Tasting Notes: Kyrgyzstan

This post is dedicated to those wondering if there is anything to eat in Kyrgyzstan besides horse meat and mare's milk. Travel guides love to revel in these exotica, and perhaps there is an audience for it. But for the rest us, a reassuring note: Kyrgyzstan is no Mongolia, a country so ill-suited to agriculture that all of its fresh produce is imported from China. No, Kyrgyzstan produces its own fruit and vegetables. In this post I give you a late summer delight: berries.

Tiny but intense strawberries, wrapped in paper cones and sold by street vendors. And blackberries, made into delicious tarts and home brewed blackberry wine, sold in recycled bottles that happened to be on hand.

Apologies for this blurry photo, but I had to include something to document these delicious tarts:

Perhaps made more delicious because eaten while ambling on the paths of the Ala Archa national park:

And in case you are wondering why there are snow capped moutains in late summer, those are year-round glaciers. Though they are receding...