Dinner Time

12 July 2017

Tingmo: traditional Tibetan steamed bread

The meals while I have been at the school are fairly predictable – possibly due to the weekly menu

pasted up in the kitchen!  2 students each day are allocated to “kitchen duty” with the weekend roster and timing going a bit haywire.  While not totally obliged to follow the weekly menu, students are limited by the available ingredients and their own abilities. 

Breakfast for standard weekdays includes tingmo, the steamed Tibetan bread which includes yeast and baking powder; these can range from light and fluffy, almost like Nana’s scones, to “stone tingmo” when, for whatever reason, they do not rise.  

A nice surprise for Sunday breakfast

Sunday breakfast

Twice a week the tingmo are accompanied by eggs:  hard boiled with a ration of 2 per person (and Indian eggs are often rather tiny) or scrambled, which might be flavoured with fried onion and tomato, or might not.  One day Thupten was on cooking duty and made exceptionally good scrambled eggs, with onion and tomato, and the eggs cooked to perfection.

Lunch is served

Rice porridge is on the menu once a week, and early on I ate this with a degree of enjoyment (I think the addition of honey helped) but subsequently it was much more runny and far too reminiscent of the much hated rice pudding of my childhood.

When I first arrived, there was jam to accompany the tingmo, but when this ran out it was not replaced.  I found some particularly good marmalade in a general store in Fatiphur;  this did not have the “set with gelatine” texture that Indian jam I had purchased in Bhutan tended to have.  I also regularly purchase small packets of butter.

Occasionally, after a special celebration, there may be peanut butter purchased for general
consumption, but many of the students also purchase their own.

Deki with her drying cheese

Deki preparing cheese

On weekends, one or other of the students often cooks Indian style flatbread for breakfast.  This might be served with a chilli accompaniment, or not.  It is perfectly acceptable with butter and marmalade or peanut butter.

Zokkar cutting thenthuk

The students, when chilli or peanut butter is not available, seem happy to dunk their tingmo or bread into their milk-tea. 

Tseten approaches his tingmo by crumbling them into a dish, adding dried cheese, maybe some butter, then mushing it with his hand.  He is more than happy to offer some to me.  I tend to decline. 

One day Deki puts in a massive effort making this dried cheese – to make enough to see them through the monsoon season.  She starts by boiling milk and yogurt over an open fire outside; she says it needs to cook like that for maybe 3 hours.  When I come back from my shopping excursion to McLeod Ganj, she has it spread out in a classroom to dry.  This is a very traditional process.

One Sunday I am pleasantly surprised by tingmo and a vegetable dish for breakfast (or brunch, it is served after 10am!)

Tea for most is drunk out of a mug, but some drink it from a bowl.  Drinking is normally achieved with much slurping, just as eating is normally achieved with a maximum of noisy, open-mouthed chewing. 

Tsultrim & Yangtso pulling
apart the thenthuk for thukpa

Towards the end of my stay, Zokkar surprised the small group one weekend with pancakes for breakfast.  These were also served with chilli.

Then there was a day when the student numbers were well reduced when omlettes were made for breakfast.  Just the one day!

Occassionally black tea is made, but since they add salt to it, I have ceased to participate in the consumption of that!

I have decided that while in India I would stick to a vegetarian diet.  The students eat way more meat than I would have expected of Buddhists, but many of them are of nomadic families or from areas where cultivation of crops is just not feasible, so meat, milk and cheese form a large part of their diet, with the addition of tsampa, the roasted barley flour.

There is one student who is vegetarian, and another who sometimes is, so “veg” is always cooked as well as “non-veg”.  Lunch and dinner will be rice and a pot of each of “veg” and “non-veg” or thenthuk – the traditional Tibetan noodles (which are, of course, hand made for each meal) made into thukpa, a soup, again with either “veg” or “non-veg”.

