Delicious Delights

The food here in Nepal quite delicious! I will admit, it is not the most varied food in the world. Most of the Nepali restaurants all have about the same menus. In Thamel, the touristy area, there is a variety of different sorts of restaurants which are sooooo good! We like to treat ourselves to these every now and then. The flavors are a welcome treat to dal bhat (will describe in a second) everyday. One reason I believe that Nepali food has little variety: I don't think Nepalis have in the past, or even now as much, cared whether they are serving gourmet food. Food is fuel, and that is that. Food is something that you want to eat as much of as you can so that you will have the energy to work all day in the fields planting and picking rice. So gourmet, high quality, top notch dishes are not a priority. That's not to say that the food isn't good, but it's just pretty uniform across the board. Also the food in the restaurants can be a little interesting as well. Sometimes the apppropriate spices seem to be missing, so an Italian pizza may end up tasting more like a Mexican quesadilla. Here is a rundown of the Nepali food:

dal bhatt: this is the national food. Dal is the soupy lentil soup, and bhatt is cooked rice. Nepalis literally eat this at just about every meal. Kuber makes us dal bhatt EVERY day, no joke. You are supposed to pour the dal on to the bhatt and eat it together. Nepalis eat with their hands, and mush the dal and bhatt together and then eat with their hands. They can fit a surprisingly enormous amount of dal bhatt into their stomachs. The dal is a bit bland, but it's good. Dal bhatt usually comes with a bit of curried vegetable and some aachar, a bit or pickled fruit or vegetable.

curd: this is yogurt, a little thinner and less sweet than we are used to. This is one of my favorite things. Sometimes you get it in a bowl, or sometimes in a cup to drink.

milk tea: this is the intensely sweet tea that pretty much flows through the veins of all Nepalis. It is so delicious, although so incredibly rich and sweet that it is hard to drink a lot of it. It's more like a dessert to me.

STREET FOOD:
There seems to be a greater variety of street food. I really like that street food here. It is sold by vendors who may have a tiny stand, stall, or just a little platform they carry around (like peanut sellers at baseball games) with some kind of food on it. Here are the best things I have tried:
A note about street food: It is a bit of a gamble how your stomach will handle this food. Our host dad Anuj tells us "DO NOT EAT THE STREET FOOD!!" But I do anyway becasue I love it. Yes, you may have a bit of a rumbley stomach the next day, but in my opinion it is just as much of a gamble to eat at any of the restaurants. There is no health code, inspectors, or rules regarding cleanliness at all. So you could just as easily get sick out of a nice Thamel restaurant as off a street cart. Especially in a country where washing your hands after going to the bathroom is not observed at all.

Burned corn: I am not sure what the Nepalis call this but I call it burned corn. It is sooo good. It's sold usually by woman crouched on the side of the road next to a small pile of burning coals. Over the coals the roast ears of corn and fan the coals and corn with a bit of card board. The corn is roasted until it has a nice smokey flavor and the kernels get sort of hard. The women hand you an ear of corn in it's husk and maybe will rub some salt on it. It is sooo good. I love this, and it runs about 10 rupees. (15 or so cents.)

Puff balls: I don't know what the Nepali word for these are either. But men sell these on tiny stands dotted all over the road. The are hollow puff balls, then they punch a hole in the puff ball and fill it with a mix of chopped vegetables and puffed rice. Then they dip the whole thing in a small vat of lemmony chili water. It's quite interesting. You eat the stuffed puff balls on tiny tin plates next to their stand, and hand them back when you are done to be reused by the next customer.

Fruit: There are all sorts of fruits you can buy on the side of the road. I generally stay away from the fruit already cut into slices because they aer usually covered with flies, but you can buy chunks of pineapple, coconut, papaya, mango, banana, and apple.

Vegetables: One of the main vegetables sold ready to eat (you can buy any vegetable at the veg markets) are slices of cucumber. The women have a tiny plate with cucumber slices, and when you buy one the slather it with green chili sauce. It is rather interesting with the green chili sauce, but refreshing none the less.

Fried things: Nepalis love fried street food. Along the side of the road are vats of boiling oil in front of food stalls. They fry all sorts of things: samosas, pancake type things, sweet dough, doughnuts filled with cream, and lots of things I have no idea what they are.

Juices: You can get an assortment of juices from carts that men push through the street. The juice of choice for most Nepalis is sugar cane. The men will grind a shoot of sugar cane through their grinder and out comes sugar cane juice! Also from these stands you can get pineapple juice.

Juice bars: These are tiny stalls along the road side. You can get all sorts of fresh juice including apple, banana, carrot, sweet lime, lemon, coconut, papaya, mango, and pomegranate. My favorite to get here is banana lassi. It is a fresh banana ground up in a blender with some curd (yogurt) and a bit of sugar. The banana lassi is equivalent to a banana smoothie. Delicious!!

Chapatis: These are delicious, I had the best ones in Pokhara though. Usually the chapati vendor carts come out later at night. The woman makes a chapati on her tiny stove, which is simlar to a pancake. Then she will put a mixture of vegetables and eggs (scrambled) on the chapati. In pokhara the Chapati was cooked in some butter and the vendor gave me a small plastic bag of a thick chili sauce to dip it in. Yum!!!! YUM!!!