Momos for Rose
The cook, the Nepali doctor, a fun fund raiser and friends……
By Trish Gribben
Photo..Alexa Johnston supervises while Dr Basant Sharma helps Trish Gribben make a momo.
There’s nothing I like better than doing two things at once. Give me a chance to make it three and whammo! I’m happy as a bee round a blossom tree. Recently I discovered the perfect recipe for doing just that: three things at once….or was it more?
It goes like this: We had a most remarkable man come to stay with us, Dr Basant Raj Sharma from Nepal, sponsored by Rose Charities NZ. He is an eye surgeon at the Lumbini Eye Institute, a 200-bed hospital built in the birthplace of Buddha, in the flat plains area of south west Nepal near the Indian border. It serves a population of 20 million Indians from over the border and about 2 million Nepali people in its own region. The Indian patients are important because what they pay for their eye surgery subsidises the poor patients of Nepal. The Institute gets no government funding at all.
Basant has also worked at a Cambodian eye clinic in Phnom Penh for Rose Charities, and I am chairperson of Rose Charities NZ, a small charity which works at a people-to-people grass roots community level, particularly in Cambodia and Nepal (as well as random acts of kindness among refugee communities in New Zealand).
I wanted my friends to meet Basant but I didn’t have the energy at the time of his visit to whip up a big dinner party. So, my great idea was this: I love eating Nepali dumplings, called “momos”. By email Basant informed me: No, he was not handy in his family kitchen. He could not make momos. He left all that to his wife.
Aha! I knew that Alexa Johnston, currently of “Ladies A Plate” fame, the cookbook that revives the glories of our mothers’ and grandmothers’ home baking, was also a Nepali officiando and a splendid cook of Nepali food. Alexa, you will remember, curated the big traveling exhibition for Auckland Museum on Sir Edmund Hillary and wrote his illustrated biography.
If I invited Alexa to give Basant a cooking lesson in our kitchen, making momos, I could ask 20 friends to come and watch or take part – and of course eat the results, as well as contribute $40 for Basant’s work. That $40 is enough to pay for a cataract operation in the eye camps Basant conducts in remote regions of Nepal.
That was it: Alexa readily agreed, I set the table simply with a length of hand-blocked Indian cloth. I set up a huge bowl of red, yellow and orange roses from Stems, the rose growers who now courier their bright flowers at unbelievably cheap prices all over Auckland [1], I set out two sets of dipping sauces in my favourite new gift: hand-made black lacquer bowls from Japan.
And I RELAXED!
Alexa is a wonder whizz of organisation: She emailed me the meat filling recipe for me to make and she made the vegetarian recipe with raw cauliflower and cabbage (see both recipes below). No sooner had she whipped on her Nepali apron and set her steamers simmering on the stove than the first guests arrived and we were all into it.
Basant is as nice a guy as he is skilled as an eye surgeon: Soon he was learning to pleat one side of the dumpling wrapper (yes, we cheated and used bought ones from a Chinese shop; oh so easy) wrapped around the little scoop of filling. Only 10 minutes in the steamer and there were the platters of moon-shaped momos ready to be eaten.
All my friends loved meeting Basant, making the momos and eating them with relish, or rather the delicious (and easy) dipping sauces. A few bottles of wine, grapes and cheese and, best of all, great generosity and there we had a really fun, simple, fund-raiser.
Thanks to the koha bowl, Basant set off back to Nepal from our delicious three-in-one evening with $US600 – enough to pay for at least 40 cataract operations in eye camps which will be conducted in remote mountain villages in Nepal, maybe particularly for women who cannot normally leave their families and walk to the Lumbini Eye Institute to get the treatment they so desperately need, not just to live seeing better, but to survive.
The next Rose Charities project in Nepal will be helping to train women volunteer health education workers to screen for eye problems in their villages. It will take more than a few momos but I know with Basant’s visit to New Zealand we have made a great start.
+For further information or to contribute to Rose Charities work in Nepal, please contact Trish Gribben, email trishgribben@xtra.co.nz
Nepali or Tibetan Momos
Recipe from Alexa Johnson
1kg minced topside *
2 large onions, finely chopped
2 tsp ginger/garlic paste (Equal quantities of ginger and garlic reduced to a paste with a little water – I use a mini-food processor for this)
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground coriander
½ tsp turmeric
6 tbsp oil – heated slightly
1-2 tsp salt
1. Puree the chopped onion in a blender with 1 cup cold water.
2. Pour onto the meat in a large bowl and add all the seasonings and the warmed oil.
3. Knead vigorously until smooth.
I usually fry a small portion of the filling to test that the seasoning is right. But it doesn’t need to be too spicy since the dipping sauce adds salt and heat.Possible additional seasonings are ermung (szechuan pepper) or chilli.
*For our night with Basant, who is Hindu, I used minced lamb.
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