Dolma, Bryan’s Tibetan maid, showed me how to make momos today! She usually makes them when Bryan comes home from a trip, and they’re just so amazing. So I asked if she would show me how to make them, and the tomato stuff that goes with them. (Fondly referred to as “Tibetan Ketchup”)
It was so much fun. Dolma is about as big as a minute, I think the top of her head comes maybe to my chin, and when I stand at 5’2” (5’3” on my passport…) that’s pretty tiny. She’s got this endearing gold tooth and a head of long long black hair that’s curiously free of grey and always pulled so properly back into a big bun. She’s got the most beautiful, face altering smile, and she sticks her tongue out when she gets really excited. She could be anywhere from 50 years old to 150.. I have no clue. Her English isn’t great, but it’s a hell of a lot better than my Tibetan, so we get along pretty well. Plus, there is something that’s so familiar, so universal, about one woman teaching another how to cook something; most of the time our grins did more instructing than our words.
So we drank a little South African beer (which made Dolma delightfully giddy) and chopped chicken and made dough and laughed and laughed. She’s just so funny – I can see when she’s standing behind me that I’m doing it wrong because her little hands kept jumping forward, wanting to fix everything. *laugh* The ingredients and all the parts are pretty easy to make, it’s the hand-momo-coordination that you need to make the cool dough designs that just killed me. It was so much fun. At the end I was covered in chicken and ginger and dough and tomato – but it was so worth it. We all stood around the boiling pot as they steamed, waiting to eat them. Which we promptly did as soon as they were done. So now I’ve got an authentic Tibetan momo recipe, written on the back of the “Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist) Manifesto” which for some reason, was the only paper in my purse.
Anybody interested in momo making lessons, I’ll give them to you for the price of a new winter scarf, a haircut, or some South African beer.
It was so much fun. Dolma is about as big as a minute, I think the top of her head comes maybe to my chin, and when I stand at 5’2” (5’3” on my passport…) that’s pretty tiny. She’s got this endearing gold tooth and a head of long long black hair that’s curiously free of grey and always pulled so properly back into a big bun. She’s got the most beautiful, face altering smile, and she sticks her tongue out when she gets really excited. She could be anywhere from 50 years old to 150.. I have no clue. Her English isn’t great, but it’s a hell of a lot better than my Tibetan, so we get along pretty well. Plus, there is something that’s so familiar, so universal, about one woman teaching another how to cook something; most of the time our grins did more instructing than our words.
So we drank a little South African beer (which made Dolma delightfully giddy) and chopped chicken and made dough and laughed and laughed. She’s just so funny – I can see when she’s standing behind me that I’m doing it wrong because her little hands kept jumping forward, wanting to fix everything. *laugh* The ingredients and all the parts are pretty easy to make, it’s the hand-momo-coordination that you need to make the cool dough designs that just killed me. It was so much fun. At the end I was covered in chicken and ginger and dough and tomato – but it was so worth it. We all stood around the boiling pot as they steamed, waiting to eat them. Which we promptly did as soon as they were done. So now I’ve got an authentic Tibetan momo recipe, written on the back of the “Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist) Manifesto” which for some reason, was the only paper in my purse.
Anybody interested in momo making lessons, I’ll give them to you for the price of a new winter scarf, a haircut, or some South African beer.
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