Living in Kazakhstan: Things I like - Shashlik and Plov

Eating out is very cheap here and at times we wonder why we would bother to cook. The meal pictured cost us $8 and it was enough food and drink for all of us.

Shashlik is like a meat kebab on a stick. So far we have only eaten lamb shashlik. It is cooked on an outdoor bbq, often in the street and it smells and tastes great. I particularly like it with some bread and raw onion. Depending on where you get it you can pay anywhere from about 90c per kebab stick to $1.20. Over here they love their fat, so half of it is meat and half fat. The more you pay the better quality the meat. We have a shashlik restaurant downstairs from our apartment and there is another one around the corner.

Plov is Sammy's favourite food. It is rice and carrot cooked in oil (healthy as!) with roast lamb added at the end. For $5 we can feed our family at lunch time. Sammy loves eating it with her hands (the traditional way to eat it) and generally eats 1/3 and drops 2/3 on the floor.

On Saturday we also found a kebab shop across the road and the kebabs were great. They are quite similar to the kebabs you can buy in Aus but the extras they add are quite different. I had my choice of lamb or chicken, gerkins, grated carrot, corn, chips (fries), raw onion and tomato. There was no cheese or tabouleh in sight. The sauce choices were mayonaise and ketchup. For $7.50 we had lunch.