Meatless in Mongolia

This is not about anything that happened since my last post. I just wanted to share this piece I wrote a while ago about diet and Dharma  and my experience in Mongolia.

Out of the blue in the spring of 2012, I got an SOS from Mongolia. The Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana (FPMT), an international Tibetan Buddhist group affiliated with Lama Zopa Rinpoche, was seeking someone who knew the kitchen as well as the Buddha’s Dharma, someone who could come asap to Ulan Baator to teach vegetarian cooking and re-invigorate its Stupa Café. “Mongolian food habits are very difficult to change,” the email said. “They basically eat meat (sheep meat) three times a day, and dairy products, obviously. But in the capital city they are willing to change and experiment… .”  

The urgency to revive the cafe was part of an urgency to restore Buddhism to Mongolia as the country re-asserted itself after a brutal Stalinist occupation.  For 70 years, the Russians had done their best to obliterate every trace of what had been the country’s official religion, and in the rush to fill the vacuum created by their departure, Buddhists were being ruthlessly challenged by a surprisingly huge and well-financed invasion of Christian evangelicals and Mormons. They couldn’t afford to overlook any opportunity, especially major public outreach like the café. 

From Chingghis Khan airport, I was driven to the epicenter of the religious revival: a four-story, brown brick building in the heart of downtown on a busy thoroughfare whose impossibly long Mongolian name turned out to be Tourist Street. It had been purchased a dozen years before, after his Holiness the Dalai Lama tapped Lama Zopa Rinpoche and his FMPT organization to bring Dharma back where it started in the 3^rd Century BC during the reign of Ashoka. This is to say at least 600 years before it found China, a millennium before it spread into what we envision as Tibet. Although we don’t think of it this way, when those famous paintings were made, the caves of Dung Huang were Mongolian. Two of Padmasambhava’s 25 disciples were pure Mongol. Chingghis Khan maintained a tight relationship with the Sakyas, and according to historian Glenn Mullin, Chingghis’ grandson Kublai, unifier and ruler of China, was so devout that Marco Polo failed to fulfill his real mission in the East: to convert the tolerant Kublai to Catholicism and thereby subjugate him to the Pope. 

Kublai Khan’s death in 1294 and the consequent rise of the Ming dynasty vastly reduced Mongolia’s hegemony, but not its grip on Buddhism. In the 1570s, the family heir Altan Khan, on a throne in what is now Inner Mongolia, declared the national religion to be Buddhism, the Tibetan Gelug Mahayana version, and brought to his court the most renowned Gelug lama in his kingdom. Appointing Je Tamchey Khyenpa, or “The Omniscient Master”, spiritual ruler of the country, the Khan used the monk’s original ordination name, Lama Sonam Gyatso or Sonam Gyatso, Lama, but switched the Tibetan Buddhist Gyatso, ocean, to the ordinary Mongolian word for that, which gave him the title: Dalai Lama. 

As the third heir of the Gelug teachings, Sonam Gyatso became the third Dalai Lama. With power and money at his disposal, he built the now legendary Kumbum Monastery at the birthplace of the Gelug sect’s venerated founder, Tsongkhapa, in Kokonor, Amdo, Qinghai--now considered to be Tibet but then part of Mongolia. (Kokonor and Qinghai are, according to Mullin, Mongolian words, and Amdo’s inhabitants’ ethnicity remains heavily Mongolian.) To everyone’s surprise, his successor, the fourth Dalai Lama, turned out to be a grandson of Altan Khan, and the Mongol child was sent to the Kumbum to study. The fourteenth and current Dalai Lama, a monk ordained Tenzin Gyatso, was, as it happens, born in Amdo quite close to the Kumbum, which helps to explain why he is so determined to restore Tibetan Buddhism to the Khans' country.

            The newly chartered FPMT/Mongolia re-opened their building in 2002 as Ganden Do Ngag Shedrup Ling. Like much of Ulan Baator, it is Soviet-era nondescript, yet absolutely impossible to miss or mistake. Behind its iron bar fence, in the little paved plaza, where there could have been three or four parked cars, there is a plump, gleaming white, 8 ft tall Tibetan stupa. Mongolians have to pass and often circle this improbable landmark whenever they come through the iron gate for yoga, children's Dharma, ESL, Buddhist films, Gelug Lam Rim teachings, pujas or purchasing Dharma paraphernalia imported from Nepal. Once they step up and enter the building, they encounter the door to the café, whose windows overlook the stupa. Its refreshment was supposed to attract passers-by to the center, enticing them to spend Tukrik, Mongolian currency, that could help fund its free Dharma classes. 

When it opened in 2005, the 16 table Stupa Café served tea with pastries made by a Swiss volunteer, but after her departure, it foundered as new managers tried to turn it into more of a restaurant, a vegetarian restaurant. That was the problem. Mongolians seemed happy to have Buddhism back—or so over 50% declared in surveys, but they weren’t happy about seemingly new restrictions on their diet. Meat-eating is so embedded in the Mongolian mind, before I arrived, at the FPMT/Mongolia soup kitchen eight kilometers away in slums overrun by nomads who'd sold their herds to seek city riches, an angry mob attacked the cooks, claiming the Buddhists were trying to kill them by not putting meat in the soup. These beggars could afford to be choosers because the Evangelicals down the street were quite willing to provide all the meat it took to convert them. 

