Food!
on Jana Gana Mana (India), 08/Mar/2011 03:41, 34 days ago
Quite a few people (both from the UK and India) have asked us about what we eat - presumably to check that we aren't starving - so I thought I'd share will you some of the thrills!!Our kitchen has a gas stove, with two rings - so all of our cooking needs to be using this - no oven, grill, microwave etc. The only "luxury" we have splashed out on is an electric kettle. We are trying to keep kitchen utensils to a minimum (and are trying to compromise on this definition!!) - so we have a cooking spoon, knife and slice/flipper, two saucepans, a small frying pan and a mixing bowl. I am finding the lack of facilities severely limits my creativity, so those of you in the UK will be pleased that I am looking forward to "cooking properly" on out return!We do a weekly shop at Big Bazaar (an Indian version of Kwik Save) where we buy household stuff, crackers, biscuits, rice, noodle, dried pulses, processed cheese slices, orange juice etc. Big Bazaar however doesn't sell milk, meat or alcohol. There is a specific Mother Diary shop in our enclave, open between specific (and rather odd) hours, that supplies milk in a bag or you can insert a coin into a dispensing machine. There's also a chicken shop which sells extremely fresh chicken - these arrive, killed and cut up into pieces in front of you, by men who sit on the work surface and hold the knife between their toes! There is only really chicken& mutton available - probably pork& beef would be available if you knew where to look! So we now enforced vegetarians and eat chicken as an occasional luxury.In our enclave there are small shops for day-to-day bits (mainly diet coke - I should think their requirements have gone up tenfold!!). There are also fruit& veg sellers, who start the day as a market, their "stalls" on bike trailers, so they then cycle round the enclave and then set up camp somewhere. I now have a regular veg man who is very patient with me and doesn't insist I buy a kilo of everything! We both eat lunch at work and then in the evening tend to cook spicy vegetarian something and rice - the something maybe mixed vegtables, chickpeas in a tomato sauce, cauliflower, potato and peas. There is pasta available too - so maybe tomato& garlic sauce with pasta. There aren't any tinned tomatoes - so I tend to peel a kilo, chop them up and simmer to concentrate them - this can then be added to a couple of dishes.We've recently started making chapatis - but these need a little more practice! And if all else fails - there is a really good little shop in the enclave that sells great freshly made samosas for Rs5 with spicy dipping sauce!!We are both losing weight (not a bad thing!) but I think that is mainly because we are eating less junk& convenience food. There also aren't lots of things to "pick" on and it isn't as easy just to "pop out to get".....hmmmm which gets me thinking.........wine, cheese, beefburgers, kettle crisps, Cadbury's dairy milk chocolate.......