Adventures in cooking

Beans and legumes are considered 'poverty food' in many parts of Kyrgyzstan, so although they grow a lot of them, people don't eat them and most are exported to surrounding countries.  This makes it hard to get protein as a vegetarian when the only real protein option is sheep.

A couple weeks ago I decided to make make a meal myself and headed to the bazaar for lentils.  Of course, the word for lentil isn't in our dictionary, and it wouldn't have mattered if it were because the bazaar in Kant is mostly Russian anyway.  Fortunately everything is in large open bags so you can just point at whatever you want to buy.  I saw a large bag of горох at one of the stalls, it looked like lentils to me so I bought a kilo at the bazaar and brought it home.

I was surprised to see how large they got as they cooked! In fact as they cooked they started to look less and less like the lentils I was sure they were.  Finally I called my teacher and discovered that they were actually peas.  Oops!