Tibetan momos

I can't go to bed musing about Bad Men Who Get Away With Beastly Things, so I'm going to think instead about the super day we had yesterday making Tibetan momos. D and T arrived with baskets of vegetables and pastry and set to grating and chopping and finally crafting these little dumplings, which makes them the most excellent type of visitor indeed.

D, being Tibetan, is evidently imbued with natural momo-making super-skill, and while the others seem to get the hang of it, mine ended up like pastry road-kill and then split, wilfully spewing their contents over the steamer. It was all darn tricky, which might be why the recipe linked to above suggests that you "pleat if capable"... (it also recommends yak, which I think might be a step too far, even for our butcher) Well, I evidently wasn't capable, but I will try them again. For one thing, what a dastardly way of sneaking mushrooms into the unsuspecting children.

Perhaps the best thing about it was the hour of the five of us sitting around preparing them. I think some of the most interesting conversations happen either over a cooking pot or a bucket of manure. In preparation, they are very similar to Japanese gyoza, only in a slightly different shape, which I think I like even better.

It also reminded me to complete something I started a while ago, namely going through all the children's books with maps, in search of any accidental or pro-China omission, and filling in the outline of Tibet. For someone whose life these days is so suburbanly housewifely, such a task feels almost like activism.

Not so very daring though, is it? Not really. Well, this is Surrey after all.

Anyway, it's taken my mind off the old men dictators a bit.