Reading notes: Pork Dumplings

I am completely infatuated with NPR's fantastic food blog The Salt , if its not a part of your regular on-line reading it should be. In honor of Chinese new year earlier this month they posted the recipe for pork potstickers or dumplings by  Scott Drewno the executive chef of The Source by Wolfgang Puck, a fancy-pants Asian fusion restaurant in Washington, D.C. I think the best part of little write up is how clear it is that Chef Scott LOVES dumplings. According to him "They're everything you want in a dish — salty, savory, filling" So true!

Lunch on a snowy day: Bathup

 Yesterday morning we woke up to a Thimphu covered in a thick white blanket of snow. Unusual not because we don't ever get snow but because usually we see a light snowfall that melts almost as soon as it settles. This time the snow came down so thick and heavy and that is stayed all day into the next one. My facebook and twitter were full of people's photos of the snow including snowmen, snow-women and even one snow-buddha. My mother and my brother, Sonny took the opportunity to make and serve up a typical Bhutanese cold weather meal: Bathup or soup with homemade noodles.

 Below are the assembled ingredients minus the homemade noodles. To left you see a basket of chopped leafy greens (my mother likes to use mustard greens but any other leaf green is likely to work), onions, garlic , ginger and some potato. Potato is not a standard Bathup ingredient but my
mother likes the way it melts in the soup to give it a lovely thick consistency. To the right are salt, chili power, sichuan pepper ( or thingay in Dzongkha) and of course bones.  Bones are critical to making a savory and hearty stock for the noodles. My mother puts everything ,except the greens and  thingay (that goes into the soup absolutely last) into a pressure cooker, adds a tiny bit of vegetable stock powder and lets it all cook until the bones are completely cooked.

In the meantime Sonny prepares the dough to make the noodles. To make the mixture he blends two parts of atta ( or whole wheat flour) with half a part of maida ( or white flour) and warm water.  The mixture of flours gives the noodle a nice texture. Below you can see the kind of consistency

that you need to aim for.

The flour is then rolled out and Sonny used a serrated pizza cutter to slice the dough into noodles. He also used the straight edge of a salad serving soup to make straight and consistently sized noodles.

The cut noodles are kept in a bowl that has flour in it and tossed regularly ( ideally with each addition of newly cut noodles) to keep the noodles from sticking together or clumping.

Once the meat it judged to be cooked, its time to add the chopped mustard greens. These are stirred into the soup and the pressure cooker is now left open and used like a regular cooking pan.



Once the soup comes to a boil again its time to add the homemade noodles. Sonny is careful not to stir too vigorous as this might ruin the noodles. He gently stirs in the noodles, makes sure all of them  are completely submerged in the soup. 



Now its time to add the thingay. My mother has had some thingay sitting on the warm stove as the soup was made  ( not over a lit flame but just sitting out on the stove )  so that they are lightly toasted. Now she crushes them into a coarse powder before adding it to the soup.

As a final touch my mother chops some green onion directly into the soup before serving.

And there you have it, the perfect snowy day meal!

Reading notes: Food Processing and the Growth of Cities

Rachel Lauden a historian who has a wonderful blog about the history and politics of food, recently had a great post  ( with wonderful vintage photographs of cod and pasta drying, well worth a look) wondering aloud about the amount of space that traditional food processing takes and how this may have impacted the growth of cities.

"I’m toying with the idea that one factor contributing to the growth of cities was the development of space-saving methods of processing foods, such as commercial drying facilities for pasta.

In early days (ancient Rome, for example) this commercial milling and baking would have dramatically reduced the space needed to produce daily bread. In the Industrial Revolution, steel roller mills, huge bakeries, vacuum pans for evaporating liquids, and so on would similarly have made operations more compact."

Reading Notes: Dried Chili

Taken from the blog "Imperfectly Perfect- Simply Being by Me" by Thimphu based blogger, Chuki.  Here she writes about dried chili both as a harbinger of Bhutanese winter and as something she loves to eat. 

