Welcome to Boiledbeefistan

I used to think that I was a very flexible eater, but then I came to Kazakhstan.

The core issue for me is that the most fundamental cornerstone of Kazakh haute-cuisine is lamb and cow fat. Kazakhstanis enjoy their fat in two ways. Sometimes, the fat is attached to a remarkably flavorless piece of boiled Grade C/D meat that it usually about half the size of its blubbery companion. At other times, Kazakhs bypass the high-maintenance hassle of boiling meat and simply dice the fat into cubes.

This is a problem, but in many cases it could be evaded by simply picking around the offensive parts of the meal. Kazakh cuisine has deftly blocked that strategy from working to any success by refusing to use any sort of spice at all. In a pasta dish, pasta tastes like boiled lamb and lamb fat. In borscht, cabbage tastes like...boiled lamb and lamb fat. Kazakhstani cuisine's definition of dangerously spicy begins with oregano. Some volunteers more enterprising than I am now go to war three times a day with a bottle of cure-all Tabasco sauce. It's great because all the locals view Tabasco sauce with intense fear and loathing, so it lasts a long time because you can't find anyone with whom to share, and it wipes away the residual fat taste.

To be fair, I believe my experience has been worse than most volunteers here. Some have host mothers who are excellent cooks, but others have been paired with a little less imagination. My personal lowlight was about a week ago when I returned home to find a sizable pot of sheep fat melting on the stove. Immediately suspicious, my worst fears were realized when it became the bulk of the stock for the soup served at dinner. It was not my favorite dinner. Today's lunch presented a more perplexing scenario, consisting of a ladleful of borscht in a jar topped with two fried eggs and then another ladleful of borscht. Why together?!? It smelled like scallops. It didn't taste like scallops.

If nothing else, I've lost a bit of weight here given the amount of walking we do combined with my efforts to eat as little as possible at the dinner table. My diet is mainly comprised of multivitamin pills, bread, Snickers bars, and apples. As bad as that sounds, it's actually a decent combination of vitamins, carbs, protein and the calories I need to get through the day. On the positive side, I only have three more weeks in Issyk considering I'll be out of town for nine days on site visit. Apparently Zhezkazgan doesn't have any fresh fruit or vegetables in the winter, but eating potatoes and cabbage every day beats the hell out of dining on soft, jiggly animal fat.