Even educated citizens like my 37-year-old friend Narmandakh, who'd lived long enough in LA to become an American citizen named Amanda, panicked when she tried to abstain for the Buddhist holy week of Saga Dawa. On days 2 and 4 she called to complain she felt so weak, she was scared. Maybe she was going to die. Maybe she should eat some lamb? Neither the six women aged 20 to 43 who worked in the café nor its manager, a man who'd studied in East Germany, wanted to be vegetarian, even for a meal. They were entitled to all the kitchen food they could consume, yet once a week, they pooled their very hard earned money to fill one of its small freezers with lamb. Everyday around 2:30, the head cook Tuya or Eveel or the dishwasher Tsetseglen would pull some out to make everyone a meaty lunch. The highest compliment they could give a dish I taught them--the way I knew they really liked, say, the mushroom barley soup--was to ask if they could add their lamb to it. 

Mongolians are proud to have survived thousands of years on a treeless plain brutalized by six months of 40º below zero (that's where Fahrenheit and Celsius intersect) as nomads who manage herds to supply all the material, milk, meat and mobility they need. Because vegetables will not grow in their frosty soil, and because nomads don’t farm, Mongolians long ago cleverly mastered getting all the vitamins a human body needs from dairy fermentation. In my Beginning Mongolian booklet, the page on food shopping words illustrates four different kinds of meat, milk, yogurt, butter, cooking oil, bread and flour--a perfect picture of the Mongolian diet.  But since they were liberated from the Soviets in the early 1990s, the majority of Mongolia’s three million inhabitants have migrated from a nomad’s ger to the booming city, and this radical shift has begun to make the traditional fatty diet worrisome to an increasingly sophisticated medical profession. 

The migration has also provoked a spate of investor-backed greenhouses and small plot farming in the surround, for while Mongolians have been rediscovering themselves, the world has been discovering copper and gold under their Gobi Desert, and corporate suits fly like locusts into Ulan Baator to devour them. In the astounding economic boom, Mongolians have been treated to all sorts of restaurants: French, Bukharin, Malaysian, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Indian, even American barbeque-- restaurants all hungry for a steady supply of scallions, spinach, even tomatoes, to please their foreign customers with salad as garnish for huge slabs of “grass fed” Mongolian beef and lamb. Then too, the Russians left a legacy of cabbage and potatoes.

Nobody was under an illusion Mongolia would become meatless soon. But the Buddhists at Ganden Do Ngag Shedrup Ling knew His Holiness the Dalai Lama had been experimenting with and encouraging vegetarian meals to practice the Buddha’s first precept of no harm. Their aspiration was to tap the brakes on all the slaughter the typical Mongolian diet required with a strategy of offering an enjoyable meatless meal. Perhaps this would lead to a second such meal and encourage a third that would make Mongolians want to try a meatless meal at home. Every meat-free bite was a step along the path to the Buddhist goal. 

History was encouraging. Dharma is maddeningly vague about meat-eating, yet it somehow reduces consumption in every country that embraces it.  Its insistence on awareness starts at the gut level with focus on habitual patterns of personal behavior, and this makes eating habits fair game. In fact, after years of brute asceticism led him not to enlightenment but to death's door, the first absolute truth the Buddha recognized was: human beings need to eat. For him the unresolved issues were: what and how? That’s why a significant portion of the Vinaya, his rules for monastic behavior, concern eating. 

When the Buddha made the cow sacred in India, the Brahmins held onto their hegemony only by giving up steak for beans. The initial Chinese converts to his India-based religion, coming from a culture described as eating anything that flies but a kite and anything with four legs but a table, cleverly invented tofu and exploited noodles. Chinese monks took their vegetarian ingredients with their Dharma teaching to carnivorous Vietnam, Korea and Japan. In Japan, cooking was turned into a meditation practice that yielded the exquisite Shojin Ryori and Kaiseki Ryori cooking Western restaurant critics rave about today. Returning from zendos and ashrams with tofu, miso and lentils, Western flower children arguably launched the lively and increasingly popular vegetarianism of 21^st C America. 

Tibetans come closest to Mongolians in reliance on meat, and for centuries their enormous monastery complexes included equally enormous abattoirs. Rinpoches made excuses for eating meat, often insisting on its benefit: the human consumer became responsible for purifying the karma of the animal consumed. But when Tibetan monastics in exile were exposed as some of India and Nepal's largest consumers of cow, an embarrassed Dalai Lama forbid beef at all Tibetan monasteries. Shortly after, His Holiness Karmapa, noting India and Nepal had plenty of nutritious alternatives unavailable in Tibet, issued a no-meat-at-all fiat. Now the monks of the Kagyu sect dine daily on rice, vegetables and dhal. Pious Tibetans in exile abstain from meat for the month of Saga Dawa.

             The key was to offer dishes that did not remind people they were not eating meat (e.g. tofu burgers), yet dishes that nonetheless offered what meat did: strong flavor, rich texture, and a feeling of fullness. The most vital criterion was familiarity. Eating habits are so primal and deeply embedded, scientific evidence—often from POWs, reveals people actually starve themselves to death to avoid eating scary food. Instinct warns it could be poison. In all probability, the weird Chinese seitan and soy-meat the cafe was unimaginatively cooking had alienated its customers.

Mongolian tradition offered the perfect solution. As herders, the nomads long ago became masters of milking. Dairy products were familiar, tasty, protein rich, filling, and abundant in the marketplace. Mongolians were avid consumers of yogurt, sour cream, butter, creamy cheese and "urum", something sold frozen in fan-shaped sheets that seemed to be heavy cream. In mid summer while their animals were giving birth and nursing, they actually relied on dairy more than meat. Why not support the remaining nomads, keep the money in Mongolia and serve dairy-based dishes?

