When you're travelling across the Mongolian steppe, where villages are far and few between, the only lunchtime dining option is to bring your food along and picnic. So, that's what we did on most of our roadtrip days.
Our picnic *blankets* were silver lined emergency blankets. No, Adam is not suppose to be laying on our lunch *table* but it was a good way to catch some rays before the food was laid out.
Depending on how dry the ground was, I often opted to just either sit on bare ground or on my blue plastic rain jacket. As long as I was in a decent spot and comfortable body position to devour my lunch, I didn't care where I sat.
Often, we found ourselves in the company of a stray dog or two. Where the heck they came from, I never knew.....it wasn't like there was an dwelling nearby that would indicate this creature was someone's pet.
I don't know when it started, but Evan was Puji's assistant, helping her with getting the blankets laid out and lunchboxes handed out. He seemed to enjoy his role. :-)
Lunch was always simple fare. Once, we had a choice of some pretty tasty sandwiches. Most days though, it was stir fried mutton served with rice and veggies of some sort. Beverage was whatever bottled water or drink you had and dessert was, of all things, a KitKat bar. We fought over those :-)
On one of our picnic outings, a few local men dropped by with an offering of boodog....that infamous Mongolian *delicacy* where meat, mutton generally, is stuffed inside the stomach cavity of a marmot. They were hoping to sell their boodog but we had all just finished eating lunch and to be honest with you, the sight of the thing did not thrill me enough to be greedy enough to buy it....if even for just one nibble.
....and yes, that's the animal's tail in the bottom picture :-)
I have to admit that none of our picnic meals were memorable from a foodie perspective. What made up for it though was the spectacular scenery were surrounded by. For as far as my eyes could see, it was picture perfect.... beautiful green landscape, intense blue sky and fluffy white clouds on bright sunny day. It was nice to not be cooped up in the car!!
