Nepali food.

Dal-bhaat literally means lentil-rice and is from what I gather the most common food that Nepali families eat. The meal is eaten for lunch and dinner at the approximate  hours of 10am and 8pm. To me, having lunch at 10am is the most bizarre thing, but I only eat it during my days off at the hospital because I usually leave around 8am every morning. So on most days I get to drink tea and have biscuits before leaving the house. They also give me a couple of cucumber slices (which are huuuuge, almost like a pineapple slice i size!) And recently I have also had porridge with either oatmeal or rice. The rice porridge my host mum made the other day had cardamom and coconut in it which was a nice variation of the norwegian "risengrynsgrøt".

Everything is so sweeeeeeet! I thought I had an unhealthy relationship with sucrose, but seriously, I cannot even expect my tea to be unsweetened before it gets poured into my cup around here. Even when I tell my host mum to NOT add sugar she will always add a little bit, probably hoping that I won't notice.!? At this point I have given up on making more remarks, it is not like she will stop the sneakiness- the same way she tries to add more food on my plate even before I have finished half of it and it is already too much. She is a sneaky but sweet woman. Pun intended.
And if something is supposed to be savoury it is usually coated with batter and fried in oil. The snacks people eat is usually crisps, crackers and biscuits, though I have also seen street vendors selling huge chunks of fresh cucumbers smeared with pickles... No wonder protein deficiency is a reality here.

Then you have the official (?) nepali dish which is quite popular among travellers, called mo:mo! Mo:mos are dumplings that are steamed, fried or in some type of soup. I have only tried the vegetable filling but they also make them with buffalo meat, pork, chicken and potatoes (?) Quite spicy, but I can now proudly say that my spice tolerance has gone sky high, so mo:mos and the super delicious tomato-garlic-ginger-peanut-chilli paste is simply a delight to have for lunch!

Due to the bird flu I have not had any chicken and I am trying to avoid eggs. Since meat is a bit expensive they hardly ever cook it at home except for the occasional mutton, so I have turned vegetarian without even noticing. Even when eating out I automatically choose the veg option. Actually at the moment I am craving home made whole wheat bread full of grains and fibre with Norvegia cheese way more than roast chicken.... Haven't felt horribly sick so far either, so I guess that dulcolax vaccine was a good investment.

Another observation I have made is that Nepal is not huge on salads. Only these new cool and hip places do salads, so it is not a very traditional thing I guess. They have all these fresh vegetables and fruits available but they prefer cooking them until they are soft, spice them up and make curries out of them instead... which is also nice by all means, but I miss having a side of fresh uncooked, or lightly steamed vegetables. Maybe the veg cooking is an attempt to kill germs? That would be a random guess though, for I am still puzzled by the abundance of squishy greens. Raw food enthusiasts should definitely travel elsewhere for a culinary experience to their liking ;)