TOV AIMAG, Mongolia — A growing pile of sheep bones sits in a bucket in the back of the ger like bloody cord wood. My guide and a family of Mongolian nomads are preparing my dinner, the long-awaited Mongolian barbecue.

It isn’t long-awaited because I am in the back of beyond, sitting in a Mongolian tent rubbing against a sand dune smack dab in the middle of the most sparsely populated country on Earth. And it’s not because I’ve grown up eating the sweet-tangy variety of grilled meats and sauces on a broad Mongolian grill.

I’m salivating because Mongolia is the Gobi desert of world cuisine, and I want something, anything, that tastes good.

What is Mongolian cuisine? You like mutton? You’d better. There’s mutton. Then there’s more mutton. When you get tired of that, you have . . . well, mutton.

In 16 days traveling the mud, gravel, dirt and pockmarked roads of northern and central Mongolia, I don’t see a single chicken.

Mongolia will always have a spot in my heart, if not my stomach. First, it’s one of the three most beautiful countries I’ve ever visited. I traveled through lime-green forests, in vast meadows covered in wildflowers under snowcapped peaks and along crystal clear lakes.

Second, it is my 88th country, and in 33 years of international travel it has without question the most pitiful food of any country I have visited. That includes Egypt, where I lived on $5 a day for a month.

I’m traveling with seasoned road veterans: a Dutch couple, a French photographer and a Taiwanese schoolteacher. During our evenings carbo loading on imported Russian chocolate from village markets, we determine that among us, we’ve visited about 120 countries.

For most of 16 days, my lunches and dinners consist of mutton with a combination of potatoes, carrots, onions and occasionally bell peppers with either rice or noodles. Sometimes I get chopped up pieces of beef. The only fruits I see in the countryside are apples and oranges. The oranges are inedible.

That’s it. You could fit Mongolia’s entire cuisine on a Denny’s napkin.

Mongolia’s food star, however dim, is mutton. For those not from Mongolia or Wyoming, that’s an adult sheep. They’re everywhere, and sheep are cheap. In itself, mutton is only slightly bland, but if there’s another meat that has more fat on it, jackals wouldn’t eat it.

Mongolians serve mutton in only a handful of ways. The main dish is called buuz, a mutton dumpling with the meat folded into steamed pasta shells.

In one tiny cafe in the dusty village of Ikh Tamir, while Mongolian cops sing karaoke on the tiny TV, I see a middle- aged woman in a white smock place flattened dumplings in a fryer. That’s my khuushuur. This is the fried version of buuz. They come out as greasy as a Hooters cheeseburger.

Then there’s tsuivan, a common dish that’s a sloppy pile of mutton, noodles and vegetables. Adding to the blandness — along with the ketchup and chili sauce that are standard travel tools for Mongolian travelers — is bad kitchen standards. At one cafe, Irene, the Taiwanese who ordered tsuivan, found a live worm.

“Traditionally and historically nomadic Mongolians have eaten food that is at hand,” says Murray Benn, an Australian who has lived in Mongolia for 18 months and runs the Fairfield Guest House, Cafe and Bakery.

The Fairfield, in the Central Mongolian valley town of Tsetserleg, is an oasis in Mongolia’s culinary wasteland. Its foreigner menu — big English breakfasts and a “Fairfield burger” that would sell well in Texas — attracts hordes of tourists who can’t look at another sheep.

Benn says the food scene has improved dramatically in just a few years when no vegetables were available in winter. I do find hanging from hooks at crude road ide stands a white fish that tastes deliciously like smoked mackerel. But Mongolia will never join its Asian neighbors among food destinations for a simple reason.

“It is harder to grow vegetables in the severe climate,” he says. “The growing period is 100 days. Also, some share the Buddhist belief that they shouldn’t till the ground, a belief still held by some countryside families.”

Mongolia, at about 4,000 feet altitude, may have the most pleasant July temperature in the world. Every day is 70-75 degrees with a bright, cloudless blue sky, a warm sun and a nice cool breeze coming down from Siberia.

But the winter is viciously cold. The grim capital of Ulan Bator, while boasting a growing number of ethnic restaurants, has the architecture of its former Soviet yoke and weather to match. It ranges from 20 below to 30 above. Northern Mongolia is worse.

Roads can’t be paved. Livestock can’t live. People can’t stay in one place.

This cycle has gone for, oh, 1,000 years. I’m firmly convinced Genghis Khan conquered land from Korea to Hungary just so he wouldn’t have to go home to eat.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, his Mongol hordes viewed food as fuel and nothing more. They traveled light with no support group. Chuck wagons were another 800 years away.

When they got hungry, they hunted and ate the wildlife around them. When their horses died, they ate them, too. Sometimes his men placed raw meat under their saddle. By the end of a day of pillaging, the meat had been tenderized.

Genghis Khan took all of the best of his conquered lands back to Mongolia. Architects. Mathematicians. Designers. Ironworkers. Engineers. I read nothing about chefs.

When the Soviets ran Mongolia from the late 1920s to 1990, they did nothing with the infrastructure and shunned tourism. Forget food. Joseph Stalin’s favorite food was Ukrainians.

So here I am in a traditional Mongolian ger seeing my Mongolian barbecue look nothing like BD’s Mongolian Grill on the 16th Street Mall. As I read later, America’s version of a Mongolian grill began in Taiwan in the 1970s. They pass along an urban myth that the Mongol hordes cooked an array of meats on their metal shields.

Unfortunately, their shields were leather. Nevertheless, the fad caught on, and now even Mongolians flock to the grukks. BD’s? It’s an American chain. They have one in Ulan Bator.

The authentic barbecue I’m eating is jazzed up with some rare salt and pepper and a spice called vigora. We’re all served big legs of mutton, and we tear off the surprisingly tasty meat like 13th-century Mongols.

Then we have this weird urge to plunder Persia.

John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.

If you go

Fairfield Guest House, Cafe and Bakery, Tusiah Zam Rd., Tsetserleg, Mongolia, 976-(0)1332-21096.

Ertnii Nutag, 13th District, 18th Region, Ulan Bator. High-end local Mongolian restaurant.