The cafe staff immediately explained why not. Shortly after Mongolia became a free country, a beautiful, charismatic Vietnamese woman known as Supreme Master Ching Hai appeared. Claiming to be an emanation of Quan Yin, the great mother goddess to East Asian Buddhists, she relentlessly proselytized about purity of spirit and diet. When she moved on, she left behind an army of awestruck disciples, a chain of vegan restaurants, and the deeply embedded fear that a Buddhist who ate any animal product would be punished by the furies of  hell. Too terrified of hellish karma to serve dairy, the café staff dutifully –and listlessly--cooked up relentlessly vegan dishes like "Goulash": cubes of soy-meat quickly stir-fried with onions and canned tomato paste.

The Stupa Café’s turnaround thus began not with a recipe but a Dharma teaching, the first and foremost teaching that actually created the Buddha and Buddhadharma. Prince Siddartha was able to sit under the Bodhi tree and become Shakyamuni Buddha only after he re-invigorated his starved, emaciated body by eating yogurt (or arguably milky rice). Thus the Buddha was not vegan. In fact, he could not have known what vegan means: the word and concept were coined in 1944 in England. The Buddha lived, taught and died in 4^th Century BC India, a country as dairy dependent as Mongolia. So there was no historic precedent compelling a Buddhist cafe in Ulan Baator to be vegan. 

"But," manager Oyunbaatar wailed, “how do we explain to our customers who believed that Vietnamese woman?” 

The answer became Lesson Two. The Vietnamese got Buddhism from southern China where dairy is not prevalent because the Han Chinese-- genetic kin to the Vietnamese-- are lactose intolerant.  Unable to find or to digest the dairy foods of their Indian masters, the initial Chinese Buddhist monks invented tofu to look and cook exactly like paneer and yogurt. Shortly after, in the careful process of making noodles to eat with that tofu, mindful monks observed the wheat starch--the seed's protein or glue, i,e, gluten-- rinse off, and tried kneading it like their noodle dough into "wheat-meat." These became the little breads named seitan in Japan, but known in China by the words "Buddha's food."  Bringing Dharma back to Mongolia gave the café manager a choice: do it the Chinese way and pay Beijing for the ingredients, or operate a Mongolian café. An exuberant Oyanbaatar flashed his dimpled smile, ran a hand through his slicked hair and took off as though he got out of jail free. Two hours later he was back by the stupa, unloading kilos of butter, yogurt and sour cream from the trunk of his dilapidated little white sedan. 

My fear that I would spend my days choking on fumes of resentment quickly evaporated. With the two old fridges full of the yogurt they knew, a semi circle of urum in the freezer and blocks of the butter they loved on the stainless worktable, the women in the kitchen took to chopping and stirring with a surprisingly joyous energy. Instead of preparing food they didn’t understand and couldn’t stand, their work was to dispatch familiar ingredients in new combinations, essentially conquering foreign food to make it Mongolian. The first afternoon, the youngest staff member, the hot-blooded 20-year-old Otgo, raced through her potato peeling chores to watch me make a batch of butter and cream scones. The next morning, when I started again so the head cook, Eveel, could write the exact procedure in her new notebook, Otgo threw a half-peeled potato on the stainless table, and raced over to my counter, saying in her broken English: “I do.” And she did, almost perfectly. This tour de force and the ebullience of the staff reminded me of a historian’s claim that the true quest of Chingghis Khan, the greatest conqueror, was to bring his seemingly primitive people up to speed with known skills and goods they didn’t have.  This motivation was the secret of his unparalleled success in capturing and consolidating the world.

As we began to focus on testing new daily specials, Tuya, the tall, big boned back-up cook, would in shy silence follow my requests to chop an onion, mince some garlic. Then she’d phlegmatically saunter over to the stove, curious about what I was doing with them, and when the moment seemed right, I handed her the stirring spoon for a taste. It took a few seconds before she would widen her eyes, burst into a smile, nod very enthusiastically and run for her notebook-- or just stand there puzzled. If she or the others didn’t like a dish-- frittata turned out to be one, we never mentioned it again. A dish that dazzled the staff--the potato gratin, eggplant parmesan or sour cream apple pie—was made anew by them and sent to the front. If it sold out, the women would hug each other, jump up and down, cheer, and run around like fools. 

Once we started to offer free tastes, people started to show up more regularly. Since there was no longer a menu, daily specials were posted in two languages (Mongolian and English) on a new whiteboard: Tibetan thukpa soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, noodle pudding. The surprise, the tastiness or maybe just their spunky appetite for experimentation brought Mongolians back. Earnest, khaki-clad backpackers drawn to the stupa took such delight in finding familiar items on the whiteboard, they ordered two or three dishes at a time: minestrone, Turkish pumpkin pancakes, and Italian arancini (deep-fried and cheese rice balls). Buzz reached the neighborhood expats who’d abandoned the café en masse, complaining they couldn’t even eat the spaghetti. Now that it was properly cooked in a large pot of salted water, they slurped it up with coriander pesto or brown butter and pine nuts. By week four, register receipts were doubling. Nandia, who worked the front because she had the only command of English, couldn’t keep up relaying all the compliments, telling us only when customers asked to meet the cooks. 

The appreciation and excitement coming from the front buoyed the women in the kitchen. Sometimes they stayed long beyond their shift, sometimes Tuya came an hour early to check on what was happening. Twice I saw Eveel flipping through my recipe file even though she could barely read the English. My last day, after we re-created all the successes to be sure we’d nailed them, these heirs of Chingghis Khan took on learning to make broccoli mushroom quiche, cream of leek soup, blackberry clafouti, peanut butter cookies and a grand finale of double layer carrot cake with creamed cheese frosting, which sold out in an hour.   

