Breakfast: Plain as it can get

Breakfast: Plain as it can get
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho.

Bread, honey, and tea... this is a reoccurring theme in my travels, simple food. I have been brought up (intentionally or not) to be a bit of a culinary snob, while I am not quite there (I can’t tell the difference between a $25 bottle of wine and a $2,500 bottle of wine) I do have standards of sorts. I feel that I can justify part of my snobbishness since I am perfectly willing to cook for myself, having been told more than once “I won’t have you marrying out of hunger” I learned fairly early on how to be a decent cook (or at least I can cook well enough that I will eat it).

So, my culinary afghan adventures have recently made a bit more sense to me in that I recently discovered that the reason that my lunch was fairly palatable and varied and my morning and evening meals were less so was because my morning/evening meals are prepared by the night watch. The lunch cook pretty much hides in the kitchen during the day (not atypical in Afghanistan) and all my meals are brought to me by the assistant cook.

Now having complained about my food I know many an American who would be perfectly happy with a bagel, tea, and jelly/cheese but I am not usually one of them. I am starting to look at stoves (think car camping stove) now since all the cooking here takes place in a cauldron balanced on a gas tank (not great for cooking with pans etc) which would explain the goulash consistency of most of my meals (that was not necessarily a put down, but everything is mixed together ala goulash).

I have been chastised before for being critical of native diets “Because those poor people don’t have access to other foods” but it has recently become apparent to me that simple native diets are often due to culture *not* lack of availability.

When in Moldova I used to be driven crazy by the lack of variety in my meals (it was not uncommon to have an egg fried in sunflower oil a slab of bread and wine for dinner (and salt if I asked for it) but I would look in the garden and see garlic, chickens ripe for the plucking (I paid for my food their so I didn’t feel guilty about taking a chicken), spinach, tomatoes, basil, and a bunch of other foods *right*outside*my*window* but it just never occurred to my host family to mix them (indeed when I tried making a tomato sauce they were horrified that I would put basil with tomato and couldn’t understand why I added *only* a capful of oil). I find a similar situation in Afghanistan. My meals are incredibly simple, and I honestly don’t believe it’s due to laziness and certainly not due to lack of availability. While I can’t get out and walk around as much as I would like I do see what’s available in the stalls along the side of the road. There is plenty of variety such as multiple varieties of lettuce, watermelon, a honey dew type fruit, peaches, plums, garlic, a few types of bread (the traditional afghan bread, which looks a lot like Indian “nan”s, is actually a pretty utilitarian bread in that it can be tastefully eaten with sweets like jelly or used as a pizza crust, or spread with something like hummus), onions, potatoes, okra, and the list goes on. This variety could yield some pretty tasty dishes but instead even the lunch cook’s meals consist of rice or potato, with bread (always two starches), and then a tomato n oil based topping which is sometimes a bit of meat like veal, or okra that has been my lunch for over two weeks… and that is the best meal of the day.