Culinary Delights and (Mis)Adventures

*I love food. If you don’t enjoy eating, you won’t enjoy this post – you’ve been warned.

Now that our stove is finally in working order, the girls and I have been cooking almost every night. With no internet at home and not inclined to wander out after dark (for obvious reasons) our lifestyles have been rather solitary; spending the evenings reading,  cooking, chatting about work, dreaming up the next day’s menu.

The difficult part about cooking here is that there are always certain ingredients that we can’t get, especially since we’re not in a big city. Sure, the markets have lots of spices, but wanting to steer away from curry every meal we’ve been trying to cook some familiar foods, and that’s tricky. In terms of Western foods, we can’t get cheese except paneer (basically just cottage cheese of unknown origin), no basil or parsley, celery, lettuce, mushrooms are questionable, meat is difficult to buy without slaughtering the whole chicken, I haven’t seen fish anywhere…half of the recipes we come across require something that we can’t find here in Hubli. Even having milk is difficult – all the milk purchased here has to be boiled first before consumption. Something about pasteurization and it tastes quite different since it’s buffalo’s milk rather than cow’s milk, I believe. No berries, and fruits are limited to tropical ones, which I have no problems with but my roommate doesn’t like them, so grocery shopping gets tricky.

So for most things we cook, we’ve had to be creative and improvise. And load up on the garlic and onions, ‘cause there’s a lot of those here (attractive, I know).

Add to that we don’t have microwaves or ovens, so we can’t bake anything. I’ve been looking up desserts steamed or cooked with a pressure cooker, but again, it’s hard to find ingredients like vanilla extract or caramel syrup.

We were going to make hummus so we soaked chickpeas, and for some odd reason the next day when we lifted the lid it was foamy and smelled like spoiled curdled sour milk. It was so nasty we threw it out, and now we're trying to solve the mystery of why that happened by emailing our respective mothers. Suspects include the water being too hot, there were rotten chickpeas in the batch, the container held spoiled milk before...etc. We got it right the second time by sticking the uncovered container in the fridge to avoid bugs, and without a food processor we chopped and mashed all the chickpeas by hand, added olive oil, garlic, and it worked! Although it was so much effort I’m not sure if we’ll attempt that again.

Despite not having a lot of familiar food items, South Indian cuisine is still variegated enough to keep our taste buds entertained and happy. In fact, while there are lots of things that I’ve never come across at the market, like custard apples, and the other stuff I don’t even know the names of which we take pictures of then hit up Wikipedia the next day. Although I was totally mislead by the ‘butter fruit’. I attempt to try something new each visit to the market, and I’d picked up a ‘butter fruit’…which turned out to be a larger variation of an avocado. We didn’t know this and cut into it before it was ripe, and couldn’t do much else with it afterwards and though we tried softening it by steaming, it tasted really bitter after that and we couldn’t eat it. I was kind of disappointed it wasn’t some exotic fruit, but at least I know there’s avocado available! Guacamole’s going on the menu!

There’s a lady who cooks a massive amount of food and delivers it to our workplace every lunch hour for a set fee, so I do get my daily helping of Indian dishes. Usually accompanied with some sort of dough thing (roti, chapatti, poori) the curries are variations of okra, beans, peas, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, cauliflower. There’s a side bowl of curd (which is the best thing for taking the heat off when the curry is too spicy) and marinated pickles. Then usually there’s a big thing of rice, either plain steamed rice, curd rice, fried rice loaded with nuts and spices…you get the idea. On Saturdays we get desserts too, but Indian sweets are VERY sweet, and this coming from someone who has a major sweet tooth. You know that scratchy feeling you get in your throat when you have too much honey or maple syrup by itself? Indian desserts induce this.  Everyday, lunch is a very communal affair. The room where we eat is small, containing a long table, where everyone eats together. It’s the most social time of the day. Most of the utensils are made of tin, which never quite makes sense to me since the metal conducts heat when the food or drink is hot.

There are little food carts everywhere, selling fresh juices, rice, paneer burgers, little buns in dishes, sliced fruits, sweets…one of my roommate’s favourites is the corn cart, where for 10 rupees they take an ear of corn, peel it, put it atop hot coals, fan and cook it, then rub salty seasoning on it. Since she goes there so much she got to talking to the corn guy, and found out that he sells about 100 a day, which means he makes INR 1000 per day – pretty good money by Indian standards.