On Fire and Water

Cooking a meal

I came home from school and helped my host mother cook dinner.  The stove is a fire stove...imagine a small rectangular box shape, on top there is a small round chimney, and then a hole cut out for the wok type huge steel bowl to set.  In Mongolia, there are really only two main types of food...something fried, or soup.  So my host mom threw in all the ingredients, potatoes, green onions, fat, and unidentified muckkk (meat) into the hot oil that coated the pot.  As I stirred, I thought I heard my host mom say the word for soup, as she grabbed my gifted bottle of bbq sauce.  She poured it right on in.  I just kept stirring, smiling of course, thinking, cool.  bbq soup...it will be interesting. so we poured a little water into the mix and covered it to let it simmer over the fire.  Next my mom is unwrapping this bouillon cube looking thing, and I asked what it was.  she showed me the label, which (surprisingly in english) read 'black fungus.'  So she put this cube in a teacup and poured some hot water, and covered it.  I went to stir the simmering food and needed to grab a rag to take the metal lid off to do so- it had gotten so hot from the fire.  5 minutes later, host mom shuttled me over to the table to show me that this black fungus cube had now expanded into a whole lot of mushrooms!! delicious!  we threw those in the mix for dinner as well, but to note, my host mom literally just grabbed the hot hot lid with her bare hand.  I asked her in broken mongolian/charades if it had hurt her hand to do so.  She of course said absolutely not!  I then told her I had baby hands...she only agreed.  Next we took the cooked noodles that had been sitting out from lunch, and the rice that had been sitting out since, maybe, hopefully yesterday, and put those on top of the mix in the wok.   I was instructed not to stir, and covered it back up.  from what i gather from my host mothers hissing sounds at that moment is that when i hear the food make that sound, take the 20+ lbs wok off the fire, and the food is ready...

We sat down and ate dinner, and my host sister ran fast to the store and bought some bread (all the starches!), and ice cream cones...(the ice cream here is prepackaged in cones and the top is covered with a sticker).  Surprisingly it was quite a tasty meal, and the ice cream was a nice treat.  While I was still finishing my ice cream, my friend from school, Cody came over to get me to go hang out with a couple other people from class at one of their houses.  My mother drug him in, and made him sit of course, and gave him a hefty portion of the meal.  He tried to politely refuse because he had just eaten his own huge meal with his own host family...however, that didnt fly with my host mother, so a second dinner he got...so as he was eating his second dinner with one hand, my host mom put a hot cup of tea in his other hand.   I just stood a back chuckling.

the well and rusty buckets

Part one: Getting water is a process here, not really a big process, but it does
nt just come from the sink.  Our water comes from a well that is in our yard, and luckily we have have an electric water pump, so we dont have to pull up buckets.  My room houses the plug for such water pump.  One very cold rainy afternoon, my host mother brought a space heater into my room and plugged it in for me...in the outlet by the window.  I went to charge my camera battery one day, and went to the same outlet by my window.  There was something plugged in, to which the cord went up into the window foam, and I did not know what it was for.  Since my host mom had plugged something in before to the outlet, I figured it was ok to use.  So I unplugged it, and let my camera battery charge for a little while.  Well (no pun intended), I found out what that plug was for a little later when my host mom was out trying to use the pump for the well...she politely corrected my mistake. oops.

Part two:  so we have these two buckets, a tan one and a green one, that we use to get water from the well, and they sit on the floor of the kitchen building.  We use this water to cook, make tea, washing our hands in the dry sink, filling my tupin to bathe, etc.  There is this little pot that we use to scoop water out of the buckets for these various activities.  Point being, these buckets are well used.  So used in fact that the bottom of these buckets are rusty, and you sometimes see little flecks of rust floating around at the bottom of these buckets.  Good thing Peace Corps made us get those tetanus shots.