Virgil
Local Favorite Foods in Shymkent
by , 06-29-2010 at 05:22 AM (10675 Views)
If you look up the cuisine of Kazakhs, you’ll find it’s based on mutton, horse meat, and mare’s milk. Well, I’ve had plenty of mutton, but we’ve avoided anything to do with horse. However, I don’t think we’ve actually come across a Kazak restaurant per se. The better restaurants tend to refer to themselves as having Uzbek cuisine. The Kazaks and Uzbeks are ethnic cousins, and as I understand it, they both came from the same nomadic Turkish roots, and while the Kazaks remained nomadic for much longer, the Uzbeks settled down which led to a refiner and more sophisticated culture. I’m not going to characterize either of the cultures as better than the other, but the cuisine seems to be dominated by Uzbek heritage. So some of the favorite foods we encountered you will be able to find at your local, hideaway Uzbek restaurant.
Let me first say, the breads out here are outstanding. I think I mentioned this in an earlier blog and provided a picture of an artistically shaped bread. I’ll provide it here again to show what care they take on the breads. They do come in different shapes, but they all seem to combine a soft raised section with a flat crispy section, such as here, the crispy middle surrounded by the soft bready part.
I also mentioned in an earlier blog how I randomly picked an option off a menu and was shocked to discover this incredible dish of meat, vegetables, over long string noodle. Well, that dish we are happy to have learned is called Lagman. There may be several types of Lagman, but I going to be generic here and just say it’s a lamb stew with vegetables with lots of spices (cumin or celeriac predominates I think) over the noodles.
Another fantastic dish that we’ve discovered is plov, a fried rice with lamb and assorted accoutrements such as chick peas, carrots, raisins, or garlic. Some might know plov as pilaf and I understand they are variations of each other.
Another item we’ve enjoyed is manti, a dumpling with meat and onions inside. It actually looks very much like a Chinese dumpling, and they offer you soy sauce as well to put over it. Very tasty.
Samsa can be either a small meat and onion filled pastry or an entire pie with the filling. We’ve had both. This is a picture of a pastry cut sliced open to reveal the insides:
Those are the more exotic dishes we’ve enjoyed, but we also do love the shashlik (shish ka bob), either with mutton or chicken, and they seem to serve it with raw onion and some type of moderately spicy sauce to put on it. They don’t seem to use very hot spices in anything, but they will spice things up for taste. I was very surprised at how good the pizzas are out here, but given they do breads and pastries so well I shouldn’t have been. Their pizzas are typically thin crust with cheeses and ground meat toppings. They also have an assortment of salads, many using a mayonnaise based dressing. We tried a couple of those and they are innovative. I couldn’t tell you what’s in them though. We really preferred the cucumber and tomato salad, which seemed to be everywhere. It usually comes with just a drop of oil and plenty of dill, and they will put some white vinegar on the table if you wish to add it.
We also enjoyed a chicken club sandwich – three layers which included extremely thin sliced chicken breast, pickles, tomato, mayo, and dill. They do use mayo and dill a lot out here. In fact on their hamburgers they will use either mayo alone or mayo and ketchup, which in essence is Russian dressing. We got this burrito type of food at the food court in the mall and it contained beef strips, pepper strips, onions, cucumber, tomato, and French fries, all within the wrap, and filled with Russian dressing. Oh and if you thought French fries were a good old American item, forget it. They love them out here. That eatery at the food court where we got that wrap was kind of odd. It billed itself as a combination Turkish fast food/sushi bar.
One thing that everyone loves out here is soft ice cream on a cone. They have all these little stands where it’s sold and for 30 Tenge (about 20 cents) you can get a cone topped with chocolate powder. You can’t even get the cone for that price back home. The ice cream is not as sugary as back home, nor I think as fatty. Everyone seems to get them every day, and why not for that price. Here’s an actual picture of my 20 cent ice cream cone I got the other day.
Many people asked about that yellow melon I mentioned in the last blog. I never did find out the species, but I guess it’s somewhere between a canary and a cucumis melon. Here are a couple of pictures. If anyone recognizes it, please let me know what it is.
Finally with all this food I will have to talk about my growing little Matthew. Well, apparently he loves to eat. They say he demands an extra bottle as compared to the other children his age. He’s a few days short of ten months and they told us today he’s 22.9 lbs (10.35 kg). That puts him high in percentile for his age, especially considering he’s been at an orphanage. He’s put on 3.2 lbs (1.45 kg) in the six weeks we’ve been with him. The other children his age look kind of puny next to him. He may grow up to be a football player. My son, the linebacker.And here’s a picture (you didn’t think I would not include one
) of him showing off his two growing baby teeth, ready to sink them into some good Uzbek foods.
Oh, an update from the last blog: We have been assigned a court date and it is Thursday, July 1st at 10:30 AM!! Keep your fingers crossed.
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