How to cook momos

I fell in love with momos in 1993 when I savoured them for the first time at a small eatery in a Tibetan settlement in Kolkata. Both of us just love momos and spare no opportunity to eat them whenever and wherever we get one. In recent years, momos have grown in popularity as a street food in all regions of India.

Momos are dumplings native to Tibet and neighbouring regions of Nepal and Ladakh. Traditionally, in Tibet momos are made with minced yak meat.  So, if you ever happen to travel to Tibet or Ladakh (in India) then dont miss the yak momos.

Outside the Himalayas where you don’t get yak meat just any other meat will do (chicken, turkey, pork, goat meat, sheep meat, beef etc). If you are not meat eater just replace the meat with minced up vegetables (mushroom, carrots, cabbage, tofu or paneer).

Please checkout the video for the way we made it. The super-cool part of the video is watching my wife wrapping up the momos like a pro.

The interesting part of eating momos is the momo sauce. In Tibet, Nepal and India it is made with tomato, chilli pepper and spices. You can find lots of momo sauce recipes on the web by binging them up (love Bing more than Google because few of our posts turn up on the first page of Bing).

In US, we discovered this Chili Garlic sauce from Huy Fong Foods. We created our own momo sauce by mixing it with equal amount of tomato ketchup and it goes so good with the momos that there is no need to make momo sauce from scratch the traditional way.

Another great variation of momos is instead of steaming, just deep fry them golden and they will taste extremely delicious.

(Fried momos picture shown here is a download from web found using Bing search)
 

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Chana Dal ( Dahl / Daal )

Chana Dahl (or Dal / Daal) is a lentil or pulse which is actually black chickpeas skinned out of its outer hull and split in halves.
India being the highest chickpeas producing country in the world, its natural that Chana Dal is one of the mainstay of Indian vegetarian cooking. 

We, however, are going to cook Chana Dal with Chicken Keema (ground meat). Why are we adding chicken in a traditionally vegetarian Dal recipe? Because:
#1. Vegetarian food sucks, at least for us.
#2. Had to use the ground chicken tray lying in the freezer from last 4 days.
#3. Did not want to spend on buying mutton keema (ground goat meat). This tastes even better with goat meat. 

Veggie lovers, please skip adding the meat part and it will be as delightful a recipe to savour with Zeera (Cumin) Rice or Pooris. Those who are trying to lose some pounds, cook this in the evening but eat it with Pooris the next morning for breakfast. Somehow it tastes even yummier the next day and you get the entire day to burn up the calories. As for us, it will be just our regular weekday dinner. 

Hope people will try this recipe it at home. We really enjoyed cooking and eating it. 

Note: 

1. We added a tsp of sugar also in the recipe. Missed to capture that in the video. 

2. Add a whole red chilli along with whole spices. We did not add it to keep it less hot for the kids.

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