The Stupa Cafe was now a very different enterprise. It was profitable, helping to sustain the center. Otgo was promoted to full time pastry chef with the dishwasher Tsetseglen as backup. Eveel asked if she could keep my recipe book, even though she couldn’t read it—yet. Nandia and Tuya got small raises. Manager Oyunbaatar got too overwhelmed to say anything. He simply refused to go home to sleep after our last day because someone had to take me back to Chingghis Khan airport at 3:15 AM, and he didn’t want the guard on duty to do it as routine. When he put my suitcases on the shadowy terminal sidewalk, his eyes were filling with tears. "It was my dream," he choked, "that this cafe would bring the world to Mongolia and Mongolia back into the world again. Now it's actually happening.”

About two months after I departed, I got a surprise email from Ulan Baator. Thank you, it said. The café continued to be a huge success. With great relief and tasty food to nourish their stomachs, the Buddhists at Ganden Do Ngag Shedrup Ling were feeling re-energized and optimistic about restoring Buddhism to Mongolia. 

~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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Eating up the World

When the Japanese beetles first invaded, they went straight for the rose bushes, all the rose bushes from the hardy dune roses to the prissy tea ones. They came in droves, like a plague of locusts, and ate the bushes bare. Some did not recover from their voraciousness.

I know when I am outgunned. Hundreds of those luminously shiny gold beetles to one of me. I gave up on the dune roses and let that disgusting army of destroyers have them. When I didn't see them on the dune roses this year, I of course thought my merit had kicked a protection circle in. I dedicated the merit. Ha ha. Turns out they simply broadened their tastes, like the frenzied nouveau riche racing from one food fad to another. They didn't want the usual this year. No. Those little gold blobs of supersized destruction were munching away on the dark maroon leaves of the sand cherry tree and the spiky red flowers on the other side of the path. The telltale lacy leaves were everywhere. How was I to know the beetles buffet is why my never fail hydrangeas were keeling over?

I was so enraged, I wanted to kill. I didn't care about the karma. I told myself I had to kill those killer bugs to protect the life of innocent plants, my plants. Every beetle booted from the yard meant, by the way they breed, dozens less next year. With baggies, plastic tubs and glass jars I mounted a campaign, stalking the enemy and piling up bodies in those transparent containers. Defiantly, I left them under the plants as a cemetery, a warning--the way the ancients used to leave severed heads mounted on gateposts.

I did in a dozen at a time but new ones soon took their places on those now fragile plants. I grouchily snatched more and more, telling myself I was hastening each beetle on to a higher rebirth, maybe as a skunk. That would be the animal realm, and that would be one step above these hungry ghosts who so perfectly illustrated the ravenous appetite and inability to stop that the Buddha described.

Today, as I slid another destructive dozen into the glass jar, I was thinking how friends have been phoning me the past few days to tell me stories about Mongolia are in just about every magazine and newspaper now. It is the country du jour. Most of the stories are of course about the world's investors and corporations swarming all over, trying to dig up the Gobi Desert to get to the world's largest untapped gold and copper mines.

And so as the last beetle slipped into my jar, I couldn't see any difference between these hungry ghosts feasting on my plants and those human hungry ghosts feasting on the Gobi Desert. Like a plague of locusts, the mining companies swarm from one site to another, hungrily gobbling up the land and spitting it out. Then the reporters fly in and chew up the goings on. Our crazed consumer corporate culture has made most of us hungry ghosts who wanna be or gotta have. And that creates even hungrier ghosts who fly around tearing up this planet from the Amazon to the Gobi and the pure Arctic waters off Alaska, leaving them for dead like my plants.

There doesn't seem to be a jar big enough to catch any of these devastating critters in.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Mongolian Grandma

Okay, better late than never the story of Grandma, the unnamed, sharp-eyed, 73-year-old woman who lives alone in the Mongolian countryside. When she greeted me at sunset on Saturday night, 9:15PM, she was wearing a royal blue silk deel, the traditional Mongolian dress, and black riding boots--the same outfit she was wearing when I left the next day at noon. Both times the gray hair around her weathered face was severely pulled back in a bun. Earrings dangled.

She pointed me toward one of the little painted stools arranged around a table in the middle of the room. These typical Mongolian chairs are only about 15" high and 15" square, which means you are basically squatting when you lower yourself onto one. When she saw everyone was seated, she thrust a bowl of candies on the table, then a bowl of small packaged cakes. Then one by one the milk tea arrived. Grandma didn't say much at all and while we ate and drank, she sat stationed on a regular chair about two feet away--between us and the cooking area--so she could keep an eye on the hospitality's choreography.

About an hour into the animated conversation, all in Mongolian and thus not comprehensible to me, I found out how we had come to be there with her that night--and at the same time learned a little about Mongolian social life. Grandma, it seemed, had two sons. The younger one had died in adulthood. The older was an artist now living in the Czech Republic. Thus she had come to be alone in the world.

But it turned out that artist son had once been married to my friend Narmandakh's sister-in law. It was that sister-in-law and Narmandakh's brother who had driven us here, at Narmandakh's request because she wanted me to see the real Mongolia and the real Mongolia is a ger in the countryside. It also turned out that the artist and Narmandakh's sister-in-law had a daughter, Grandma's only grandchild. The daughter was grown now, had studied in Paris and was back in Mongolia working lucratively as a translator for a French company. The person she most adored in the world and went to visit at every opportunity was Grandma. The ex-daughter-in-law, Narmandakh's sister-in-law, who was very close to her daughter, also called the old woman that, which is why I was told we were "going to Grandma's."

Grandma herself said very little that first evening, but the next day after breakfast, she brought out a bunch of photo albums, piled them on the table and began reminiscing. Grandma at 20 was a stunner! With her high cheekbones, almond eyes and bow-shaped lips, she could've been a double for Greta Garbo. Those high high cheekbones, that narrow little chin, the hair pulled discretely back...she was a beauty.

