I got to learn how to cook a Neplali dish this week. It is called Chili Buff. It is a combination of cooked vegetables and fantastically prepared water buffalo. (water buffalo is very common here.)
Now, there are several reasons that I couldn’t cook this at home by myself (but we might have the capability if we work together.)
1. I don’t own a pressure cooker and I feel like I would do it wrong and die.
2. I am not positive where to find water buffalo meat in the good ol’ USA.
Anyway, you pressure cook some meat until it’s medium. Big hunks of meat. While that’s happening, you crush up and mince some garlic and ginger. When you get the hunks of meat out of the cooker, you cut them into thin slices. Then you put soy sauce, some of the garlic, the ginger, coriander, masala curry, salt, and pepper on the meat and mix it up. Ooh, and don’t forget some eggs to do what eggs do.
After that, you deep fry the meat.
While someone is doing that, everybody else that is helping you can cut up green onions, purple unions, tomatoes, chilies, and capsicum (green peppers). You put them in a huge bowl and then cook them with the remaining garlic and ginger and spices.
Then you eat it all with amazingly cooked white rice in ridiculously large quantities.
There is one Nepali meal. I realize that this blog might make me sound like I can’t cook at all, but I feel like I could do all of this, with the help of some meat connoisseurs and maybe someone who understands how to correctly use a pressure cooker. If you can help me in June, let me know.
It was so fun! This week, I also got invited to learn how to make dal bhat, another traditional food here. We’ll see how that goes.
