Saturday, February 10, 2007

Have a Bowl of Cookie Dough

So I'm visiting a family yesterday. Mongolian hospitality never asks if you're hungry. They just start rousing around the kitchen to scare up something, usually of a dairy derivation, to offer you to eat. A cup of tea is handed to me and a huge bowl of what looked like yellow sugar cookie dough with raisins in it was placed in my hands. There was a big table spoon stuck in it.

Then came the directions to do in my predicament: "Eat oil", is what the man of the house repeatedly said. Just like cookie dough, this substance's main ingredient is some kind of grease.

The daughter in law of the house was sitting in the living room (well it's a one room cabin really) with a bowl on her lap, creating an other holiday food for the upcoming white moon new year.

Well fortunately Mongolians are not as big on cleaning your plate as Americans. So I didn't have to polish off the heaping cereal-sized bowl of this pasty yellow substance before I left.

But as I think about it now, you've got to love a culture that not only allows eating uncooked dough, they encourage it. It has become one of Mongolian's National festive foods. Perhaps not surpriszingly with it being referred to as "fat" or "oil" is really pretty good.

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