Since returning to Mongolia, we’ve been trying to (re)introduce our two older kids to Mongolian culture. One area we’ve been doing this in is through food. Of course, we’ve eaten Indian and Chinese takeout, Korean food, pizza, and KFC, but I’ve also tried my hand at cooking Mongolian dishes at home. I figure more exposure breeds familiarity and then this way, if the kids encounter something they don’t quite like, we can coach them on better responses than pulling a face and refusing to eat.

For the most part, they’ve enjoyed everything I’ve tried which is, admittedly, not a lot of dishes. I’ve been taught how to make buuz and huushuur by hand, but I go the lazy American route and go with frozen dumplings. 😉 Anyway, this evening I made banshtai tsai, which is basically a mini-dumpling soup only the broth is Mongolian style milk tea. This is the recipe I followed (roughly).

When a friend taught me how to make suutei tsai, she taught me her family’s version, which includes cooking millet in the tea. Millet, translated into Mongolian, is literally “yellow rice”, so I combined this idea with the recipe above and used millet instead of rice in the first step. (Next time I’ll use white rice and compare.) Both Z and T ate it up and enjoyed it, and I thought it turned out deliciously! Definitely looking forward to leftovers tomorrow!