Aambrosia

Breakfast is...Part 2

Shortly after my arrival in India, I wrote a short post about the chai and chapati breakfast. (For a quick breakfast read, check out Serious Eats' recent "Four Ways to Interpret Breakfast," which looks at a sumo wrestler's breakfast and what they eat to start the day in rural Cambodia.) Being that it's the least important meal to Indians, I haven't given it much attention here and it deserves a bit more.

Like Indians, the Tibetans in Dharamsala prefer a very simple meal to start the day: bread and tea. The bread, while basic as can be, is not at all boring, even served plain. Called pagleb, it's made with either whole wheat or millet flour. The dough (flour, water, baking powder) is made fresh every morning and one piece of pagleb cooks in less than a minute on a flat skillet over a high flame. It's very similar to the Indians' chapati only made with darker flour, rolled out thicker, a puffs up a bit when it's baking on the stove.

Choephel Family Guesthouse

Tashi Choephel runs a travelers lodge in Mcleod Gunj, India, a good place to be a hotelier. Many people who visit this small village 3 kilometers north of Dharamsala stay for some time. Karigan, 30, a native of Bend, Oregon who's spent multiple years traveling in India, has been staying here at Tashi’s for two months. Because Mcleod Gunj is home to the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s Government-in-Exile, people from all over the world come here to take teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, to pray, to see His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama preside over a ceremony, to experience “little Tibet.”

It’s 6:15 on a quiet Sunday morning at Tashi’s home, which is attached to his guest lodge, and his wife Amala (the Tibetan word for house mother) prepares breakfast of millet-flour bread and sweet milk tea. Her son is still asleep in his "room," i.e. the living area just off the kitchen. Where he's sleeping and the family spends most of its time mats cover wide benches raised off the floor and pillows line the wall: you sit back against the pillows with your legs crossed and tucked under you. The T.V. is always on.

Later, while eating breakfast Tashi’s mother, above, controls the T.V. remote. She likes Indian Idol and National Geographic. For breakfast, she has tsampa: a bowl of millet and wheat flour mixed with sweet tea. She’s careful to mix it well, but it’s still very dry and powdery; she doesn’t mind at all, this being the food that she knows and eats two meals per day every day and has been for decades. Tsampa is a little too old fashioned for her grandson Ishi, below. He has a piece of Tibetan bread, hot off the skillet, and a hard-boiled egg.

Monks Feel No Cold, or Himachal Bakchoy is in Season

As the weather gets colder here in India's northern province of Himachal Pradesh (tourist agencies call it "the Himalaya country" because the peaks are on the smaller side at around 3,000 meters), farmers are bringing their rugged, cold-weather greens, onions, and leeks into town to sell in the market. It's in the teens (ºC), but the monks in Dharamsala still go sleeveless.

Roasted Peanuts

Near the main intersection in the village of Mcleod Gunj, vendors sell pagleb (Tibetan flatbread), roasted peanuts, chicken soup, chai, bakchoy, and rum. They sell a lot of other things, too. Near the bottom of the photograph are homemade peanut-honey cookies.

View from the Dalai Lama's Temple

Gorakhpur, India: Family at Lunch

Earlier this week on my way to Dharamsala, where I am now, I boarded a train in the busy, industrial city of Gorakhpur, in the northern province of Uttar Pradesh. With a bit of unsettled stomach and wary of a 24-hour train ride ahead of me, I just had a little yogurt and bread for lunch. This family, however, had a proper midday feast:

Fresh Orange Juice in Sunauli, India

Sunauli is a small village in northern Uttar Pradesh on the border with Nepal. The restaurants and food stalls share Indian and Nepali cooking traditions, so some interesting hybrid cuisine has developed: Nepali sabjis (vegetable curries) accompany smoky black lentils, called dal makhani, an essential northern Indian dal. Fresh orange juice, however, is universal, or at least anywhere oranges are grown.

