Chilli seedlings : a time to plant

After repeated reminders ( nagging!)  from our housekeeper I finally bought some chilli seedlings for our garden. We have had a wet cold spring and have neglected our garden. Here is hoping that  this purchase is the beginning of change. I am admittedly neither a knowledgeable  or consistent gardener but now that my parents have moved back to rural Bhutan we are being expected to take a more active role. Finger crossed?

The return of "To Zowa Sho"

 I recently caught up with an old friend from high school who wants to take up blogging about local food traditions in her home country, Nepal. Since she was always the best cook in our dorm I can't believe she didn't come to this idea sooner. She can't believe I stopped updating this blog. "You are in the perfect place to do this kind of writing," she reminded me. As always her enthusiasm was infectious. Its been  more than a year since my last post but after that conversation  I am finally ready to come back to regularly blogging about Bhutanese food. 

To celebrate my return, here is my favorite food photo of the last year.  A close up of the beautiful and very tasty beans I helped my mother harvest in her garden in Tang, Bumthang last fall. 

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!

Fresh from the garden!

How does our garden grow?

Thimphu town is full of pink, pink blossoms that is. Our apple trees and basically all the many, many other apple tress in Thimphu are in bloom. Here is what our garden looks like right now. Its nice to be home for a full year so that I can watch these trees go from winter bare branches to pink blossoms and in the fall hopefully all these tress will be heavy with apples.

 In these pictures you also get a sense of what else is growing in the family garden. We have already started to plant chili and asparagus for the year. And of course, as you can see my parent like to mix their veggies and flowers.  

As far as I know daffodils are not edible but I couldn't help wanting to share a picture of them too. 

Peaches by candlelight

 This time of year the trees around our house are so heavy with fruit that we can hardly keep up with all the ripening apples and peaches. In fact much to my mother's frequent distress many of our apples are being eaten by bird or they fall off the tree and rot. We have been giving away apples by the basket-full.




 Luckily  my family has "invented" a new favorite way to eat our peaches. The peaches are peeled, the pit is removed and the small peaches are then sliced in half. Then we cook them in a large pan with some sugar and water. After dinner we eat the peaches in a bowl with some fresh homemade yogurt.

Its a simple dessert, much lighter and healthier than peaches and cream, prefect after a regular weeknight dinner. During a recent power outage we discovered that peaches and yogurt are even tastier by candlelight!

 



 

Garden Fresh

Earlier this year the Opposition Leader,  Lyonpo  Tshering Tobgay posted a review of a new restaurant in Thimphu and while he raved about their ribs, he also bemoaned that fact that everything on the table from the rice to the beef to the onions to the cooking oil had been imported from India . He writes, “We don’t grow our own food. We don’t build our own houses. And, besides hydropower, we don’t produce much else.” Lyonpo ( perhaps ironically?)  titled the blog post, “Bhutanese Food.”

 

My first instinct is to agree—when I lived in the east for a year, if the big trucks didn’t wind their way up from the border there were no onions, no mangos, no chilies, no butter, no tea. But that is less our experience here in Thimphu where my parents’ garden provides a decent chunk of what makes it way to our table.   Of course by no means does that mean we aren’t dependant on Indian imports for some of what we eat.  But here are some of what is currently growing in our garden:   

 

Corn                                                                       



 



Cherry tomatoes


Salad green and beet root


                                                     





                                                            


 










and basil, which my mother makes into pesto using walnut or cashew nuts instead of pine nuts which are not as far as I know locally available

 

And here is a picture of our garden, since it slopes upwards it hard to convey it’s full scale. I do however love that my parents like many other Bhutanese kitchen gardener, also grow flowers among their veggies.

 

But I know we are lucky, as Thimphu continues to grow, both outward and upwards, space is becoming more and more of a luxury. How many other people can even have a kitchen garden in a Thimphu that looks more like this?

 

 

These are part of complex reserved for government servants, just below our own house and my sister’ s boyfriend – P---’s  family live in one of the apartments.  We often cut through the complex on our way down to town which is how I know that some of the green spaces have been used by residents to grow their own vegetables. Here are two photos of these gardens.

 

I asked P--- a little bit about the gardens and he says that use of these green spaces is mostly through informal mutual agreements rather than a formal mechanism. His family has lived in the complex for years and always maintained a kitchen garden but he has noticed that in recent years as food prices  rise, more families who live in the complex have taken up gardening.