Have you seen the list of “100 things to eat before you die?” The list includes both mundane things as well as those you’d eat on exotic vacations. I’m proudly ¾ done owing to my having had the opportunity and inclination to eat many strange foods. Maybe it started very young since my grandfather loved head cheese and we still eat lutfisk every Christmas. On a trip in Thailand, my co-travelers and I snacked on a bag of fried meal worms from a local market. Once on a date with a man from Sri Lanka I ate a fish eyeball. He said it was his favorite part of the fish. (Note that the outside of a cooked fish eyeball is gelatinous but the inside is like a little ball of cartilage- otherwise it might get stuck in your throat halfway down.) So when meeting a friend at the Himalayan Restaurant on Franklin recently, I espied yak momo on the menu and couldn’t resist.
Momos are small Tibetan dumplings filled with meat or vegetables. They look very similar to Chinese steamed dumplings. Disclaimer: since the amount of meat I eat in a year would maybe fill a coffee cup, it’s not really fair for me to review a meat dumpling. I ate it to check it off the list and see what yak tastes like, not as a food critic. Our server entertained my request for one momo instead of the ½ order of six or whole of ten on the menu. The yak meat, which apparently comes from a yak farm near Rochester, MN (who knew?) was ground and fried with onions- lots of onions- to the point there was something distinctly White Castle-ish about the taste. Overall the momo was moist and aromatic and served with a bright tomato- cilantro sauce that was so good, I was digging in the corners of the condiment cup with my fingers. Anyway, maybe it was the onions, but for the next hour or so, I was burping yak momo.
When I lived in Europe we used to make fun of the travelers who said “I did Paris, I did Budapest…” like it was a goal to just check off each city so you could brag to your friends as opposed to traveling to experience a different culture or landscape. And maybe my ego is getting the better of me and I’m doing that with eating strange things. Was the whole point of eating a yak momo to check it off a list? As I burped my way through the evening the goal of completing a checklist didn’t seem to make much sense. Now if I had eaten a yak momo standing on a street corner in Lhasa looking at the Himalayas, that would be something to write home about.
Morchella’s interest in food is an unintended consequence of her hardworking mother having raised three children on the food of the ‘70s and ‘80s: Banquet Fried Chicken, Tuna Helper, and Creamettes with Ragu. To this day neither Morchella nor her brothers eat spaghetti. Morchella likes to start her day counting breaths in salamba sirsasana and finish it biking home in the dark.