blessed Rainy Day in Bhutan or Thure, a nationally observed holiday that marks the end of the monsoon (or rainy season) and the beginning of the fall. For farmer ( which according to most statistic would describe most Bhutanese) it means the growing season is behind them and the harvest is not very far away.

On Thure all natural water  is considered holy and everyone is encouraged to take an outdoor bath in order to cleanse themselves of their accumulated bad karma. Some people will leave a bucket out to gather rain overnight and then bathe with it in the morning. 

Its also an important family holiday and when I taught in the east of Bhutan, where the holiday is considered particularly important, many of my students made a huge effort to travel home for the day.  As it is with many family holidays sharing a meal is an important part of the celebration. Many families will start the day with a bowl or two or three of rice porridge or Thup is particularly important 

My sister's inlaws ( who are easterns) invited us to join them for  breakfast which of course turned into a regular feast. 

As with many visits in Bhutan  the meal started off with sweet milk tea and biscuits  ....

 quickly followed by steaming bowls of thup...

I ate three bowl full of the rice porridge  before realizing that another rice dish, shamdey ( a mixture of rice, butter, meat, eggs and sometimes a little spring onion) was waiting to be served!

This time with a little suja or butter tea....

At the end of the meal my sister's father-in-law insisted that my brother, Sonny, join him in celebrating the day with a glass or ara or home brewed alcohol. 

Another reason to raise a glass? This post mark an anniversary for this blog! One year ago one of my very first posts was about Blessed Rain Day and the thub we ate!

Reading Notes: Asian Beers

A former intern recently wrote to "blame" me for her fondness for South-east Asia. I encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to spend a summer in Laos and she has wanted to return to that part of the world ever since. She recently took up a teaching position in Vietnam and has been blogging about her adventure there including this recent post about all the different Asian beers she has tried since she arrived.  As a firm believer that context and atmosphere plays a huge part in how we enjoy food and drink  her final piece of advice is spot on, she writes " If you decide to try one of these beers back in the states and think its horrible, don't blame me. Book a flight to Southeast Asia and grab a Beerlao in Laos, I promise it will taste a whole lot better."  

As well as inspiring a little jealousy and wanderlust, the post definitely also encourages me to consider writing about Bhutanese beers in the near future!

Reading notes: NPR 's dumpling week

All week the NPR food blog, The Salt, has been sending out great dumpling stories, many of which include fabulous recipes that I don't have the time to try.  Perhaps the most interesting post was one in which they attempted to document all the many, many,  many kinds of dumplings, what they are calling their "Global Dumpling List." And yes, momos are on the list but more interesting is their list of " disputable dumplings" that includes everything from empanadas to samosas. Why disputable? Because NPR put together a panel of "Dumpling Experts"  to help them decided what should actually be considered a dumpling!

Reading Notes: Instant Noodles

Summer holidays are behind me and I am back at work which means , once again, less time for original blog content. As if NPR food blog, The Salt, knew that I didn't have time to come up with my own content, earlier this week they put out a great post on the global popularity of instant noodles. Elsewhere on this blog I mentioned how my time at boarding school gave me a real fondness for instant noodles so it always gives me a twang of sadness when someone  is dismissive or worse, hyper critical of instant noodles.  In boarding school we ate instant noodles because we thought the school food was "gross," because they were easy to make ( we could even eat them raw, sometimes mixed into a bag of chips), because we could get them cheap and because it was easy to add things to them like chili powder, dried mushrooms, vegetable  and cheese to customize and improve the taste.  The NPR article points out that these are many of the same reasons that instant noodles are popular all over the world: 

 it's the multinational noodle companies' conquest of countries like Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico that really interests the anthropologists: Frederick Errington of Trinity College, Tatsuro Fujikura of Kyoto University and Deborah Gewertz of Amherst College. And it's here that they make one of their most intriguing arguments: Instant noodles do good by alleviating the hunger of millions of people around the world. These supercheap, superpalatable noodles, they write, help the low-wage workers in rich and poor countries alike hang on when the going gets tough."They're cheap and tasty and tweakable," Gewertz tells The Salt. "They're capable of being transformed to everyone's cultural taste."In Thailand, instant ramen is seasoned with lemongrass and cilantro. Mexicans can buy Maruchan noodle soup cups flecked with shrimp, lime and habarnero , among other flavors. Papua New Guineans have incorporated the noodles into rituals as cardinal as weaning babies and honoring the dead, she says.

