milk tea. thank you cows.

Last night, Ned, Sun pang, and I rode our bicycles to a Mongolian restaurant. Sun Pang's girlfriend met us there. She is a sweet, giggly girl, 1 year younger than myself, a college graduate and working as a banker.

The central dish of a Mongolian meal is the milk tea. The milk tea is in a large, round kettle kept hot by resting on a burner. I am guessing that the tea is a combination of unflavored black tea, milk, a bit of yoghurt and milk curds.

We sipped milk tea in big, round tea cups and put in sweet, crunchy crutons (but long and skinny) to soak up the tea, and then eat. The milk tea was milky, with just a bit of flavor from the tea, and a tad sweet.

The other standard Mongolian dish on the table was a combination of 3 foods: runny yoghurt, roasted wheat bits (sort of like Grape Nuts cereal) and sugar. The waitress mixed the wheat bits into the yoghurt, and then added a spoonful of sugar. As simple as it sounds, it was delicious and comforting, and I would love to enjoy it in the future as a breakfast food.

We had beef riblets, and a dish with mutton and stir-fried vegetables. Both were good, but the milk tea, and yoghurt cereal were more distinct and tasty to my palate.

The Grocery Store has a huge section of teas. One of my next adventures is to find a similiar tea used at the Mongolian restaurant and make my own milk tea at home.