Food, glorious food...

Namasté, faithful readers,

We just had such a phenomenal American cook night tonight that I had to write about it. ("Cook night" = just what it sounds like - the Nepali and American students take turns cooking specialties from their homeland once a week, and the regular cook staff get the night off to sit and eat with us.) Daal-bhaat is tasty, but it doesn't offer much variety, so we're all getting pretty unenthusiastic about it at this point. It doesn't seem to bother the Nepalis one bit - every Nepali person I've met will tell you that daal-bhaat is their favorite food, even though most people eat it at both big meals of the day throughout their lives. In fact, most people won't consider it a meal unless there is rice present - our afternoon "snack" is really meal-sized, but no rice is served so it's called kaajaa (snacks) instead of kaanaa (food). Besides the daal (lentil soup) and bhaat (rice), a Nepali meal also usually includes tarkari (some sort of vegetable medley), saag (spinach/greens), and achar (spicy chutney and/or pickled veggies). To the credit of the cook staff, they try to cater to our desire for variety with spaghetti, lasagna, soup, etc. a few times a week, but the 10 a.m. meal is daal-bhaat every single day, as are at least half of the dinners.

Cook night, then, is an exciting time for the Americans to get some much-needed excitement back into our diets! Last time we made Mexican food (tortilla chips with salsa and guacamole, and burritos with bean or ground chicken filling - Nepal is a Hindu-dominated country, so no beef products are allowed here - and all the fixings: cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, olive, etc. We subbed homemade chapathis for the tortillas and they worked quite well.)

Tonight we were originally planning on making omelets, but for 20-odd people that would have been quite an undertaking. Instead we had scrambled eggs with cheese and vegetables in them (and bacon for the meat eaters), hash browns, and pancakes. Leila also made some incredible cream cheese brownies (who knew you could find cream cheese in Nepal?!) because we've all been craving chocolate lately... and Phoebe created a wonderful iTunes playlist of morning-related songs for background music while we ate.

It's so fun to cook with everyone. People are pretty good at dividing up the tasks at hand and getting them done - tonight, for example, we had people cooking hash browns in the program house kitchen, pancakes over in the girls' hostel, and scrambled eggs in the boys' hostel. We're also trying to come up with ideas for the next few cook nights - leave a comment if you have any other bright ideas for us! Other menus we're considering include:

-A Southern dinner with fried chicken/tofu, buttermilk biscuits, mashed potatoes, greens, etc.
-Picnic food: deviled eggs, potato salad, chicken salad, egg salad, rolls, salad
-Leila's gumbo and rice
-French food night: scalloped potatoes, ratatouille (vegetable stew), "beef" (goat) bourgignon or mushroom chicken

Mmm, writing about food is making me hungry all over again, so I should stop. Instead, I'll close with a tale from our Chitwan weekend, entitled "How Jessie Convinced Katherine That We All Saw a Tiger In The Woods During Our Birdwatching Walk, The One Kat Was Too Lazy To Wake Up For"...actually, the title is basically the entire tale. And unless Kat has been reading my blog, the ruse shall continue... :oP

Time to go study for my Nepali quiz tomorrow (yeah, we do work here too sometimes; I should write about classes in my next post)!

Love and pheri bhetaulaa,
Rani

P.S. Mom, it is currently 8.45 P.M. on Monday, February 19!