Eating Goat

On the drive to our hosts in the Mongol Els, our guide asked us if we wanted to eat sheep or goat for our barbeque dinner.

“Goat!”

I suspected no one actively wanted to eat goat but after days of mutton, we were ready for a second option.

“Can we eat a baby?” Juno asked. (On the construction site, he had been running after baby goats for fun, catching them by their baby horns and threatening to eat them.)

Our guide finished conversing with the hosts on her cell phone and said, “no, we never eat the babies.” It’s probably considered wasteful to cut short a lifetime of wool supply.

By the time we arrived at our host’s cosy ger, our dinner was already in preparation. In this picture, you can see pieces of goat chopped up atop a cupboard.

For the barbeque, our host filled a big pot with heated stones, goat meat, carrots, and potatoes. The pot was covered with a lid held down by a random piece of metal. Then it cooked over the campfire for about forty five minutes.

We all ate together in the main ger: the Habitat group, guides, drivers, and the host family. The Mongolians passed around a bowl of the fermented mare’s milk but understood travelers enough to not bother offering us a sip. They also passed around toothpicks but I was sad to not receive one of those because it really is an essential utensil when dining on tough goat meat.

The best part of the dinner was the singing. We asked if they had a Happy Birthday song (in honor of Wei’s birthday) and they said no, but they would sing a song in honor of his mother without whom, there would be no birthday for Wei. Then they sang a song about fathers for the same reason. (I’d read that most of Mongolian music is about nature so it’s pretty hard to find a song not in honor of mother earth, father sky, or indirectly, their offspring’s birthdays…) We sang them “que sera sera” led by Carol and a TGIFriday style birthday song taught to us by Cassandra.

This entry was posted on December 30, 2008 at 7:43 am and is filed under A first, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.