Adventures in Uyghur Food
A couple weeks ago, one of my teachers invited us over to his house for lunch. We were all looking forward to a typical Uyghur lunch, so we were mildly surprised when we were served what looked like Chinese jiaozi. For those of you uninitiated, jiaozi (sometimes called “Chinese dumplings” in English, but nothing at all like the dumplings that my mom used to make!) is a very typical Chinese food. My teacher’s wife called it “Chuchura,” which is a typical Uyghur food. But the name is all that seemed to be in common with the normal Uyghur food called chuchura.
Like jiaozi, these special chuchura had an outer wrapper and an inside stuffing, but while the outer wrapper was just about the same as traditional jiaozi, the stuffing was anything BUT traditional. We were told it was sometimes called “kuk” which in Uyghur can mean green or blue. That was certainly descriptive; the stuffing was deep green, and it had a distinct grassy flavor.
After further discussion, we discovered that the stuffing was, in fact, alfalfa!
When you live overseas, you tend to expect to have foods put before you that you’ve never seen or heard of before. But when a familiar item is placed in an unfamiliar setting, it sometimes takes you by surprise. I grew up on a small farm in southern Oregon, and we didn’t normally bring the alfalfa in from the field and put it on the dinner table. So this was a bit of a stretching experience for me. Even after we were told that alfalfa is highly nutritious, it still tasted like grass to me.
It reminded me of plaintain in the Cayman Islands. The first few times I tried it, it just didn’t taste like anything I wanted to continue eating. Eventually, though, I came to not only tolerate it but really enjoy it. Hmm…watch out neighborhood sheep - I might learn to like alfalfa!