MONGOLIAN MYSTERY
Friday evenings tend to be the most wonderful part of a week. The whole weekend stretches tantalizingly ahead of you and you have time to lick your lips in anticipation. In this case, quite literally. This weekend was one of gastronomic delights.
All I know about Mongols is the fact that Gengis Khan was one of them and that some babies are born with a congenital condition called “mongolism”. Not very good analogies I agree.
Since we were feeling particularly adventurous, we walked into the Mongolian Grill in San Bernardino. It was a very pleasant place with comfortable seats, and with a huge tava- like contraption holding the place of honor.
There was a huge buffet table set up in the middle with all the ingredients for a meal. Now this is how you do it. You take a small bowl from the corner of the buffet and walk down the buffet choosing between meat, veggies or fish. The last counter has noodles that you place on top of everything else you’ve chosen. Then you pour on a vast variety of sauces depending on how spicy you want your food to be. You then take the bowl to the two chefs manning the “tava”. The tava rather looks like the ones our chatwallahs use back home, just that this tava is huge. The cooks then walk all round it pushing the food with their spatulas. This is done because (as one of my co-diners informed me with a sufficiently supercilious air) different parts of the tava are heated to different degrees. Once the food is cooked, the chefs put it on to a dinner plate and present it to you with a flourish.
Did you think this was simple? Let me hasten to put that notion to rest. There is a technique to it all, as one school kid demonstrated to his girlfriend. To ensure that you stuff the maximum amount of food into your bowl, you pick up another bowl and use the bottom of the first to stuff food into the first. He nonchalantly told his girlfriend that he was just doing this to show her how to do this right, not that he wanted to eat quite that much. To which the PYT replied, “Oh, I have been to dinner at your house, and you all eat like pigs.”
In case you are wondering how the food tasted, it tasted just great, though my first bowl had an overpowering taste of garlic, and I had no one to blame for it but myself. But by my second bowl, I had it down pat, and so now I have some good food to associate with this mysterious place called Mongolia.
All I know about Mongols is the fact that Gengis Khan was one of them and that some babies are born with a congenital condition called “mongolism”. Not very good analogies I agree.
Since we were feeling particularly adventurous, we walked into the Mongolian Grill in San Bernardino. It was a very pleasant place with comfortable seats, and with a huge tava- like contraption holding the place of honor.
There was a huge buffet table set up in the middle with all the ingredients for a meal. Now this is how you do it. You take a small bowl from the corner of the buffet and walk down the buffet choosing between meat, veggies or fish. The last counter has noodles that you place on top of everything else you’ve chosen. Then you pour on a vast variety of sauces depending on how spicy you want your food to be. You then take the bowl to the two chefs manning the “tava”. The tava rather looks like the ones our chatwallahs use back home, just that this tava is huge. The cooks then walk all round it pushing the food with their spatulas. This is done because (as one of my co-diners informed me with a sufficiently supercilious air) different parts of the tava are heated to different degrees. Once the food is cooked, the chefs put it on to a dinner plate and present it to you with a flourish.
Did you think this was simple? Let me hasten to put that notion to rest. There is a technique to it all, as one school kid demonstrated to his girlfriend. To ensure that you stuff the maximum amount of food into your bowl, you pick up another bowl and use the bottom of the first to stuff food into the first. He nonchalantly told his girlfriend that he was just doing this to show her how to do this right, not that he wanted to eat quite that much. To which the PYT replied, “Oh, I have been to dinner at your house, and you all eat like pigs.”
In case you are wondering how the food tasted, it tasted just great, though my first bowl had an overpowering taste of garlic, and I had no one to blame for it but myself. But by my second bowl, I had it down pat, and so now I have some good food to associate with this mysterious place called Mongolia.
posted by newatthis at 4:21 PM
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