  

Dried Chilies ( Long overdue post #2)

Bhutanese famously think of chilies as a vegetable and not a spice, every meal requires them.  Unsurprisingly chilies are grown in every single district or dzongkhag in Bhutan, thought of course as this article put out by the agriculture ministry points out, climate and elevation differences mean that there is necessarily a lot of variety in the types of chilies grown. Chilies are grown both for personal family consumption and to sell in the local market. 



Unsurprisingly chili is one of the most commonly dried "vegetables" in Bhutan. In the past when transporting vegetables was difficult this was an important way of insuring a year long supply. Times have changed and fresh chilies are available year long but Bhutanese still choose to dry some of their supply.

According to Kunzang Choden in her  book " Chilli and Cheese: Foods and Society in Bhutan" sun drying is still the most common way to dry chilies. She also make the following observations about the colors of dried chilies  :

"Mature chilies, which begin to get a tinge of red coloration, easily turn read when sun dried. Green chilies split in half and sun dried retain their color so they are green even when dried. The biggest chilies are selected and blanched by immersing them  for some minuets in a pot of boiling water and then drying them in the sun. These chilies become a yellowish creamy color when dried and are known as shur kam ( boiled and dried or white chilies).   The colored chilies preserved in different ways not only add color to the dishes but also widen the possibilities of different tastes and textures." 

Below are some picture I took in the fall and winter of chilies being dried in my own neighborhood.

Dried Meat ( long over due post #1)

It's July, summer holidays and at long last I have time to catch up on some of the posts that I had planned to do ages ago. This post on dried meat has been waiting since the winter!

Thimphu winters are typically dry and cold. There might be some early morning frost, even the occasional snow but in general winter is a very dry time.  Many Thimphu residents take full advantage of this dryness.  Strings of meat and chili hung out on washing lines, on balconies and out of windows are a familiar sight all over the city during this time of year. 

I love that in an age where most urban middle class families have fridges  and there is a reliable weekly market with fresh vegetables that people still spend time and energy preparing vegetables and meat to dry. 

Our family bought a leg of beef to dry this winter. The meat has to be cut into long narrow stripes and then hung out to dry. Its actually easier to do this messy work outdoors. Below is a family friend who  helped us cut our meat up this year. You can see that we just lay out a plastic sheet and did the chopping mostly  without a cutting board 

We did have some very interested observers. Here is our ( greedy) family dog, eagerly and carefully watching the work being done. Don't worry he got his share of the bones!

And here is the final product hung out to dry. The meat takes several days to dry so at night we have to cover it all and guard it from birds, dogs and cats. Sadly this year we had actual human thieves come and steal a portion of our meat overnight and then our clever cat got into our storage and ate the rest of it.

So how do we eat the dry meat? It came be cut up and eaten as is, often with a chili paste. Growing up my all time favorite breakfast was " Bhutanese breakfast" -- Suja ( butter tea), rice, ezay ( chili paste) and shakam ( dried meat) that had been lightly roasted usually over an open flame.  More often however  we cook it with vegetables ( like dried turnip leaves ) and chili as show in the picture below. 

Meat Buffet at a Bhutanese Wedding.

Recently I was invited to a wedding in Paro that had the most impressive meat buffet. Unlike a lot of fancy weddings and events that I have been to lately the family didn't cater the event instead they did it the old fashion way and got together to cook up the feast. And what a wonderful old fashion feast it was! And of course a "typical" Bhutanese celebratory feast means meat, meat and more meat!  

Here are two photos of the meat aisle taken from either end to give you a sense of the spread. 

Many of the preparations and even types of meat on offer were old fashion. Each is considered a delicacy and treat. For example below is tripe or stomach lining. It has rubbery texture that I don't enjoy.

Here is one of my favorites, blood sausage fried with chill and other spices. Incredibly dense and rich.

Liver- prepared with a lot of oil and a lot of spice, also very rich.

A pork stew-ish dish. Yes those floating white pieces are pork fat. Bhutanese love pork with a layer of fat.

Since it was a summer wedding, the flies were very much in attendance. One member of the family just stood near the food swotting them away with yak tail fly swotter. Surprisingly effective!

Despite eating more of the meat then I should have, I managed to save room for the beautiful and very tasty cake baked by a cousin of the groom, who owns a cafe/ bakery in Paro called Tshernyoen. 

Reading Note: Picnicking

As the weather warms up eating outdoors is such a treat ( except when it rains but that is another story). My family frequently eats outside this time of year, surrounded my mother's beautiful garden and at work we tend to gravitate to the tables outdoors at the campus canteen.  So of course this interesting post on NPR food blog, The Salt, on the history of picnicking was well timed!

What was perhaps most interesting part of the article was learning that picnic starts as something the wealthy indulged in. These early picnics required servants and nice linen, a "movable feast" more than roughing it out in nature and eating out of sandwiches out of plastic containers.