"Perhaps the best part about winter is the dried red chili. I know the cold season is just round the corner when I drive past houses and see windows and verandas decorated with strings of red chili. I can see the winter sun working on them diligently.

Like any normal Bhutanese, I love chili for reasons I hardly care to find out. And the dried ones are even better. It effortlessly blends with every other item. Shakam with red chili, vegetables with red chili, or red chili with cheese!"

 Note: Shakam-- is the Dzongkha word for dried meat. Any dried food has the suffix "kam" added to it.

Dried things: An Introduction

This is a picture of a recent home cooked dinner, one my all time favorite Bhutanese meals. It might be a little hard to tell what it is from the picture but the dish consists mainly of three different dried ingredients: dried meat, dried turnip leaves and dried red chilies.

This time of year, winter time, the weather is dry and sunny and everywhere you go, even in dense urban Thimphu,  people are drying food in whatever space they have available. Sometimes they have strings of red chili drying out of a window, strips of meat on a clothes line or a layer of chili laid out on a rooftop.  Once again I love that despite all the change in our eating habits (for example, my mother complained again yesterday about the over-use of processed Indian cheese in Bhutanese dishes) and fridges and weekly vegetable markets and meat shops,  there is still so much fondness for an old-fashion food preservation process like drying.

According to Dr Brian Nummer of the National Center for Home Food Preservation ( proof that there is a national center somewhere for everything!) drying as a food preservation technique is not only found not in every culture in world but also throughout human history. Its one of the oldest, most prevalent ways to deal with the fact that fresh food doesn't stay fresh all that long.

Over the next few posts I am going to share a little bit about how my family and other families in Bhutan dry foods and also how they cook and eat them. Join me?

Reading notes: Bhutanese hosts

This reading note comes from the wonderful blog, " A(nother) Year in Bhutan"  by Ariana  Maki , an art historian specializing in Bhutan and the Himalayas. She began the blog in 2009 when she was volunteering for the National Museum in Paro.  The quoted section comes from a recent post about eating in Thimphu

"Your host and his/ her family will likely apologize for the food they are offering, saying that it isn't very much, its not tasty and they are sorry they couldn't give you anything. However, your eyes and mouth will quickly recognize this self- deprecating sweetness for what it is, as before you will be laid a near cornucopia of foodstuff, not to mention a wide variety of drinkable goodies. For example at one recent dinner, my friend and I were offered mango juice, apple juice, tea, butter tea, whiskey, vodka, homemade ara ( alcohol), and changkyer ( homemade alcohol served warm with egg and a little rice)."
 

Guest Post: " The Rice Incident"

This is a guest post by Carolyn Barnes who lived in eastern Bhutan with her husband, Jacob  during the 2010/2011 school year. This wonderful story originally appeared on her own blog and she very kindly agreed to reboot it so I could share it here. For more of Carolyn's funny and smart observations you can follow her on twitter at @CBarnesAnthro

The cartoon was created by the multi-talented Bhutanese artist Pema Tshering who works in a large variety of mediums and styles including water color, film and most recently animations. You can follow his work on facebook

Living and Learning

In the summer of 2010, just after marrying, my husband Jacob and I set off for Eastern Bhutan.  I took a position as a lecturer at Sherubtse College in Kanglung, while Jacob became a house-husband or, as he likes to joke, a “home minister.”  After the initial elation of realizing that we were in Bhutan to stay, we of course had quite a serious bout of nervousness and homesickness.   Arriving in the thick of the monsoon exacerbated our despair.

What was even worse about the monsoon rains was that they socially isolated us at the time when we needed to be out-and-about the most.  We felt trapped inside our wet home and, when we were able to get out, we found that many of our neighbors were still on vacation and some of the shops were closed until students returned.  Although we did what nesting we could and tried to get out and show our face around town, we were bitterly lonely...and damp.

