Report from India, Part 12: More food: A culinary walk through our trip, Days 1 - 3

Day 1:

After a red-eye flight, exchanging euros for rupees, a joyous reunion with F and not quite enough sleep, Day 1 began with waking up later than planned (but don't worry, it's India and hardly anyone is 'on time' anyway; lateness up to an hour is considered par for the course.)

Breakfast: hot watered-down milk for the cornflakes (and also for tea for the others); there was also rock sugar to sprinkle on top

bananas, that tasted somehow different (not quite so sweet?)

red-tasting jam (listed in the ingredients were “nature-identical and artificial flavours”...I'd love to know which fruit tastes identical to that particular shade of red...)

3 slices of white toast (Why has everyone decided that this white squishy stuff is desirable? Freshly toasted it’s okay, but by the time you get to the third slice, it has cooled into cardboard... Germans pretty much rock the bread scene—more types of bread than any other country AND whole wheat is allowed.)

Then, depending on your choice of “veg.” (short for vegetarian, which is the standard around here) or “non-veg.” you had either a chilla (like an eggless crepe, made of graham flour, in this case with onions and some spices) OR an omelet (because eggs count as not vegetarian) with onions and chilis.

Lunch at the fast food restaurant:

Raj Kachoree: a hollow crispy puff, filled with some beans (I think mung beans were present), lightly sweetened yogurt; a few sweet drizzled sauces (I think there was tamarind sauce and a pistachio sauce)--this dish was to provide balance for the spicy.

Special Tila (i.e. a sample of several things:

raita (generally yogurt with cilantro and some sort of fresh vegetable—cucumber, carrot, tomato)

dahl (here it is quite thin and individual small black lentils float in it—rather unlike the thick green lentil mash that my mom learned to make from our Indian neighbor. She must have come from a different region/state.)

the daily vegetable

a rolled papadam (thin fried chickpea cracker)

naan (flat bread prepared in butter)

_(I forget)_ (spicy chickpea sauce)

milkshake (….nothing surprising here. See Part 4 for my thoughts on this :) )

Dinner at the hostel:

dahl (again the soupier version with floating black lentils)

vegetables (fairly dry in comparison; seemed to have been sauteéd in oil but long enough that all crisp freshness is gone (There's a rule in India “Wash it, peel it, boil it or leave it”...too many bacteria/diseases can be gotten from fresh produce. Luckily bananas are always safe. Water too can be sketchy, so get it from a safe source or boil/filter it as well.) Still, despite lacking freshness, the vegetables had a nice flavor.

Another sauce (also vegetables and potatoes in it, vaguely tomato-based)

rice

roti (which apparently stems from the Sanskrit word for—wait for it—“bread”—I know them by the name of chapati! Yay! These are flatbread 'cooked'/'baked' without fat on a skittle. They are made from whole wheat flour and water but no levening agent (vs. “naan” which is made with white flour and yeast. (However, my mom makes chapatis with our normal bread dough :) )

curd (tasted just like my mom's homemade plain yogurt w/ nothing in it)

Some ate with their right hands—sauce mixed into the rice with the fingertips and then carefully put into the mouth; others ate using pieces of chapati (torn with the fingers of the right hand—the left hand is seen as unclean because it completes duties in the bodily nether regions...) to scoop up the sauce/rice.

Dessert: ice cream. Flavor? Pink. Just pink. (Okay, there might have been the slightest hint of something trying to resemble strawberry...)

Day 2:

Breakfast: (same as Day 1) F decided that he didn't mind drinking the hot milk plain but thought it strange on cornflakes (guaranteed to speed up the sogging). I decided I didn't mind it on cornflakes, but found it odd plain. Go figure :) (As a child we often had oatmeal or cornmeal mush and sometimes we added cold cereal to the mix. Not so different.)

(F surmises that the tradition of hot milk has to do with the need for pasteurization. However apparently this is just 'what you do' in India (according to F's Indian mentor for his Master's Thesis). You eat cornflakes with hot milk. You drink your tea with hot milk. Therefore the milk is served hot.)

Lunch (at a Tamil (in southern India) restaurant):

Sauces: dahl, savory coconut yogurt sauce, spicier orange sauce also with mustard seeds in it (mustard seeds seem to be in nearly everything)

Samosas (potato, pea filling in fried dough tetrahedron)

Masala dosa (giant crispy crepe with spiced potato filling—guess what else was in there? Mustard seeds; it was rolled up and folded kind of like a tortilla, but more square and compact)

Dessert: mango lassi & banana lassi (fresh and delicious!)

Look at all the options!

And remember our fast food adventures? Seems like Indians really have no need for lines. If it works just to sidle up to the counter and place your order whenever, then go ahead. Luckily the 'crowd' was fairly small, otherwise we may have ended up lassi-less. (And that would have been tragic!)

Dinner: we fended for ourselves with some simple bread and cheese—as well as some butter cookies we found in the apartment :)

Day 3:

Breakfast:

We ate cereal and 'milky milk' (as opposed to??), that we had bought at the little store the night before. No, the milk was not hot, nor watered-down :) But it did come in a plastic bag! Just 500mL. (F tells me milk-in-a-bag also exists in Germany and in Argentina (but both in 1 Liter bags)...go figure :) ) Also 'low-fat' or, as they call it here 'toned' milk is 3%, 'full fat' 6%. (What are they feeding Indian cows? It must be all the meditation. So that's what the cows do all day when they sit on the side of the road!)

Lunch:

We tided ourselves over at the Red Fort by buying ice cream—good old on a stick/in a pre-packaged cone.

Then, once we'd come back to the apartment, we set out exploring. The first place didn't seem to have savory food anymore (or maybe just not what I asked about?..we couldn't clarify, because they didn't speak English), so we kept walking. At the next shop, we saw some boys enjoying a fried triangle sandwich-sort-of-thing. We asked what they were having and ordered two :) They called it a cheese bun or something. I didn't notice much of what I'd call cheese, nor what they usually have as cheese here (paneer), but either way it was tasty.

It was a puff pastry square, folded on the diagonal and filled with coleslaw, a sprinkling of nuts and little hard crackers (these are often in spicy snack mixes) and then some thick lentil dahl (or something green lentilly). There was a sweet/spicy red sauce that we dipped it in. (We just ignored the tomato ketchup they gave us with it.) Yum!

Dinner:

Our Indian take-out (ordered by F's mentor for us) came in a metal stack of bowls/containers.

1 dish held fried puri (fried round flatbread)

another held a thin tomato-based curry with peas and chunks of paneer (a sort of cheese—the only kind I've ever seen/heard of in India)

sautéed, salted (I'm sure there were a few more spices) vegetables (there was potato and then something else..small seeds like a pepper, but the flesh consistency of cooked zucchini and a skin resembling green eggplant..who knows! But it was tasty too!)

And dessert – yum! Sweet balls of ground pistachios or cashews...some nut...vaguely like freshly ground peanut butter (so of course I liked it :) & F did too) It seemed to have been thickened with some sort of flour so that it formed a crumbly ball, almost like slightly dry sugar cookie dough.