Meals in Mongolia

I was invited to Mongolia to revitalize the menu at the vegetarian Stupa Cafe. Conveniently placed just inside the front door of a four -story building dedicated to Buddha Dharma, it is supposed to generate income to support all the effort and activities of bringing Dharma back to Mongolia. It's mostly patronized by local Mongolians, many devotees of the Dharma offered here, with the occasional tourist or two. Mongolia is an adventure travel hotspot right now and urban Ulan Baator is the necessary entry and exit point for the desert experience. So they have to begrudge themselves a day or two here. These tourists are easy to spot: they're usually a tad unkempt whereas the Mongolians are flashily dressed to the nines, often with a lot of spiffy sparkle on their clothes and high heeled shoes. The cafe doesn't get much of the enormous expat business crowd like the Cuban who runs Millie's Cafe near all the embassies, probably because its reviews on Yelp and Trip Advisor are lukewarm. My mission is to change and fire everybody up.

This is a challenge in the world's coldest urbanizing nation, five to six months of minus 40ºC. The traditionally rural, nomadic Mongolians have managed for thousands of years to survive courtesy of their animal herds: sheep, cows, horses and goats. Think milk and meat. Then think it again and again and again. This unkosher diet suits perfectly because the Mongolians have mastered the fine art of fermenting that milk and in all that ferment are more vitamins than we get from industrially produced green vegetables. Plus there are more forms of dairy here than anywhere on the planet and the array in markets is mindboggling, also at times quite confusing. It's not just all the butter, yogurt, sourcream, clotted cream, and the one or two mysteriously solid forms that pass for cheese. The Mongolians have perfected the art of drying yogurt curds into thousands of shapes that are displayed in jars and on plates on market counters like grayish cookies.

All this dairy, yet it's impossible to find anything that resembles what we think of as cheese. I've spent a few dollars here and there fooling myself. Just when I think I've scored something like mascarpone or ricotta it melts on the toast like the clotted cream it is. I bought a chunk of what I thought could be mozzarella but it refused to melt. Foolishly I spent 40 minutes hand whisking the hell out of thick milk thinking I could make whipped cream. All I got was the same milk with some bubbles in it. There doesn't seem to be much correspondence between the milk of the local cows and the milk of our Western cows, although I'm told the quality and texture of the dairy changes radically in summertime after the animals finally get to munch on grass. This however is mostly preserved for winter in those cookie-like forms, so there's no way to know what else it might have been.

Vegetables are even more novel to the Mongolians than they are to the Tibetans. What's in the market --everywhere the same array of bell peppers, potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbages, torpedo shaped beets, tomatoes--comes either from Russia or China, although it seems the leaf lettuce might be local at this time of year. Ditto the stringy looking scallions. The two fresh herbs, dill and cilantro, are wilted and dry. Most of what's in cans is stuff from attics that has been dumped here by countries like Germany which at least leaves the Germany label on. The Chinese disguise their stuff with phony English labels. The Russians provide a lot of grains; the Chinese rice they wouldn't dare eat. Everybody said: Wait til you go to Mercury Market and there you will find everything good." What I found was a food flea market where you could buy expired cans of Russian caviar, jars of German sauerkraut and for $15 a restaurant sized plastic jar of McCormick's oregano.

My mission is to make meals from this that will appeal to both the Mongolians and the tourists, keeping the price point low enough for the students and other low income locals who depend on the cafe. It is also not to alienate the long suffering kitchen staff, 5 women who do hard labor from 9AM until 7 or 8 PM for $200 a week and all the food they can taste while cooking it. They are now sharing with me what they make for their own lunch as a sign of acceptance and it's hard not to notice that absolutely every day, the fried rice or soup always contains tiny morsels of lamb. Fatty morsels because they love fat the best, a carryover from those minus 40ºC days.

That shows it's not an easy task to turn these people into vegetarians but I'm on it, starting with real Italian pizza. My homemade marinara sauce, a handful of canned mushrooms, a chopped green pepper and some Mozzarrella cheese I found at that Mercury Market in a two kilo loaf was a hit. Just like yesterday's frittata with onions and zucchini, and of course cheese on top. Gotta do dairy. and if not dairy, deep fried. The Mongolians love anything fatty and fried. Watching the kitchen staff turn out about 500 "calzones" a day, I got the idea of thinly slicing one of the potatoes and throwing the disks into the fryolator too. And so we had chips! With lots of salt, the other ingredient the Mongolians worship. If their food isn't slathered in salt, they don't think it has any taste. So chips were a winner.

but the bigger hit, the surprise triumph, was arancini. These fried risotto balls are the traditional way Italians use leftovers: last night's risotto is fried up with some garlic, onions and parmesan cheese, and when it's piping hot an egg is stirred in along with breadcrumbs made from yesterday's fresh loaf. Golf-ball sized balls of this are handrolled. a small cube of mozzarella is inserted in the center and when the ball is rolled in more breadcrumbs it's ready to be deep fried. Our arancini got the "fantastico" approval of our Italian director, although he was bewildered about why they were more tennis ball sized. "The Mongolians," I explained, "like everything big or they feel cheated. They're right up there with McDonald's in supersizing everything."

I told the cafe director these were called fried rice balls but he was going to call them "money balls" because he would be making money on his waste. His smile got as big as all Mongolia.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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