Ploofle

New Year’s day was pretty low-key - just a day full of cooking with one of my sitemates.  It’s apparently an enabling environment, as by the end of the day we had a liter and a half of kahlua, baklava, cream cheese-apricot strudel, pineapple upside-down cake, buttermilk pancakes, and an entire mexican dinner (horse-meat fajitas with homemade tortillas and from-America salsa and refried beans).  In other words, it was *excellent* although almost sickness-inducing quantities of food.  I still have most of the desserts here as well as 9/10 of the kahlua.

Yesterday I finally pulled out the pickling-in-process beef and made what I assume to be relatively authentic corned beef.  As I’m typing I’m cooking up hash now and plan to have some nice fried eggs on top of it…yum…for dinner.

Today was the mandatory fun NGO/work event.  For me, preparations involved getting to the meeting place at the agreed-up 10am, waiting for about two hours, then finally going when everyone else actually showed up.  We went to the lake, and this apparently meant “drive on the lake and find a nice spot where we normally couldn’t have a picnic as we’d be waist-deep in water”.  AND there was a Schedule of Events.  Five hours later and after several bouts of woman Snow Sumo, group tug-of-war, random eating and drinkening, frost-defrost cycles, and way too many group photos I’m now back at home.  Overall, I enjoyed myself more than I thought I would, which is often the case with group events.  Needless to say, from both the cooking extravaganza and this group event, there are a variety of awesome pictures, some of which will be posted in the subsequent blog update.

Oh, and during the process of baking and experimenting with puff pastry (see random baklava above), I found out that I bought not 10kg of normal flour but 10kg of semolina flour.  Ugh.  So now I have to look for lots and lots of recipes that use this kind of flour, as it normally takes me about 2 months to get through 10kg if I make bread, and I doubt I can make that much bread with this stuff.

Hope everyone had a good new year - last lap here for me - I’m actually leaving this year!

Tags: food, mandatory fun, semolina sadness

From this article from the NYTimes of cost-saving items…let’s see how it fares here:

1. Oats: Expensive where I’m at, though not necessarily in UB.  That typical cylinder-type thing here? About $3.
2. Eggs: Cost about twice as much here as what’s cited in the article - around 30 cents apiece.

3. Kale: Hahaha…I wish.

4. Potatoes: Cheap for sure, at about 30 cents a kg

5. Apples: Kind of expensive (about $1.75 a kg here) but worth it.

6. Nuts: Um, nope.  A can of peanuts here is about $2, and other nuts go up in price astronomically - there’s a 1-lb bag of pecans randomly here, and it’s like $20.

7. Bananas: Nope.  Rarely here and expensive - I don’t even know how much they cost.

8. Garbanzo Beans: Not here.  You can get some dried pintos in UB of dubious quality, and recently I’ve seen cans of kidney beans here for about $1.25.  Mysteriously, the newly-arrived cans of white beans are about double that price for the same amount.

9. Broccoli: Nope.  Never even seen it here.

10. Watermelon: Uh, this is seasonal unless you live in America…

11. Wild Rice: I wish we had this.  We do have millet and barley, though. And (yuck) buckwheat.

12. Beets: Yuck!

13. Butternut Squash: I think not - though maybe I’ve seen one once in the past year and a half - an accident, I’m sure.

14. Whole Grain Pasta: I don’t think so, but it’s all in Russian.  Haven’t seen anything that would match color-wise though.
15. Sardines: Now sardines we have - albeit generally in tomato sauce.  Maybe I’ll experiment with these they’re less than a dollar a can.

16. Spinach: Ha!

17. Tofu: Dried tofu, along with the Supreme Master(tm), has come to Khovd.  I don’t know why, but I’ll not complain…

18. Milk: Local milk is a bit farm-y, and you have to pasteurize/boil it yourself before using, but it’s good.  Box UHT milk, while less tasty, is more convenient and what I tend to use.

19. Pumpkin Seeds: Both yuck and ha!

20. Coffee: Well, this is just generally too effort-ful.  So I’m good.

So, reasonably, the only really easy item on this list for me are…potatoes.

Tags: food

I have to admit, there is a certain visceral happiness to eating cake and champagne twice in one day, as well as being given goodie bags by various people for new year’s.

It doesn’t match up at all, though, to the joy I experience watching my coworkers grimace and frown their way through a few shots of whiskey while I down mine with ease.  FINALLY, the vodka-face is on *them*, bwahaha…

Hopefully, now that I know this, I can encourage more whiskey-drinking to share the, er, love

Happily heating up avgolemono-like soup!

Tags: bwahaha, new year's, soup

An interesting article in the NYTimes about censorship at google.  The accompanying pictures are happily pixel-like art and made me laugh.

In this case, there’s not really anyone watching the de facto watchmen per se.  But it’s interesting to hear about how Google censors its content.  Censor may be too strong a word, though…as it sounds more like stick to the strict rules and everything is free - something like what’s in the 9th and 10th Amendments of the Constitution:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Which, in my mind, is the way it should be.  Laws and programs should be developed to protect rights and privileges, not restrict them.  Hence a few very obvious disagreements with things like, oh, poll taxes, Prop 8, limiting health care rather than making health care a right for all, etc. etc.

Also, Bonnie sent me this silly “Thriller” video.  This is what happens when librarians get together - a combo of book car drill teams, costume parties and…low production quality Matrix fight scenes?? Overall a compelling reason to be around librarians, I think.

Tags: google, librarians, protection not restriction, watchmen

First, a few words I want to remember:

хэрхэн - Similar to яаж but used more in writing, while яаж is more spoken.  Хэрхэн is often used in the sense of “How to do ____” rather than as a question word, or so I’ve been led to believe.

итгэл тавих - Guessing from context, but I believe it means roughly team-building (and perhaps literally trust putting).

__ хүртэл - I think this means “at least”…so like “At least 5 minutes.”  I was looking for how to say “less than” but I haven’t figured it out, e.g., “Less than five minutes remaning”

хэвлэл мэдээлэл - Literally “printed material” but I believe used as the term for “media” or “press.”  Perhaps a good indicator of why it’s hard to explain media to be inclusive of radio/internet/video/etc.

судалгаа - Used for both “survey” and “research” in Mongolian. It can be hard to differentiate between the two as a result.

Also just came across a potentially interesting site that has online Mongolian language listening comprehension exercises through Indiana University.  I’m not sure why its domain is Russian (.ru) though.

Also amusing: On Drunkenfreude and an educational tv series from the 80s that combines evil aliens, benevolent child aliens, librarians, bookmobiles, post-apocalyptic settings, and how to use your local library resources aptly named Tomes & Talismans. Sound like a name rip-off of any, erm, 80s-emerging RPGs? Go Mississippi public broadcasting!

Tags: alien hordes, drunkenfreude, mongolian