Food

Having spent four months in Nepal I have been exposed to all sorts of new food. Some good, some not so good, and some that was just damn fantastic.
The traditional Nepali dish, which most of the population eats twice a day, is dal bhat. It's rice (bhat) with a lentil soup (dal), some form of curry and usually pickle. To eat you mix everything together. As such most families eat off plates with a lip, so as to not spill over. Even in restaurants it usually comes on such a plate, often with various compartments for each item. Think prison plates. The curry and dal vary by region, and are generally quite good. Plus, when you order it in restaurants you get refills until you're full, and when its served in a private home there's a mound of rice. When Caitlin and I stayed with our students we had to be careful not to put all the curry and dal on the rice at once, as the bowls were immediately refilled without our asking, so we'd end up with far more food than we could possibly eat.
In my house we ate dal bhat with cabbage and cauliflower curry most nights for dinner. Our dal was very different from the typical dal (not in taste, it was just WAY thicker than it should be), but we liked it. There's often lots of twigs and small rocks in the lentils, and therefore in the dal. There's a distinctive crunch when you find one, but after a while you stop noticing and a small pile on the side of the plate is normal.
In addition to dal bhat we made lots of fried rice and fried noodles, other staples of Nepali diets. To complement dinner I sometimes made chapattis, momos and alu parotha. All three involve dough made from flour and water. Chapattis are the most basic, being simply dough rolled very thin and fried. Alu parotha is two layers of dough with curried potato in between. It should be fairly thin, but I usually made it rather thick, as it was often the main course of picnic lunches.
Momos are my favourite. They're a Tibetan dumpling made from dough with either meat or vegetable mash inside. Steamed (momos) and then sometimes fried (kothey), they're my favourite Nepali food.
The most common snack eaten by the children is chow chow, which is dry ramen noodles. There's all sorts of brands, usually chicken, vegetable or shrimp flavoured. It's an excellent snack for on the go. If you have a little more time there's chock pot, which is noodles with lots of spices and fresh coriander. It can be spicy, but it's also really good.
Sweets and biscuits are really cheap, and there's lots of variety. Sau-roti is my favourite hot sweet - rice flour, flour and sugar made into a dough, then deep fried. In terms of biscuits, the coconut crispies and pineapple creams are the best. Not the ones labelled chocolate, they don't taste a thing like it.
Unless in a tourist area, it's best to stick to local food. Attempts at western fare are a gamble. Sometimes it's really good (like the burgers and spring rolls at the Gorkha Inn), but other times it goes horribly wrong.
Now that I've left Nepal, I'm craving one more dal bhat like crazy. I'm pretty sure there's a Nepali restaurant in Ottawa, so I'll be making a trip once I'm home!