The food - Part 3

First of all - have you noticed the fancy NEW AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION button on the right hand side? Try it, it's hilarious.

We are currently in Hanoi, where we are forced to stay in our hostel unless we want to go play with the Monsoon rain. Unfortunately for you, this gives Judith & me time to update our blog. Having raced through Latin American (The food - Part 1) and Japanese (The food - Part 2) cuisines before, we would like to give you a quick taste (ha!) of our culinary experiences in Mongolia and China as well. Over the past few days, Judith & I have both recovered from our first serious stomach bug on our tour to date* – what a timing for this post! 

In an earlier note, I had already alluded to the fact that Mongolian nomad cuisine is, well, special. Nomad food really is not created to taste nice or to be a pleasure visually, it's just an honest provider of calories for survival in a hostile environment. Mongolian cuisine is highly seasonal, even more so than in other places. The harsh climate only allows for dairy production in summer - well, the two months of the year they call summer anyway. In winter, the nomads usually eat the animals which in the previous season have been nice enough to provide them with milk. Life can be tough.

As we stayed with different nomad families during summer, we got to eat tons of dairy products. For breakfast, we usually had yoghurt with sugar, milk rice, or urum (the brother-in-law of butter) with some bread. To prepare for the cold season, most of the cheese production was dried outside or in the tent. The tent is also where all the cooking takes place, always on a single stove fuelled with dried cow dung. Yes, it burns.  

For lunch, we often had home-made noodles, sometimes prepared in a  - surprise, surprise - milk-based soup, accompanied by some parts of animal fat & the odd piece of mutton. Dinner essentially was the same. Being nomads in an environment such as Mongolia, the chefs neither add any spices, nor do they include a lot of veggies. Nomads don't grow anything which doesn't have four hooves. No wheat, no rice, no corn, no spices, no green veggies, nothing. The few veggies they do use are bought on markets, a lot of it imported from China.

For drinking, people mostly resort to milk tea, consisting of hot water, milk, salt (!), and a bit of the leftovers of the Chinese tea production. To party, they throw in some “vodka“ made of  goat milk (only about 15-20% alcoholic content), which really tastes like vodka with a goat having drowned in it. An all time Mongolian favourite is Airag, or fermented mare's milk. It tastes like regular milk gone bad (the one that comes out of the carton in little pieces as you try to pour it over your cornflakes), with a lovely hint of horse. Mmmh.

To conclude, the food described above may sound horrible. However, if there's nothing else to eat, Mongolian nomad cuisine can actually be OK. Just try for yourself. 

After several weeks in milky wonderland, Judith & I were happy to return to China. Chinese food is simply great. And it has nothing to do with “number 54 sweet & sour for take-away, please” which until now I had thought was Chinese. The biggest surprise about Chinese cuisine was its immense variety. Every region in China has developed its own recipes, using distinct ingredients & spices. Beijing as the capital is said to be the best place to sample different regional restaurants. And sample we did. Central Asian Chinese food (depicted above) from the Xinjiang region, for example, features very distinct Mid-Eastern flavours. The Northern food generally is more salty in that they use a lot of soy sauce. The further South-West you go (Yunnan, Sichuan), the hotter & spicier (and more delicious) it gets. Conversely, the food in the  South-East (e.g. Hong Kong) is a lot milder again. Of course, being in Beijing, we sampled fabulous Peking Duck. In addition, hotpot (see below), a pan-Asian favourite, not only sounds funny but also tastes nice.

Last but not least, both Judith & I decided to try some of the shock-food as well, just to make our travel stories more exciting. While we didn't have snake (even though I thought I'd do anything to free our planet from these beasts), we did try fried scorpions. They're actually not half bad: once you put salt on them they taste like Pringles Original. Who knows what P&G put into Pringles, anyway. 

With this silly remark, I shall close this post for today. We're heading from Vietnam to Laos tomorrow on a lovely 22-hour bus ride, so I'd appreciate some compassion for our backs. Gude appo. 
__________________________________________________________________________

*) This is what happens when you get overconfident. We caught this stomach bug eating at a rather unclean food stall at a market in Vietnam – bragging to each other about how well our stomachs had coped with the food so far. If we'd get through this unscathed, we thought we could get away with anything. Well, as it turned out, we're sissies after all.