Lhasa Moon Tibetan Cookbook by Tsering Wangmo

by Tsering Wangmo

Located on Lombard Street in San Francisco's Marina District, Lhasa Moon is one of the finest Tibetan restaurants in the West. A unique mix of Asian influences and Tibetan regional ones, its cuisine delights vegetarians and meat lovers alike. This cookbook of the restaurant's most popular dishes includes recipes for soups, snacks and appetizers, the famous Tibetan momos, popular noodle dishes, tsampa and breads, sweets, and beverages. It also provides an excellent overview of the foods grown in Tibet with their special climate and regional variations; foreign influences; daily meals; the types of household kitchens; food served in monasteries; and food for Tibetan celebrations. A section on special ingredients and substitutions is also included.

Genres: Cookbooks, Cooking

Paperback

First published November 25, 1998

Reviews

[Mary Rude · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice overview of Tibetan cuisine, with helpful explanations about how Tibetans view food and how it works into their culture. A lot of these dishes are a little strange for the America palate, but it was fun trying them!

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are not a lot of Tibetan restaurants in the United States and there are a variety of reasons for this paucity. One is the general unavailability of many traditional Tibetan ingredients: yak meat, yak milk, droma (a vegetable), churu (ripened cheese), and sesha (yellow mushrooms). Another is that some of this food is a long reach for people with Western tastes, even those who enjoy East Indian and Chinese foods. The stopper is usually poecha -- hot weak black salted tea churned with butter. Even Tsering's text refers to this ubiquitous Tibetan drink as "infamous." The author is a refugee from Tibet who fled first to India and then to the United States where she runs a successful restaurant in San Francisco. She admits that she tempers traditional Tibetan cooking to accommodate American ingredients and American tastes. This book is careful to point out first the traditional Tibetan manner of preparing a dish and then the Americanized version. This is very much to her credit. There are a number of dishes well worth the effort, e.g. momo (meat-stuffed dumplings), ping sha (beef stew with bean-thread noodles), luksha shamdeg (lamb curry), and sanga paley (fried pastries). It is also great fun to attempt to "bake" amdo paley (a favourite of the Dalai Lama) in a stovetop Dutch oven. This book is a necessary addition to the culinary library only of those who wish to explore the far reaches of Indo-Asian cooking.