But she was simply a seamstress. And the wife of a Mongolian Communist Party official. They lived in a house in Ulan Baator. She worked for the Soviets in a big sewing factory, rising higher and higher in the ranks because of her focus and skills. "I am the one who sewed that special suit for the first Russian in space." She pointed to a picture of herself seated at a machine. My mind lit up like switchboard. Was this bizarre or just the way the world is if you are out and about in it? I was sitting in a shack in the Mongolian countryside with the woman who had gone to Moscow to sew the spacesuit for Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space and the man who in 1961 first shook America senseless when it realized it was running behind. Grandma had unknowingly affected my life as a schoolkid, because Yuri Gagarin set off the space race and the forced teaching of math to idiots like me.

Now I knew why there was a full table model Singer Sewing Machine in that shack. But there was also a small altar with photos of Chenrezig and Vajrapani, a remnant of the pre-Communist days when Grandma's parents had been Buddhist.

More photos of her son the artist and her son who was lost, photos of Narmandakh's sister-in-law sitting next to me know gasping at how thin and young she looked. Photos of Grandma and her husband being honored for something in Moscow. "She was really quite sophisticated for her time," Narmandakh whispered to me. "But after her husband died, she didn't want to stay in the city. She said the countryside was 'home' and she wanted to go back to it. So here she is."

Here was the shack I described earlier in my post from Mongolia. Grandma didn't have herds anymore to tend; her son in the Czech Republic, her French speaking granddaughter and her neighbors in the ger all felt she was too frail now to tend them. They worried. So she just had two mangy and fierce looking mongrels tied up on the far side of her yard where she'd planted scallions and potatoes and had hoed the spot for the tomatoes she'd started indoors. "They want me to go back to the city," she said looking at me, "but who will feed my dogs. No, I have to stay here, that's all."

Here, I discovered when we took a short walk after the photo ops, was about 100 yards from a beautiful river where Grandma pulled her water from. She had a bicycle she rode infrequently now 10 miles to a mining town where there were markets and banks. She had a pension from the Mongolian government and felt quite comfortable, not wanting for anything.

When we got up to leave, she disappeared into her bedroom and came out balancing a pile of packages. She gave slippers to Narmandakh, her brother and her ex daughter-in-law. She gave me a pair of merino wool gloves. I had no idea why she was being so generous, especially to me a total stranger. "It's a Mongolian custom," Narmandakh explained, "that the elderly always give departing company a gift. That way, if they die before the next visit, they leave on good terms."

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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sorry for the silence:sickness is a dharma challenge

I wanted to share from Mongolia with those who may be reading this blog the stories of the 73 year old Grandma who lived alone in her remote ger and of the remarkable, brave and extremely beautiful young woman named Narmandakh. Exhaustion, a bad internet connection and the problems from some mysterious ailment kept me from it.

Sadly I brought the exhaustion and mysterious symptoms with me, and for a while they did me in. Not being in control of your body is serious dharma practice. The frustrating and scary symptoms and the failure of anyone to diagnose what they add up to has definitely challenged my patience, dented my sense of impermanence (they are not going away), and taxed my belief that everything is pure and perfect as it is (sorry but I can't figure out how to make severe qualify.) I sat around obsessing about what was wrong with me and spent too much time looking up ridiculous things on the internet, desperate for an answer.

But last week, I caught myself bringing myself down, holding myself down in distress, wasting my time in pointess research. Slowly I began to realize that getting upset and depressed wasn't helping me feel better and get on, it was just making life worse. "Suppose this is all fatal and you die tomorrow?" I asked myself. "What you're gonna most regret is that you didn't do things you wanted. So what the hell? Go swimming. Enjoy yourself. Go to the movies with friends and laugh while you can." So I have been. I try to go about the day as if nothing is wrong, at least when I'm not going for tests. And if I do pop off tomorrow, at least I will have had some fun in the runup.

Auspiciously, the day I decided to do a U turn with my behavior, I received a very cheering email from Mongolia in which the six woman working at the cafe where I taught cooking hoped my back was better and announced that the cash register was really ringing daily now because of all the new food they were cooking. They were especially proud to report that the two youngest, who had been dishwashers and general aids when I got there, were now fulltime bakers. The demand was great for our soucream apple pie with the butter cookie crust, our cream cheese frosted carrot cake and oatmeal cookies, plus of course the cheesecake.

This was wondrous news all around. The cafe needed to make money to support all the return to Buddhism activities going on in Mongolia--or at least the free ones in its building. I'd been asked to come because the food was so unappealing the cafe wasn't raising enough money to pay its own bills. Now its receipts were double the old days and climbing.

The joy of the women and their kind messages to me was the most cheering. Frankly, it was unnerving to have to walk into a restaurant kitchen and tell the staff who'd been working 10 hours shifts there that what they cooked was disgusting, that in essence they were inadequate. After all that is the reason I had been summoned. But it turned out they were anxiously awaiting a teacher, someone who would show them how other countries cook. They couldn't get enough. And when something sold out, they were so gleeful, they jumped up and down, screamed and hugged each other. They couldnt believe they'd done it. In the end they were so grateful they pooled their very limited resources to take me out for dinner and give me a present.

That made the 14 hour work days, seven days a week, and the exhaustion worth it. Their email lifted my spirits out of their gloom, for it reminded me I had actually achieved something--something that seems to be of benefit--and achievement often carries a price. No Mongolia, no mysterious symptoms. No good deed goes unpunished.

Next the story of Grandma and Narmandakh and more....