Shopping was the real way we began to feel more established in the community, especially before I began working.  Shopkeepers asked who we were, introduced themselves, and helped us find goods.  They quite often were the ones who explained the ‘obvious things’ to us; the local knowledge about daily living that Bhutanese take for granted but that we remained clueless about.  One of the ladies often explained to us how to prepare and cook produce we’d never seen before:  how to trim and fry olo choto or make datse with fiddlehead ferns.  Another explained the differences in the eggs imported from India and those produced in a big farm down in the valley.  Yet another showed us how to charge our cell phone with credit and how to pick out the best passion fruits (yum!).

While very instructive, these first interactions were often awkward and uncomfortable for quite some time.  I really worried we were bothering these people or that they’d think we were wasting their time with tedious questions.  While this may have been the case, these early dealings were essential in introducing us to life in Kanglung.  In particular, one humorous shop interaction from our first week in the village became quite the legend amongst our local friends.

The Rice Incident

One day the rains decided to subside for a bit, so we went shopping about 15 minutes up the highway in “Upper Market.”  Having decided that we needed to buy rice to cook in our new rice cooker, we went into a shop and surveyed a small room of half-empty bags of grains sitting on the ground.  The young shop-girl directed us to what was probably the most expensive and fancy rice in the store, saying that it would be “good for you.”  Jacob examined it, rolling some of the grains in his hand before we confirmed that we’d take it.  The price we paid seemed quite expensive, but we were newcomers and eager-to-please.  As the shopkeeper girl hollered something at her mother in the next room, Jacob continued to examine the bag of rice, which was about 1/3 full, lifting it up and down to gauge its weight.  I asked how heavy it was and if he thought we’d have a problem carrying it home.

As he was making this calculation, I noticed that a woman from the next room was in the process of hauling a HUGE, unopened bag of rice out to the front of the shop, at least 30 kgs with a big label that read “Rice Queen.”  I quickly realized this was the bag of rice we had just purchased.  While attempted to explain what I thought was happening to Jacob, and the young girl asked where the car was be taking the rice home in.  We froze, absolutely flabbergasted.  We just bought an inordinate amount of rice.  How the hell were we ever going to eat it all?  And, more importantly in that moment, how were we going to get it home?

I couldn’t even lift the bag off the ground.  Poor Jacob hoisted the bag up on his shoulders, with the help of one incredibly strong lady and myself, hunched over and strained.  He started waddling down the hill like a pack mule; sweat soon completely drenched his shirt and dripped off his bright red face.  The old woman from the shop stood outside on the hill and watched for some time, giggling and shouting in Sharchop as we begin our descent (thank goodness it was a descent!).  We had to stop every few minutes so Jacob could catch his breath, resting the rice on the concrete blocks to keep cars from flying off the steep sides of the road.  People giggled as we slowly passed by.  Jacob was focused on balancing the bag’s weight as he moved.  I worthlessly fidgeted about him, tugging the bag one direction or another if he looked like he needed help.  He ever so slowly stomped down the hill, his feet slamming on the pavement with the weight.  At one point a few students who were back in town early came along and insisted on carrying it a little ways, also becoming drenched in sweat, before they had to go back up to their dorm (bless them!).  Eventually we made it home with the ridiculous bag of rice. 

This became a story we tell people over and over again, to which many a Bhutanese friends have slapped their knee and giggled, “You didn’t know you were buying the full bag?!”  It has also become a way for us to explain how clueless we were in the beginning about the daily operations of just living life there; how much help and explanation we needed for what seemed to locals like the most basic task.  One perplexed Bhutanese friend once asked, “Well, how do you buy rice at home?” perhaps assuming that we also consume huge quantities of rice at every meal.  I then had to explain that we rarely ate rice at home and, if we wanted to buy it, it would be in much, much smaller quantities.  He then said, in a soft and concerned tone, “Then, what do you eat?”

Much to our dismay, we finished that bag of rice before our year was over in Kanglung.  But when we needed to purchase more, we only bought a few KGs at a time.