Homemade Tibetan Food – Momos and Thupka

First off – you won’t really learn how to make Tibetan Momos from this blog. This is just about my experience TRYING to learn. With that said, enjoy the story telling, photo story, and yummy looking goodness.

As some of you know, I’ve been teaching English with a program called Lha, and one of my students, Tsomo was sweet enough to invite me over to teach me how to make Tibetan Momos. Being a foodie, I’ve learned how to make some traditional dishes in every country I’ve been to, and even though I wasn’t in Tibet, McLeod Ganj certainly felt close enough for now. I was thinking of taking a cooking class in town, but with Tsomo’s offer, learning to cook from someone I knew sounded even better!

Momos are basically a type of dumpling that originates from Nepal or Tibet. It’s quite similar to Japanese potstickers, though instead of meat, most momos come with mixed veggies or potatoes. There are meat ones, but I just got so used to eating vegetarian in India, I practically forgot about meat.

When I arrived to Tsomo’s flat, I was reminded that our English exchange wasn’t the best. Tsomo had already prepared all of the momos and was just waiting for me to arrive to freshly steam them. I was excited to eat, but disappointed I didn’t get to learn. Tsomo still had the filling mixture leftover so she agreed to teach me how to wrap the momos after we ate.

Momos before steaming

We had meat momos for lunch, which consisted of minced meat, onions, garlic, ginger, and cilantro. Ohhh they were so yummy, I added some chili sauce at first, but decided it didn’t even need it, it tasted fine without. A simple cucumber salad and some tasty broth to accompany the momos was perfect. After we were nice and full and cleaned up a little, it was time to get my hands messy!

I didn’t particularly flourish in the momo making but it was still a really great experience. The dough i s asimple flour and hot water mixture that is kneaded and rolled out like so:

My favorite part of the day was when Tsomo was pointing at the different types of momos she wrapped and when she got to mine she said, “Washington momos!” We all died laughing. Hey at least they were semi recognizable as momos?

This whole rolling dough into a circle was really difficult for me…

Ok serious concentration time..

Another night Tsomo made Justin and I beef Thupka. It was pretty much the best soup I’ve had in McLeod Ganj. Soooo good. I was too busy laughing and having fun to take photos so sorry, you just get a picture of the soup.

The End.