In fact they sound an awful lot like modern Bhutanese picnics where people tend to bring their pots and pans and actually cook out in the open. And the food is always special occasion food made for a large number of people.  I was once told by a group of  students horrified by my suggestion that we save money by making sandwiches, that there was no point going on a picnic if there wasn't meat and if it wasn't grand. Here is a picture of me at that picnic where my students cooked up  the most delicious feast.

Reading Notes: Portraits of grandmothers and their signature dish.

So, the blog Jezebel had a lovely post recently about a photography book focused on grandmothers from 58 different countries posing with their signature home cooked meal. The book was put together by photographer Gabriele Galimberti, the man behind the riveting photo essay of children around the world posing with their most prized possessions. Apparently he was inspired by his own grandmother's ravioli.

Scrolling through a more complete sample of his photos I am struck by how few of the dishes are familiar to me ( I admittedly plan to stay unfamiliar with the Caterpillar in tomato sauce!)  However what is perhaps most interesting to me is that glimpse these photos give into the kitchen where these women work their magic.

My Bhutanese grandmother died before we were born but my Swiss grandmother cooked many wonderful meals for us.  Our least favorite was probably cow tongue, which was baked whole and looked very much like a cow tongue even as she sliced it up for us.

Fresh from the garden!

Reading Notes : Six Basic Tastes of Tibetan Medicine

From : " Tibetan Medical Dietary Book: Vol 1 Potency & Preparation of Vegetables" by Dr. Yangbum Gyal, Clinical Research Department  Men- Tsee- Khang ( Tibetan Medical and Astrological Institute of H.H., the Dalai Lama)

Sweet: Something that is tasty and clings to your mouth and make you want more like sugar, candy, cookies , ice cream, grapes, molasses, honey, etc.

Sour: Something that set the teeth on edge , pucker the face and make the mouth watery when it touches the tongue like lemon, orange, Kyuru ( Emblica officinalis), seabuck thron, raw grapes, curd, butter milk, etc. 

Salty:  It creates hot sensation and produces saliva when it touches the tongue. For e.g., salt, natron, etc.

Bitter: It taste bitter, clears the foul mouth smell and does not want to taste more when anything bitter touches the tongue. For e.g. Bitter gourd, dandelion, coffee, etc

Hot:  Something that burns the mouth, oozes out tears and produce heat when it touches the tongue, like chili, garlic, onion, Gingiber officinale, Piper longum etc.

Astringent: Something that give a weak sense of taste and sticks to the tongue and palate when in touches the tongue like, raw banana. 

Reading Notes: Collections of Honey.

In another life I worked for many years in a museum, backstage where all the artifacts were stored and cataloged and cared for. So understandable I have a soft spot for collections which is why I adored this recent blog post by  anthropologist Sarah Weber looking at what collections of honey in Palawan, Philippines could teach her about the flow of wild honey from forest to market to home. The answer? A lot! Particularly interesting was the way in which this museum-y approach allowed her to explore question about value and authenticity. What the post reminded me were the photos I sometimes see on social media-- particularly facebook- that people take of food that they purchased from various CSA ( Community Supported Agriculture) that they belong to and all the claims of value, purity and even perhaps a gentle moralizing implied in the photos ( often in the captioning of them).

Reading Notes: A week's worth of groceries

I cannot stop looking at this amazing slide show on the Huffington Post shows families from around the world sitting next to a week's worth of groceries. A friend sent me a link pointing out that Bhutan had been included in the slide show. The staggering amount of packaged food in some of pictures is even more shocking in comparison with the fruits and vegetables that dominate in other pictures.

The photos  are all from Peter Menzel and Faith D' Alusio's book " Hungry Planet; What the World Eats" which documented global food trends. The books was published in 2007 so its hard not to imagine the changes since then.

Reading post: The fifth taste- Umami

I am huge fan of Marmite but its a hard taste to describe. Apparently however western scientists are starting to recognize a fifth taste, umami- to describe the strong savory flavor of food like Marmite, Parmesan cheese, anchovies and the taste enhancer MSG.  (The four other tastes are of course sweet, sour, salty and bitter). This article from The Guardian's great " Word of Mouth" food blog  is a great introduction to umami.

"So why is bolognese sauce with cheese on top, or a cheeseburger with ketchup so finger-licking good? Because, says Laura Santtini, creator of the umami condiment Taste No 5 Umami Paste, when it comes to savoury, "1+1=8". In the simplest terms, umami actually comes from glutamates and a group of chemicals called ribonucleotides, which also occur naturally in many foods. When you combine ingredients containing these different umami-giving compounds, they enhance one another so the dish packs more flavour points than the sum of its parts." 