All hands on deck
to help prepare vegetable for a special dinner

Washing the bok choi in the "stream"

Sometimes, maybe about once a week, there is fried rice with veg, often beans and carrots – which is rather good.

Tsultirm & Zokkar prepare momo wrappers

The standard vegetable order seems to be potato, cauliflower, onion, garlic, chilli, white radish (which the students call white carrot), carrot, cucumber and tomato.  Occassionally we get green beans.  Only on special occasions do we get peas or bok choi.  Mushroom comes occasionally for the vegetarians, believed to be a good meat substitute.  I haven’t the heart to tell them how much mushroom would need to be consumed to get the equivalent of 100g of meat!!

A couple of times a week a “salad” of onion, tomato and cucumber is prepared with a generous sprinkle of vinegar.  Discarding my food hygiene rules, I tuck into this as a welcome change.

wrapping the momo

Twice a week we get bananas or papaya, or occasionally watermelon, to accompany lunch.  These are also very welcome.

Once a week dhal is cooked, and that is also a welcome change (and addition of protein to the diet)

Momo ready for steaming

There is officially a “momo night” once a month, and a half day holiday to allow for the extra work this entails.  For my first one of these, for some reason (cost, availability of ingredients… who knows?) it was not momo but a special meal was prepared with bok choi and a lot of mushroom among the other ingredients.  For these times it’s a matter of “all hands on deck”.

Early in my stay, one evening there was only one other student at school, Thupten.  He cooked for me that evening and brought it to me, already served up on a plate – a huge quantity of rice and fried potatoes.  Carbs and oil, I guess it’s 2 food groups. 

momo party

Lungrig & Kunzang preparing momo

I enjoy when I cook my own dinner – the weekends when there are few students around or they are cooking only for themselves or just snack type food.  It’s an opportunity to eat the vegetables they do not cook: peas, eggplant (brinjal) and okra as well as incorporating paneer into the meal – assuming I can find some.  And flavouring it with curry leaf, which grows in great abundance but is not used by the students.

Rice and fried potato - kindly prepared for me by Thupten

Sometimes the “snack” food involves just cooking bread – but in a different style – as a loaf cooked in a pot on the gas top.  Sometimes it turns our really well – Lungrig manages it beautifully; sometimes it is pretty charcoaled on the outside.

My cooking efforts

The “picnic” and the “graduation party” food was something else altogether, putting extra into the special food aspect, and I have talked about these in other blog posts.

More of my cooking efforts

And towards the end, Lungrig and Wangchuk, the only students left at school, come in and tell me they cannot cook dinner, there is no cooking oil.  They will go to Norbulinka for dinner, can they bring me something back, it might be a bit late – 10pm-ish.  Thanks but no, I will cook without oil (I spotted green beans and tomatoes in the kitchen earlier).  Their surprise was great.  How could I cook without oil, it would not be easy.  I tell them I have ways!  And then I checked the oil container; it easily delivered a couple of tablespoons of oil into the wok. 

The following morning, Lungrig comes into the teachers’ office around 8:30am with breakfast.  He slipped on the outdoor steps the night before and has scraped his arm and hand and therefore could not cook breakfast, so this has been brought from Norbulinkha. 2 pieces of flatbread made from wholemeal flour – luxury!!  And when I investigate further, there is an omelette in between.  I excavated my peanut butter from the fridge in the main office (a relatively ant-free place) and find that the quantity of breakfast is way more than my capacity for consumption – flatbread and peanut butter are put aside for morning tea!

I try to keep a supply of fruit - papaya and banana are the standard.  Earlier, when the mango looked irresistible, I would buy mango and was most annoyed one day when a monkey slipped into the office while my back was momentarily turned and stole the large mango I had just taken out of the fridge to come to room temperature before eating.  The thief also got into my bag of snack food - a sort of bhaja mix that I rather like.  I am now more careful about where food is stored and about closing the door and windows when I leave the office!  And to think, the first time I saw monkeys here I was excited.