Speaking of food grown on the farm...
I never would have guessed it but Nepal has turned out some amazingly delicious food - so much so that I think it deserves a little space of its own.
If what you think of is Dal Bhat (lentils and rice) for Nepali cuisine, then you'd be essentially right. What we were treated to on the farm, however, was dal bhat twice a day served nearly every time with fresh buffalo milk yogurt (curd), curried vegetables and often a pickled something or other. If you're me, it was all mixed in a pile with a fresh chili pepper. If you're Casey, it was mixed bit by bit. Anything twice a day every day has the potential to get a bit boring but Pramila is an amazing cook and changed it up just enough every time that even after two weeks I was still looking forward to it. Favorites include the aforementioned jungle spinach, whose stalk, pickled, was spectacular, and whose leaf made for the creamiest spinach I've ever had, as well as the yellow skinned cucumbers, which are much bigger and juicier than the small green ones we grew up with.
The days at the farm also always started off with tea. Sometimes it was fresh cut Lemongrass (fresh being exponentially more impressive than the Lemongrass tea at the tea shop I used to work at) but more often it was the national standard of masala dudh (milk) chiya. This most excellent mixture of milk, cardamom, cinnamon, tea, sugar and possibly a secret ingredient or two is almost as important as dal bhat for most Nepali and for good reason - it's ridiculously delicious.
Pre and post farm our options and explorations expanded a little to include some Tibetan fare which, with the thousands of Tibetan refugees that now call Nepal home, is fairly common. These include the millet beer previously mentioned, thukpa - a noodle soup along the lines of Vietnamese Pho, millet pancakes with honey, Tibetan milk tea with salt and butter (wow), and one of the more interesting bread items I've had on the entire trip. On the menu it just said Tibetan bread with jam/honey. When it arrived it was a little bigger around than a large bagel and looked sort of like a plain donut but without the hole in the middle. The reason it seemed so unique, though, is that its taste and texture put it somewhere between a donut, a soft pretzel and regular bread - not entirely new, but not quite like any one thing I've ever had. Throw in my soft spot for honey and it's a shoe-in for my best of list.
And finally (though I won't pretend that the above is all Nepal has to offer) there are those little curiosities and side snacks...
• The sugar bowl on the table at a restaurant in Pokhara that had cardamom pods and cloves sitting in it for flavor. Amazing.
• The "Winter Melon" tea in a can that we just couldn't resist sampling. It ended up tasting like either a popcorn or cotton candy Jelly Belly, though neither of us has had one recently enough to remember which it is.
• The small fresh bunch bananas, about half the size or less of those in the States with a sweeter taste and small hard black seeds throughout.
• The dried snack food of peanuts, crunch dried noodle type things and beaten rice. When I say beaten I really mean chewy flattened rice. We happened to spy a couple of girls making this one day; the rice laid out on a mat and the girl operating a long wooden arm like a seesaw with her foot that would drop the heavy opposite end down onto the rice.
• Dasain's Tika Day Salad (our name, as Padam only called it salad, when we asked): a stunning combination of shaved dried dates, shaved coconut, chopped apples and bananas and a hint of sugar in fresh plain yogurt. We're thinking it would've also been delicious with a hint of cinnamon as well.
• The recycled soda bottles, complete with date of manufacture. I had a Fanta while on the farm marked 1994 (the contents were definitely not that old, thankfully), though the below vintage Slice was unmarked. I guess I should actually say reused soda bottles instead of recycled, as they're all collected back, cleaned (I assume), and refilled until they kick the bucket.
Location:Paknajol Rd, Kathmandu, Nepal
