马奶酒/ma3 nai3 jiu3, mare's milk. Must be very peculiar.

I wonder how hard it is to make...My post-retirement dream is to buy a still and make bootleg booze in my basement.

This has the advantage that most revenuers wouldn't suspect you could make alcohol from something so weird.

As usual, this was a good lesson.  It sounds like each of the provinces will have some dish(es) that make it special.  the hard part will be for cpod to identify the dish unique to all the provinces.

I have a question more on the regional nature of Chinese food.  I've noticed that Americans that live in China tend to come back to the States and whine about the low quality of Chinese restaurants back here.   But I wonder if this isn't really due to the fact that many (not all) of the Americans that do this whining tended to live in Northern China (Beijing, Lanzhou, Xi'an, Heilongjiang, etc..) and then come back to the US which has predominately southern Chinese cooking.  I was hanging out with 2 professors from the English dept at Lanzhou university that were telling me as northerners, they hated southern Chinese food.  Acknowledging that 2 professors provide the randomness, and statistical significance necessary with 95% confidence  to extend this food observation to the 1.3 Billion Chinese :-), and Adding the usual disclaimers about not generalizing food preferences of people in regions, I wonder if others have noticed a strong distaste of southern Chinese for nothern cuisines not their own? or vice versa?

Who out there has tried it??

You can hear authentic Mongolian in 蒙古国, but interestingly they don't use traditional Mongolian characters anymore, probably because it's somewhat cumbersome to write, but primarily use Cyrillic alphabets because of the influence of Russia, which helped the country become independent from China in 1921.

On the other hand, Mongolian characters, which is originated in Uighur characters, are still used in 内蒙古 of the PRC. You can see both Chinese and Mongolian characters written on a sign as required by law. Unfortunately, the Mongolian language/culture have been highly sinicized, and the number of speakers has been decreasing especially in urban areas in 内蒙古.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjQ3NTU3NzI=.html

American Chinese food is a whole other variety.

抓 have usually seen referring to food that is eaten with the hands  like 抓饭、 手抓排骨.

Another term for food that is pulled apart by the chef is 手撕 - in Chengdu you can get astoundingly delicious 手撕 麻辣烤兔 (numbing/spicy bbq rabbit) and 手撕烤鸭 (bbq duck) .

Thanks for the fascinating lesson! I've never thought about Mongolian language. The Wikipedia article on it was very interesting.

My husband tells me that there's a difference between "sheep" and "lamb": A lamb is a young sheep.

Your attempts at throat singing were fun to hear.

hi all,

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