TracyFood

Monkey Monday: now with actual monkeys! 19 November 2007 7:34 am

Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen, Kathmandu, monkeys, nepal, pictures, seasonality, travel, vegetarian , trackback

See? On the roof of the Patan Museum, even:

Nepalis were always pretty entertained by how excited we Western tourists got whenever we saw monkeys, except when they were busy warning us not to get too close. Apparently monkeys have been known to snatch purses, but that’s nothing compared to the trouble caused by monkey bites, or so I’m told. (New Delhi’s monkey trouble even made the New York Times last week!) We were all pretty happy to have avoided first-hand experience of all that. Anyway, that picture, like just about every other one I put on TracyFood, links to my Flickr, where the Nepal trip photo album just keeps on growing (Note how I write that all passive voice, like it’s not because I’m obsessing over it for at least an hour every day, but of course that’s exactly what I really mean). So. Before I spend the rest of this Monkey Monday discussing the monkey situation in Nepal, a few other random things I liked reading this past week (besides that monkey article, I mean):

Firmly in the awesome category: The Secret? It’s Not the Potatoes, a New York Times piece about mashed potatoes. Less awesome was the same Dining section’s article about vegetarianism at Thanksgiving, Side Dish or Main, Depending on Who’s Eating, starting of course with the title and continuing through some very silly assumptions, like

all Thanksgiving side dishes are vegetarian (I’m not even vegetarian, but do not get me started on stuffing cooked inside the dead bird) —this one is fortunately refuted in the article
the most important feature of a vegetarian dish is not its meatlessness or even (gods forbid) its deliciousness, but whether it contains enough protein, because after all meat and protein are all but synonymous and if you want to go meatless you’d better go all crazy with the complementarity or else die of malnutrition. GAH!

And then, to make matters worse, they suggest a few Thanksgiving-appropriate vegetarian recipes, and the one that sounds most delicious to me (Curried Lentils With Sweet Potatoes and Swiss Chard, a TracyFood-worthy concoction if ever I’ve read one)? Involves lentils, only it doesn’t say what kind! Clearly, I must demonstrate the existence of lots of different kinds of lentils in the world, and sharing the results of my first ever attempt to cook Nepali-style dal bhaat should do the trick, oh yes. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, the adventures in dal bhaat have me more convinced than ever that one of these days I should suck it up and get a pressure cooker. Also I have been pondering America’s Test Kitchen’s slow cooker review, because apparently I think I have kitchen counter space to spare. Bad Tracy! (Actually, I think Alton Brown’s tapioca pudding recipe might be driving my slow cooker lust just a tad.)

Um, what else? Well, I’m actually a little overwhelmed just thinking about stuff I’ve read this week and stuff I’m still trying to read, like last month’s Grist magazine interview with Michael Pollan, for instance. Also, and this is of course no surprise to anyone, least of all me, my Google Reader is still solidly out of control, and although I almost catch up on my favorites now and then, mostly I’m making the problem worse by discovering and subscribing to more fun food blogs, like Fanatic Cook. Bad Tracy! Except for how, y’know, reading is awesome.

But you know what else is awesome? Monkeys. We saw them all over Pashupatinath, the holy site I raved about in my first live post from Kathmandu:

and of course all of those pictures link back to Flickr, where I stealthily posted a bunch of Kathmandu pictures without any fanfare or even changing their upload dates, so I figured I’d plug them again here for anyone who missed them the first time around. Pashupatinath is on the Bagmati River, across from the Mrigasthali Forest, which in turn is between Kathmandu and its airport, which is on the outskirts of town. (Just north of the airport and northeast of Pashupatinath is the Bouddhanath Stupa, but I haven’t yet linked those pictures to a map on Flickr… it is very cool to spot places I’ve been FROM SPACE!) I never did get a picture of Pashupatinath’s three-handed monkey, who is really worth an essay in and of itself. Nor do I know if I have any good pictures of monkey mamas carrying their little babies, but I’ll be sure to post those here if it turns out I hit the jackpot (there’s not many things cuter, except of course my cats).

And that’s all my monkey news for now. If you made it all the way through, thanks for reading all this rambling!