some ragamuffin: food

an unidentified (by us) plant gathered and eaten in the taiga

cutting up some homemade noodles, a popular staple

The following is a lesson on how to make a Mongolian party-food of blood-filled abomasum and intestine.

First, slaughter a goat. This is done with an incision into the abdominal cavity and through the diaphragm. You then quickly slip your hand through the diaphragm and into the chest cavity, where you use your thumb to rip a hole in the aorta. The animal bleeds out quickly into the pleural space, and the blood is effectively contained within the chest. The blood is collected, and the animal is gutted, and then toasted with a blow torch to remove the hair.

blow-torching a goat

Blood from the chest cavity is collected in a bowl. The digestive tract is cleaned out with water, and the keratin is scraped from the rumen.

rinsing out the GIT

some clean intestines

scraping keratin

Removing clots from the blood

The abomasum and intestines are then filled with up with blood.

Filling the GIT

Tying off the abomasum

The bood-filled organs are boiled along with the lungs, liver, heart, colon, forestomachs, omasum, and kidneys in a pot of salted water, and there you go.

tada

sampling

Mongolian dairy is pretty delicious, and the best dairy animals, in my opinion, are yaks. This is probably because yak milk is 6% fat. The following sequence illustrates how you make sweet yak curd.

Let fresh yak milk sit at 30 degrees Celsius for 24 hours. The cream rises to the top, and the rest ferments into yogurt. Pour the yogurt into a steel bowl over a wood stove. Heat to 80 degrees.

yak yogurt on the stove

Pour the heated product through cheese-cloth

The curd goes back in the bowl for cooking and mixing

lots of white sugar

into a mould to dry

all done!

Did you know you can distill "vodka" from mare's milk? Mare's milk is extremely high in lactose (like human milk!) Come to think of it, you could probably distill liquor from human milk as well.