TracyFood

Another Nepal flashback: October 20 was one delicious day. 20 February 2008 8:28 am

Posted by Tracy in : potatoes, nepal, travel, pictures, eating , trackback

So yesterday I posted a bunch of Nepal pictures to my Flickr pages, and realized that I am now posting trip pictures more or less exactly four months after they were taken. That revelation, and the fact that a number of yesterday’s posted pictures were of particularly delicious meals, are all the reason I need to write another happy Nepal flashback, this time to October 20, 2007. If you’re feeling too lazy to follow that link, it’s okay — it was sort of a boring automagical post anyway. All I wrote was:

Another trekking day, but depending on whether we took a rest day on the 18th it might be day 5 or 6; I hereby officially quit trying to keep track ahead of time. Any which way, with a name like Bumsing Danda involved, it had better be good!

Little did I know what deliciousness lay in store!

So. We started the day in Nunthala, also called Mani Dingma, having spent the night at the Moon Light Lodge:

I noted in my journal, “Breakfast was porridge, toast, and over-hard eggs, nothing fancy,” but I didn’t make those notes until lunchtime, having barely had the presence of mind to take a picture of some fun decorations in one of the lodge’s dining rooms:

Yay kitties! But I was in for even better cat action at our lunch break in Juving:

Kitten and potatoes? Everybody sing: these are a few of my favorite thiiiiings!

This was at The Green Bamboo Lodge & Restaurant in Juving, whose beautifully overgrown garden and sign I photographed for future reference:

and it’s a good thing I did, because it was a very memorable lunch indeed:

Poori bread, steamed squash, nak cheese, and mustard greens saag! More of my favorite things! Yay! And of course those were just the first course, because I made sure to leave room for dal bhaat. Double yay!

Thus refreshed and refueled, we hit the trail and made a slight detour to a monastery that was still under construction:

The artwork-in-progress would have been fantastic under any circumstances, but I particularly liked contrasting the different stages of completeness to my memories of Taksindu Monastery the day before. Unfortunately, the weather turned while we were inside, and the rest of the day’s trek was sort of a race against time and weather, which left us tired and very happy to be sleeping at another lodge in Kharikola that night. I even got to take a hot shower of sorts: the “hot” was mostly supplied by a kettle of water provided by our kitchen crew since it took a while for the lodge’s system to warm up. (As far as I could tell, it was a pipe running very close to, if not through, the lodge kitchen’s central stove. No kidding. My quest for hot water gave me a chance to peek into the kitchen and be very impressed by our crew’s industriousness, including Nettre’s beautiful work mincing garlic with a terrifyingly huge cleaver, but it didn’t seem right to take pictures, in part because I didn’t even know whose permission to ask! Anyway.

For dinner that night, we’d asked the kitchen crew to make us an all Nepali-food meal, which they did with enormous style and flair. There was mushroom soup and popcorn (all our trekking dinners had a soup and snack starter course), followed by the main event:

We’re talking dal bhaat with all the trimmings here, including a sesame-cucumber salad, potato-noodle-vegetable tarkari (curry), and a fantastic tomato sauce (with different seasonings it could have been a salsa fresca, but that’s as close as I can come to describing it beyond “tomatoes and fresh coriander and tastes like awesome”). It was so good, readers. So good. And then there was dessert!

Those are apples, cored and sliced into rings, then battered and deep-fried into golden brown perfection. They are crispy on the outside, just this side of applesauce on the inside, and I never learned their Nepali name. In the Netherlands they’re called appelflappen, and also “heel erg lekker” (very seriously tasty), and they’re a traditional New Year’s Eve treat. I feel like I should have something profound to say about the power of food to transport me through space and time, even during a trip at literally the ends of the earth, but instead I will finish this post with another picture: