Anatomy of Dal Bhat

Dal Bhat, my muse ;-)

These are the Elements of Dal Bhat:

Rice: a big pile of white rice (Bhat).

Dal: The bowl in the upper left is full of soupy lentils (Dal) cooked in a pressure cooker with spices. That gets poured on top of the rice before eating.

Vegetables (tarkari): the mound at the top of the plate is mushroom curry with tomatoes and lots of mustard oil, turmeric and other tasty spices. Mushroom season is just beginning in Chapagaon (where I live), and Ram Hari (host dad) says that during peak season my neighborhood sends about a metric ton of mushrooms to market per day. Yum. Mushrooms vary in price from 70 rs (1$) per kilo to 350 rs ($4.50ish), depending on the day's yield.

Saag (leafy greens, lower right): I usually think of Saag as meaning spinach, but it actually refers to any kind of leafy greens, and really, they all look the same when they're steamed this intensely. All the saag we eat in my household is grown in in the kitchen garden, right outside the house.

Lapsi Achaar: Those two little lumps in the upper right are made out of a fruit called Lapsi (Choerospondias axillaris), which is a small, green, plumlike fruit. As far as I can tell, "Achaar" just means "sauce," and there are many varieties of it. This one is made by boiling lapsi, removing the skin, then pickling the flesh (still on the large seed) in mustard oil, red chili pulp and all manner of other spices. Achaar is strongly flavored, and usually eaten by taking a big bite of rice and a teeny bite of achaar for the added taste. This is definitely my favorite achaar, but there are dozens of types, not all made with lapsi, and most are delicious.

TANG:  The cup is full of steaming hot pineapple flavored TANG (astronauts!). Its hot because we have to boil water to drink it, and the water usually gets boiled right before mealtime. So I get a lot of hot TANG.

I eat some version of this meal twice per day, around 9:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m.
I was worried, initially, that I would get tired of so much rice, but the opposite has happened. When I went trekking for a week in September, I didn't eat any Dal Bhat the entire time, and I craved it by the fourth or fifth day. I bought some at a rest stop in our 10hr bus ride back home....it was not nearly as good as home, and I was happy to get back to the host house for a good tuck-in.




The best part of dal bhat at the house is that LOTS of the food comes from our kitchen garden or the farm that my host family owns in a village about an hour away. They grow lots of mustard, most of which gets pressed for cooking oil. They have lapsi trees and radishes and different squash/gourds and various types of leafy greens.


I realized recently that I am living two dreams right now:
1: I ride a bike almost everywhere. The vast majority of my transportation is on a bicycle. Throughout college I often talked about how I wanted to "live somewhere where I could bike to work and everywhere else I needed to go." And here I am.
2: I eat local organic vegetables Every Day!




Good times.