Eating Dhedo

Ishwor is eighteen and finishing his high-school studies (the last year of high school before university is called "10 + 2": after ten years of compulsory education, two more years of study are required to complete a high-school degree). When I visited his family's home in Belahiya, he and his siblings were around for the end of the Dashain festival. Most of the time, however, he lives with his uncle's family in the more developed city of Pokhara, where the schools are far better. His twenty-year-old sister was just married last week in Pokhara; they scheduled the wedding to coincide with the festival so many relatives could attend.

Ishwor's new brother-in-law works in the United Arab Emirates and had already gone back to his engineering job just a few days after his marriage. Ishwor, in addition to eating dhedo with a big grin, studies science and humanities but is not sure which he wants to focus on when he goes to university. His parents run a small chai stall near the border with India. Here, his mother prepares a pot of Nepali chai: steamed milk, black tea, and sugar.

Nepali Dalbaht (Dal & Rice) and Holiday Specialties

Nepalis generally prefer a small breakfast -- a cup of milk tea and a piece of flaky bread to dunk -- and focus their cooking energy on lunch and dinner. For locals in Siddarthanagar, a small city near the border with India's Uttar Pradesh province, this means a midday and evening thali, or set meal, that includes rice, a simple lentil dal (yellow lentils cooked with turmeric and salt is the most basic version), and a seasonal vegetable curry. Often, a dab of chutney, pickled mango, and/or sliced red onion act as condiments.

A special dal substitute during holidays such as Dashain is kwanti, a mixed bean and pea soup. Other specialties include gundruh, a dry and fermented leafy vegetable, and dhedo, a wheat, maize, millet, or buckwheat flour pudding, very much like the Italians' polenta. I visited a family's home near Siddarthanagar, in a small village called Belahiya, when they were making dhedo: it's just boiled water and flour, stirred with a stick (the village utensil) into a thick dough.

Used like any flatbread to scoop up the vegetable dish, lentil dal, or paneer, dhedo works especially well for the soupier vegetable dishes because it soaks up the gravy. Here, in what turned out to be a sort-off too intimate representation, it's served alongside a potato and squash curry, and a just-made chutney (green chiles and tomatoes ground into a paste with salt, garlic, and a little water):

Yogurt with sugar is their most common dessert; it's light and refreshing after the hot, spicy meal. For those Nepalis who step into a restaurant or street stall for a quick lunch, chowmein noodles (vegetable, egg, or chicken) or fried rice are typical choices. A boy waits for his chowmein with cabbage:

They keep their condiments simple: corsani, or green chile sauce, and ketchup. Let this be the first time on this blog, but surely not the last, that I tout ketchup as the world's greatest condiment. Of course, it is at its best alongside spicy foods.

Fire and Ice: Italian Pizzeria in Kathmandu

Borrowing its name from a Robert Frost poem, Fire & Ice Pizzeria takes the road less traveled in a land of steamed momos, noodle soup, and dal with rice. Opened in Kathmandu's Thamel district by a Neapolitan family in 1995, F&I makes Italian-style thin-crust pizza, focaccia bread, mushroom risotto, lasagna and spaghetti -- truly, a menu of culinary godsends for hungry trekkers returning from a week or two in the Himalayas. But with all of this Italy-inspired fare, the Nepali/Indian influence is not far off: the focaccia is basically a thick Indian chapati baked with a brushing of olive oil, and the pizza dough is thin chapati baked until crispy.

Chapati dough -- wheat flour, baking powder and water -- is made without salt, which makes it similar to genuine Italian pizza crust, thus lending itself well to tomato sauce and mozzarella. I had spaghetti with eggplant and olives in a marinara sauce while my companions' individual pizzas included such toppings as carmelized onions, fried potatoes (cut to the size of silver dollars, fried in olive oil, and dusted with coarse salt), yellow bell peppers, and, quite amazingly (where were we?), a few leaves of fresh basil.

Once the food had been served, our efficient and friendly waiter brought around a pepper grinder the size of Bamm Bamm from the Flintstone's club and a block of Parmesan to grate over our plates. On the tables (free of charge) are bottles of olive oil with green and red chiles, and (for quite a few Nepali rupees) a bottle of Italian wine. (Us budget travellers stuck to the local Everest beer.) For dessert choose from these classics: a brownie sundae or a cone of soft serve -- vanilla, chocolate or twist.