Tibetan culinary experience

Tibetan culinary experience

[Someone must volunteer to write a script to change my blog template. I'm getting confused - do I need to type a title in my post, yah dah yah dah yah dah...]

The Tibetan culinary experience is on of a kind. As it is, given its harsh and uninhabitable conditions, Tibet hardly manages to produce enough food for humans. Grass, there are sufficient. At least if there weren't enough grass at a single location, the nomads would have known to move to greener pastures to fatten their livestock for winter.

Anyhow, I digress. Recent developments in Tibet have been amazing, to say the least. The Han people visited the Tibetans and taught them how to construct greenhouses and how to irrigate fields and so on. These days, it's possible to have morning glory, peaches, water melons and other lowland vegetables in Tibet. Amazing!

But there is something that the advent in technology did not address. Cooking techniques for the new types of vegetables. In the end, we had endless meals of badly cooked food. In fact, let me give you a glimpse into how to cook fresh food badly.

Take fresh zucchini (or winter melon), remove the skin and seeds. Cut into thick strips and fry it (possibly on its own) with oil. Add a couple of slices of dried chili for colour. Add some brown colour sze chuan seasoning (whatever that is!) for a caramelised appearance, add corn starch and [since everyone already knows how bad this tastes,] serve hot. Use [as many tour groups eat consecutive lunches and dinners at the same restaurant, add variety by serving on] round plates today. [Remember the rotation, Round before Rectangular, then Oval before Square. Then repeat.] 3 meals later, you'll swear off this dish.

Another case in point on how lovely food can be turned into something that makes you think you are being served poison. Try this: Non-tibetan tour groups to Tibet normally face food issues. So serving eggs is usually the most foolproof way of ensuring that the tour group members get something to eat. So, this is how we cook the eggs. With tomatoes. Let's count the ingenious ways of naming this dish.

Yesterday's lunch - Tomatoes fried with eggs
Yesterday's dinner - Eggs fried with tomatoes
Today's lunch - Fried tomatoes with eggs
Today's dinner - Fried eggs with tomatoes
Tomorrow's lunch - Tomatoes and eggs fried Chinese style
Tomorrow's dinner - Eggs and tomatoes fried Chinese style...

Honestly, I give up after a while. We simply told them we couldn't eat no more of that and asked for sunny side ups. And then we had sunny side ups meal after meal after meal...

Someone SAVE me!