Meanwhile let us all pray for the swift return of Kyabgon Traleg Rinpoche, so astonishingly clever at teaching Dharma to us Westerners and in flawless English. He died suddenly two weeks ago. The loss is enormous.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
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Summer in the city: Ulan Baator

Mongolia is not a hardship post, at least at this time of year. The huge state department store Nomin has five floors of everything from 81" flat screen TVs and stainless steel pizza pans to potted marginata plants and Clinique cosmetics. Plus of course cashmere: a quarter of the second level selling floor overflows with Mongolian cashmere and camel hair from 10 different local companies. Sweaters, hats, gloves, socks, leggings, dresses, coats, even woven cashmere blankets and camel hair throws. The quality is luscious, the styling fashionable and the prices reasonable to ridiculous.

You can go to a bustling pub and watch the European football tournament on one of those 81" flatscreen TVs while sipping a stein of Chinggis beer and gorging on a hamburger with fries. The meat is Mongolian grass fed. You can also go to a fancier restaurant for red wine and braised lamb shanks in cognac pumpkin sauce for $17. You can eat real cheesecake, Uzbek pilaf, French onion soup. The taxi system is a bit bizarre but it works. There are officially marked metered taxis roaming the streets or you can call for one, but mostly people just go to the curb and flag down passing cars. The rule of thumb is that small, old cars will taxi you for about $1.80, 2,000 tukrit, which helps the driver pay for gas. The other rule of thumb is not to flag down the humungous SUVS that dominate the streets, especially if you are a single woman. You will be taken for a ride and not paying in tukrit.

Last week I went to a dinner party at the apartment of an American working here. It was palatial to say the least. The duplex had two living rooms, a huge kitchen with all the latest appliances, a 15' square astroturf covered patio/deck and three extra large bedrooms. The master bath was as big as the front room of the STupa Cafe and had a whirlpool tub, huge glass enclosed marble stall shower, the Korean version of Toto toilets and double sinks with enough room left to exercise in if you chose to. It came with garage parking.

The city has a handful of museums including a costume collection and the lovely Zenabazar Art Museum, dedicated to a Mongolian lama who propogated a particular style. It has gorgeous applique thangkhas, a local specialty. It has an opera house and theater. Karaoke bars are such the rage, there's one on every other block in between all the clothing and handbag stores. The Mongolians are literate: the city has universities and bookstores. wi-fi is ubiquitous and just about everyone is talking on a cellphone as they scurry down the sidewalk or sit in their car honking at the stalled traffic.

Speaking of traffic, there are lights and delineated pedestrian crossings. Some lights even tell you in bright green how many seconds you have to get across the intersection. But that's no guarantee. Drivers here hate to stop for pedestrians; they hate to stop for traffic lights or anything actually. It's like they're horsemen galloping on the plain; they want to keep going. But there is a fine now for hitting a pedestrian. This is easy to do because most pedestrians wander into the streets like the cows of India, crossing where and when they please, even while traffic is flowing fast on a green light. I've watched them stand bewildered in the middle of the road while the light is green wondering why the whizzing traffic doesn't stop for them. I've even had several people encourage me to step off the curb with them while the light was green. It's bizarre but I've gotten used to it.

Two Saturdays ago I got the extraordinary experience of the Gobi Spa. The entry fee is 20,000 tukrit, which is about $17, and when you pay you are handed your own blue sweat suit and two keys. One is for a locker at the entry where you have to store your shoes. The other is for the women's locker room where you put all your clothes and that blue sweat suit. Then you get the choice of showers with all the shampoos, conditioners, soaps and body lotions supplied; the sauna for which you have to sit on a plastic bag to be sanitary, the cool and hot tub, or the tables where three gorgeous young Mongolian women in bikinis will give you a body scrub that will take your skin off. The fierceness of their scrubbing made me think this place was a Russian holdover.

Once you've sweated, showered and been scrubbed, you put on a pair of plastic panties and your blue sweat suit--the pants are bermuda shorts length. Now you have the choice of a relaxation room where you can recline on mats and watch TV or sleep or sip your soda from the bar; a private massage, a restaurant, a dark relaxation room with mats covering the entire floor or three special saunas. One is the salt room, one the agate room and one is made of another mineral with quite different properties. The floor of these rooms is lined with mats you can recline on, using or not as a pillow the wooden blocks scattered around.

We went on what happened to be Mother's Day and the place was packed. The locker room was a riot of mother's brushing the black hair of their small daughters or shepherding them into the sauna. A few little girls were having a screaming good time in the shallow cold pool but stopped to notice me, the only yellow haired female in the place.

Perhaps that's why the squat Mongolian man in the agate sauna room noticed me too. I wasn't reclining. I was sitting with my back against the hot wall, one of those wooden blocks under my knees, trying to release tight muscles in my lower back. I was in there with my new friend Amanda who was guiding me. The man, who was the only other person in there, started talking to her. Because Amanda is strikingly gorgeous with high cheek-bones, full lips and large almond eyes, I thought he was flirting. But then I saw them pointing to me. The man put his hand in the air, moving it down to indicate the disks of the spine. "He's saying you should go to the traditional hospital for massage that will cure your back," Amanda explained. "He's very professional; he can see your problem." The man pointed to his lower back and then at me. "I know where the place is. I think you should go."

And two days ago I did. I was the only person not bearing an xray and also the only nonMongolian paying the $12 for a 45 minute treatment. It was bone cracking chiropractic so I got out of there in a hurry. But back treatment is available along with cashmere, cheesecake, cabs and karaoke in Ulan Baator.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmthing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, ReligionThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved

Still in Mongolia

After a back-breaking week of cooking up all sorts of special dishes to test for the new cafe menu here in Ulan Baator, the staff closed up yesterday afternoon to take me to the"countryside", as Mongolians call everything beyond this capital city. It was a profundly heartfelt thank you for the cheesecake, pizza, eggplant parmesan, cilantro pesto and dhal bhat platters I'd taught them to prepare.