Reading Notes: Michael Pollen on the Magic of Sharing Food

From Michael Pollen's recent interview with NPR about his new book " Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation" 

"Some of the foods that hold themselves out to you as supremely convenient, like those microwavable single-potion entrees in the supermarket? I did an experiment with those. We had what we call " Microwave Night,"  where we all got to buy one of those, you know, fast-food-in-a-freezer-bag things that they now have in the supermarket. And guess what? It took 40 minuets to get that meal on the table. Because the microwave is individualistic. You can only microwave one person's entree at a time. And you're not sharing. And there's something magical that happens when people eat from the same pot. The family meal is really the nursery of democracy. It's where you learn to share, it's where we learn to argue without offending. It's just too critical to let go, as we're been so blithely doing." 

Reading notes: why we think food = love

I have had a pretty long and trying week and there were a couple moments that only fried food could redeem but the truth is that for me real comfort after a long day is a meal shared with loved ones. Which is why this week I returned to read this great NPR article about how human brains evolved to equate food with love.  The articel's inclusion of cute example of  bonobos sharing salad makes it well worth the read but what strikes me is the emphasis on shared food as love, even the comfort of the memory of shared food.  I completely embrace the idea that comfort food might be a shared meal instead of hurriedly eaten, instantly regretted junk food binge. 

Eating out: The Folk Heritage Museum Restaurant

The Folk Heritage Museum Restaurant is intended to offer an "authentic" Bhutanese dining experience.  So you can probably guess who their main clients are: yup, foreigners. However its not just tourists who dine here, Thimphu's expatriate community in general seems to eat here frequently too. Well maybe its not always by choice, it seems to have become a favorite place for "official" meals that include foreigners. So high level-y stuff,  and since I am not even remotely high level-y and I am not a tourist, I had never eaten a meal there before. Of course I have always been very curious. What exactly is an  "authentic" Bhutanese meal? So when I was invited to join my visiting Swiss aunt and uncle and their friends there for lunch earlier this week I was quick to accept.

This is a little photographic account of our meal there. The table was set on with traditional-y Bhutanese wooden bowls, of course Bhutanese didn't really eat at dining table but it was a very pretty setting all the same. 

Already set out on the table were three traditional woven baskets  filled with what I think of as " tea snacks" since they are most frequently enjoyed with a cup of tea. One made of corn ( the yellow one) and two made form rice. All of them a crunchy and savory and a perfect companion to tea but the corn snack is the real danger since its deep fried and delicious.

Once we were seated someone came round to serve us butter tea or suja. I have to say that starting the meal with a cup of tea is indeed very Bhutanese.  On almost any occasion that you visit someone you will be offered a cup of tea before anything else.

Then they started to set out the food-- white rice and mini-buckwheat pancakes ( from my region of Bhutan!) I was less then impressed with the pancakes-- at home we make them thick and large and eat them steaming hot. But I am sure these little sampler pancakes were ideal for unfamiliar tongues and taste buds.

Here is more of the meal: ferns ( which are back in season! Hurray!), a spinach dish , potato and cheese and a small bowl of typical Bhutanese condiment: fresh chili, cheese and tomatoes. The potato dish contains no chili at all so it was basically scalloped potato once again probably a concession to foreign tastes.

Here is a close up of the ferns which were delicious. They were more of less just fried with just a little seasoning so that you could really taste the flavor of the fern. Since the season started I have mostly eaten fern drenched  in cheese so this was a welcome change but perhaps not a completely typical Bhutanese recipe.

 But there was also some ema datshi ( chili and cheese) as well as some very fatty pork ( the more fat the tastier is the Bhutanese way of thinking about it) served up, both of which are stereotypically Bhutanese. The Swiss looked at the large strips of fat with something between horror and fascination but mostly struck to the chicken instead which was coated with in a tasty dry curry rub closer to something you might find in an Indian restaurant. 

Here is my plate- don't worry I went back for seconds!

After the meal they served some cut fruit-- desert and sweet things are not very traditionally Bhutanese but if you look at the number of bakeries and pastry shops I think we have made up for lost time!

So final thoughts? It was a decent enough meal, but  no more or less authentic or tasty than a meal that you could purchase in town or cook at home. I think what the Folk Heritage Museum Restaurant  does best is provide a unique and pleasurable dining experience. The interesting and thematic decor ( for example they have traditional kitchen utensils hanging artfully from the ceiling), the attention to the presentation of the food and the pacing of how its served, as well as the prompt efficient service are all rather unusual in Thimphu.