LATELY and worried about putting on more weight than my heart can carry I’ve been taking to winding off the day with just some steamed “mo mo” from here, there and everywhere – be it Chat Street down town Panjim or the nearby Charlie Chan’s very decent cloud kitchen at Caranzalem, and since I can’t go all the way to Moksha at Porvorim! There are so many cloud kitchens now of course doing oriental and southeast Asian food or Nepali or Tibetan or northeastern India if you like…doing “mo mo” or “momo” as usually listed on the menu (along with the familiar noodles, “wanton,” “thukpa,” etc). Chinese vegetarian non-vegetarian is always popular although my favorite used to be and still is I suppose when I think of it…yes, Goenchin, one of the pioneering Chinese restaurants which does one of my favorites claypot rice. But this is about mo mo and how I’m re-discovering it as health food for our times packed as it usually with a savoury mix of minced veggies and of course each menu specializes on its own dip ranging from chili-garlic to just soybean and at Chaat Street they also offer a sweetish mayo dip to cut the heat of the chili sauce…
My current love for mo mo however dates back to my schoolgirl years in Penang in Malaysia in the 50s and 60s when in the multi-racial milieu we craved for all kinds of food even my vegetarian Gujarati home…my Chinese friends were always there to help me discover all Chinese food veggie and non-veggie, think fine noodles “bee hoon” and all the sticky white and purple black rice cones topped by a deep dark brown sweet ball of fresh grated coconut and palm jaggery, wrapped in banana leaf cones…you remove the twigs and relish, heavenly food! Along with all the “mee goreng” and “laksa” and “Hainan chicken rice” and “rojak” and a favorite breakfast “bubor cha cha” and more, and more, all to be rounded off with a bowl full of primary cruncy “ais kachang” naturally. I grew up in Penang on absolutely fine breakfasting, fine lunching and fine dining and fine snacking off the streets if I may say so and it was all fresh hawker’s food okay, a far, far cry from the industrial junk foods we put in our mouth all day long to entertain our slew of degenerative diseases! Don’t laugh. Today we just don’t know what and how to drink and eat despite all the foodie sites good, bad and ugly proliferating on social media…
Okay, back to mo mo. In the old, old days I used to relish steamed spring rolls – these were rice flour pancakes stuffed with a savoury mix of crunchy soybean sprouts and they were utterly yummylicious, you dip them in chili-soy sauce and as per desire and enjoy. Plain too utterly edible and agreeable. Well, nowadays one may not find steamed spring rolls for love for money but there’re all these sleazy deep fried so called spring rolls which I try to ignore and sometimes ask if they can do steamed spring rolls, but sorry, they don’t do that.

So, the steamed mo mo are next best for me at least. These “potli” mo mo rounded or in crescent shape turn up ivory white and are indeed, scrumptious and depending on how the good the filling is – savoury without being chili hot but with finer flavors of ginger-garlic shredded cabbage, carrot, green beans, celery, etcetera. Six or eight mo mo to a plate and my tummy is happy with my early dinner or supper, I sleep better even if I always sleep better anyway. Of course one must dip the mo mo lightly in all the chili or other spiced up sauces which come as accompaniment, sometimes the sauces are more interesting than the drab mo mo! One may of course store the spicy sauces in fridge to stir-fry up some leftover rice or veggies the next day or use to line cheese sandwich the next day (like I used to line sandwiches with some desi pickle in a cheese sandwich once…don’t knock, non-oily lemon pickle is a marvelous combo with cheddar cheese in a sandwich), try.
Like I said there’re so many cloud kitchens doing mo mo and other oriental and Asian food around about where I stay. Cloud kitchens are just a euphemism sometimes for any hole in the wall or fancy eatery kitchen from where the Zomato and Swiggy guys come to take away home delivery parcels of food ordered over their smart phone apps. I haven’t learnt how to order food over the phone apps though, because I find the delivery even if it promises free delivery if it’s the vicinity – is actually not free at all. Top prices for delivery add up and you never know the bill may also include extra service charge which you know nothing about.
I prefer to just pick up food from nearby places where I know the food is fairly reliable say on evenings or weekends, when I’m not up to cooking for a family member of one! And invariably there’s a lot of my weekday homemade kichadi waiting for me in the fridge to be eaten up instead of chucked, I hate to do that. When it comes to food I am not a problem, but most men are – a friend of mine complained that if she didn’t have a non-vegetarian dish on the table in the evening for dinner sometimes he would get so angry that he would throw the plate at her, that is if she put some “ghass poos” for him to eat even if it is perfectly wonderful paneer palak freshly made!
IN the countries of the southeast Asia one may find various steamed foods including various mo mo and wonton versions – yes, both steamed and fried too. The steamed versions are more popular thought and in fact they do quite a bit of steaming of food and light stir-fries which deliver a light crunchy deliciousness to the veggies in…plain steamed greens too as a side dish is so agreeable to clean the palate in between say something like gobi Manchurian which lately has been coming in for a lot of flack, I don’t know why – maybe the use of aji-no-moto or something highly salted. Oriental can be over salty but it shouldn’t be. Eat too much salty and you know it will up blood pressure and I dare say it contributes to calcification of the arteries and veins and eventually boom, heart attack, the world’s first killer at a younger and younger age.
FUNNY or not funny. Whenever I eat out nowadays I look for food which is less salty, less oily, less spicy and no sugar – in vain! Somehow over the years I find eating out has become a pain because all these come lately cooks of cloud kitchens think “tasty” means more salt, more oil, more chili and so one is tasting these seasonings rather than the actual food. Don’t eat out then! I’m working on it. But why should eating out be perceived as an unhealthy habit and setting the stage for ill-health and disease? Well, think about all this, it’s your life after all and how much you respect it. These days I’m more worried about the role of master gland pineal gland and how when it dries up or starts calcifying or giving up the fight to survive ….the brain cells start dying and we have an epidemic of the dementia disease on our hands, including Alzeimer’s disease! No joking. It is something everyone over 50 years is worried about now. So what must you eat to save your brains? Tamarind amongst other things, I’m told. I’ll share another time here. All good life is enshrined in what we eat and how we eat it and the sooner you take it seriously, the better off you’ll be.