Four of us took off about 2:15 in the center's old royal blue Subaru Impreza, a tiny tinny car that gets lost on the roads jammed by Land Cruisers and Lexus SUVs. Uyin Baator, the cafe manager, had sacrificed his day off to be the driver. I had the honor of the passenger seat. In the back were Nandia, who takes orders and money seven days a week now that the university where she is studying to be an English translator is closed for summer holiday, and the head cook, Eveel, who looks Eastern European with her pale skin, long black pigtail and generous figure. Otgo, the dishwasher and potato peeler, had to bow out at the last minute because her brother had been taken to the hospital. A bag of food and four bottles of water were thrown in the far back.

We went with the heavy traffic down boulevards to the four-lane Peace Bridge over the snaking Tuul River that defines this city. It's one of only two bridges that connect the older, more developed part of UB with the relentlessly growing new city on the far bank. Everywhere you look are cranes parked beside crowds of enormous half built apartment towers. Mongolia currently is the world's fastest growing economy with a GDP rise of 25% per year thanks to all the copper and gold under the Gobi Desert, and although 1 million of its 2 million people already live in UB, it looks like the city is preparing to absorb the last nomads out there on the plains.

"Agh," Uyin Baator grumbled as we crossed the river again on a smaller bridge. "This used to be a really big and beautiful river. This is our Mongolian Tuul River. but no more. Look how thin it is. They are taking all the water."

After the slum district where the toxic coal fired plants are and where Mercedes and Volkswagon and Hyundai car dealerships line the last of the four-lane boulevard, we bounced along a pot-holed two lane, stopping for gas and then at a small shop for what turned out to be salami. Mongolians cannot picnic without meat and Eveel had packed food from the vegetarian cafe. So now all filled up, we motored past decaying Soviet buildings, an occasional ger and lots of huge billboards screaming the merits of candidates for the upcoming election. There were plenty of intervening billboards too touting Swedish mascara, Bridgestone Tires, the loving bank tellers who patchildren on the shoulder, and the joys of a flat screen Samsung TV. Korean companies are kings here.

We passed the airport and a glass space ship that they told me was a new sport palace and suddenly the car choked, sputtered, slowed, sputtered, slowed. The bewildered Uyin Baator pulled off the road, opened the hood and double checked all the dipsticks. He started the motor again. The car lurched, sputtered and crawled. "You got bad gas," I said. "either water or dirt in it."

"Maybe," he said, not really sure what to do.

I got out and tried to flag down a truck. It zoomed right by. So did three cars. Then a white sedan with four young guys pulled over. A guy got out of the back. He had on droopy swim shorts and unlaced sneakers. He worried over the car, put his food on the pedal to rev the motor and told Uyin Baator I was right. His sister had the same problem last week: bad gas.

We lurched and crawled our way into the small town on the horizon. The gas station attendant sympathized with our problem but had no solution. We filled the tank a bit more and soldiered on. All the stopping we had to do gave me a good chance to snap photos of Mongolians on their ponies herding horses, large herds of sheep, dry river beds waiting for summer rains, or white gers sprinkled below the treeless rolling green hills.

Eventually we reached our destination: Manjushri Mountain, a popular weekend getaway spot for UB residents. The entry fee for Mongolians is 75 cents but for foreigners $6. Uyin Baator pleaded with the elderly couple guarding the entry gate for me to be admitted as a Mongolian since this was a holy Buddhist mountain and I was such a good Buddhist. The fat Mongolian woman in the big straw hat and tight black capri pants considered this for a moment, looked at me and handed back the $6.

The Soviets destroyed what had been a major monastery on Manjushri Mountain just as they did the monastery on Chenrezig mountain. But there are remnants on this mountain and inside the one remaining wooden building a small shrine has been recreated. A Buddha statue is flanked by statues of Green and White Tara and the altar is decked in royal blue khatas. Mongolian khatas are all this rich blue hue "for the blue sky," Eveel explained. Then she put her forehead to the altar for blessings, opened her small purse and put money in front of the Buddha. She is very very devout, which is why she works in our cafe and not a restaurant where she could earn twice the money and be able to afford a place to live. Eveel is in her 40s now and is basically alone here in UB having left her family in the ger and chosen not to marry.

The rocks behind the building had four or five cave openings framed by wooden doors. This is obviously where the monks must have meditated in retreat. As I was looking up at these cavesI thought I saw a stream of maroon flowing down above them. It got closer and closer. It was monks in Tibetan garb. As it turned out, eight Tibetan monks from Dharmsala had gone to the mountain top to do prayers of blessing. With longhorn, prayer table and texts in hand, they hurried off to their bus in the crowded parking lot.

"There!" Eveel said triumphantly, pointing to a rock beneath us. "You ask me all the time for rhubarb. here." Finally! Mongolia gave rhubarb to the world: it grows wild here. You cannot buy it in stores; you have to go to the countryside to pick it. Under my feet it was everywhere, newly sprouting. Rugosa roses and blackberry brambles were also sprouting. Siberan iris and violets were in full purple bloom under strong summer sun in that big blue sky. Uyin Bataar motioned us to the shade of the glade of evergreen trees and here we, one group among many, had our little picnic before lurching back to Ulan Baator in the lingering summer light.

~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

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Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved

Going to a Ger

My new Mongolian/American friend who wants to be called Amanda, whose life story is worth its own blogpost if not a major movie, surprised me Saturday afternoon as I was finishing in the cafe kitchen. "I'm coming at 4, be ready with warm clothes and food. We're going to the countryside." That's what Mongolians call the rest of their enormous country beyond the bumper car, horn honking bounds of Ulan Baator. That's where they truly love being, just the way Mainers who live on the coast can't wait to get away to the woods where everyone of them keeps a little cabin. Even the most sophisticated urbanite, like Nanda's step-brother, a kidney transplant surgeon trained in Chicago, keeps a ger and horse in the countryside. "It's the real Mongolia," everyone says.

So off we went in her brother's Japanese SUV with the driver riding English style on the right side while the car went American style on the right side of the road. His stylishly dressed wife sat in the passenger seat, telling him whether he could pass or not, which I reckoned was tricky from his perspective. "A typical married couple," Nanda said at one point. "He drives and she directs and of course they're arguing all the time." It seemed quite light hearted and good natured to me, especially since these people had just returned the night before from an 8 hour journey to see her aging parents in the far countryside after her father was awarded a medal of honor for his fine building work. Then they'd immediately consented to Nanda's plea to take us out of UB, as the locals call it.

It wasn't easy getting out of town late on a Saturday afternoon since there are only two bridges over the Tuul River that bisects UB. We sat in a traffic jam Nanda found reminscent of her time on the Santa Monica Freeway, the 405, when she lived in LA. But I didn't mind this one: the cars were spiffy, the sidewalks were clean and I was getting a change of scenery. The national bird of UB seems to be the crane as humungous ones tower everywhere, building sleek office skyscrapers and apartment buildings. I finally saw gas stations too. Petrol is sold by the liter and is so wildly expensive that Nanda took $ 70 from me to pay for her brother's gas.

We began to move on the other side of the river, plowing along a four lane highway that suddenly became a two land dirt road, then a two lane paved highway, again a dirt road with huge gouges and potholes we had to keep sideswiping. But we were in big sky country, a tree-less steppe where grass was just beginning to emerge and the bare background hills folded into each other as they rolled from dark to white in the play of light. It was perfect scenery for old Westerns except the land was dotted here or there by an occasional white ger whose uniform roundness and pointed peak looked like a dollop of frozen yogurt or white Hershey's kiss. The ger, which we call yurt, is the typical Mongolian house. These people historically have been nomads and the white horsehair ger can be set up or taken down in about an hour. Permanent ones now sit on brick or cement foundations and have painted wooden doors as well as metal stovepipes rising through the peak of the round roof. The door always opens to the south for the solar benefits, but also because the wind blows east west. You can set your compass by a ger door.

Predictably around a ger will be large or small herds of cows, sheep and goats or horses. Once we passed a pack of camels accompanied by an eagle.

An hour out, a monumental stainless steel status of Chinggis aka Ghengis Khan wielding a golden whip atop his horse rose out of nowhere on the barren plain. We drove through an archway to a crowded parking lot. We climbed a lot of steps and went inside a ger shaped glass building where we had to pay the equivalent of $4 each to go further. "The guy who thought this up is very rich now," Nanda said as she handed me my change. We crossed an atrium that had a three story high boot to put LL Bean to shame. "It took 60 cows to make enough leather for Chingiss Khan's boot," Nanda's brother said as we gawked.

We took a small elevator to 3, the top floor. From there we wound around a narrow cement staircase that finally opened to a small flight of wider steps that took us a platform where, turning around, I realized we'd been inside the butt of the horse and were now outside atop its head eye to eye with the great waist belt of Chinggiss Khan with his golden whip. Amanda said this was actually the spot where Chinggiss is supposed to have found the golden whip that signaled his success as Emperor of the World.

Getting off the elevator at 2 we found a museum of Mongolian artifacts including primitive armor, bronze teapots, bronze bridles and iron stirrups, and eventually chainmail. Another room featured a huge map of Chinggis' empire, stretching from the coast of China to Turkey and Syria, and the way he divided it up among his sons: the Yuan Empire that was essentially China, the Golden Horde that was essentially all the central Asian "stans", .. . There was one English speaking docent there and she was anxious to give her spiel about the various dynastys outlined on the map because I was the only foreigner who'd passed through that day. "Which was Kublai Khan?" I asked and she pointed to China, proudly noting that its Great Wall had been built specifically to keep the fearsome Mongolians out.

About 45 minutes after we left Chinggis Khan on the plain, long flat topped sand hills began to appear in front of the rolling ones. "Coal mining," Amanda said. And I remembered everyone telling me how eerie UB is in the 40 below winter with the thick smog of coal heat filling the air so that you cannot see a foot in front of you. The road bent 90 degrees and a town appeared. "The Russians built it for the coal mines but it's a nice little town now." With severa banks, a supermarket, several mini marts, the standard karoake bars, one cafe and two restaurants lined up along the main road, it looked like a typical small town serving several thousand people. It took two minutes to drive through.

We were only two more minutes into the countryside when the SUV suddenly veered off road onto the plain. It was almost 9 PM and light was fading. But we soon twisted onto a dirt track going seemingly nowhere, crossed onto yet another and finally came to a stop in front of a fenced in shack and ger. "The woman who lives here alone," Amanda said as she threw open her door, "is 73 and she's just beautiful in every way. You're gonna love her. That's why I brought you."

More tomorrow about dinner and the ger and that beautiful old woman.

goinandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, ReligionThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved

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!"
http://www.sandygarson.com
http://yoursinthedharma.blogspot.com/

Technorati Tags: Yours In The Dharma, Sandy Garson, Dharma, Buddhist, Buddhism, Spirituality, ReligionThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
Click here to request Sandy Garson for reprint permission.
Yours In The Dharma 2001-2010, Sandy Garson Copyright 2001-2010 Sandy GarsonAll rights Reserved