Indian eats

A typical northern indian meal consists of at least the three following things: daal, a watery lentil curry; potatoes, cooked with a bunch of spices; and chapati, a pita-bread like roti. To be completely honest, we weren’t too keen on any of the three. The potatos were hit and mi.ss; sometimes we really liked the way it was cooked and sometimes we didn’t. Chapati got old real quick; we prefer other carbs, like rice and pastacraved noodles and pasta. We just didn’t like the daal; we’re not lentil eating people.

Lots of restaurants offer thali, which is an entire meal for an awesome value. Usually for less than a 100 rupees ($2 CAD), you’d get a plate of rice and piece of chapati accompanied by daal, a vegetable curry, and vegetable or potato of some sort... enough food for small family.

What we really enjoyed were the paneer curries. Paneer is a cheese popular in indian cooking and is usually a source of protein for vegetarian indians (it reminds me of firm tofu in taste and texture). Our favourites were palak paneer (paneer in spinach curry) and paneer masala (paneer in a tomato curry). We liked it better with rice than with chapati.

Lassis, a yogurt based drink, were always welcomed. In Canada, mango lassis are served at most indian restaurants and consist of sweetened mango pulp and mixed with yogurt or cream—more like a mango shake. In India, the lassis are usually taken either savoury or sweet. Savoury lassis are mixed with salt and spices; sweet lassis are simply sweetened with sugar or honey. They kinda taste like yop, but minus the fruity flavour. we had a lot of lassis, under the impression that the bacteria in the yogurt is good for digestion. can't say it worked for us, but lassis sure are yummy.

Street food was nice in moderation. Most street food or snack food, also known as chaat, were deep fried, which we could only eat so much of. There were samosas, of course, always with a delicious chutney. There was aloo ghobi, roasted potatoes covered with spices. There were a whole bunch of pastry things, filled with what seemed like aloo ghobi. There was pakora, deep fried potato fritters. We also ate chaat where we have no idea what was in it: nuts, yogurt, pomegranate seeds, chutney, potatos—I think.

By our second week in India we were craving chinese food like we’ve never craved it before. We found an advertisement for korean shin ramyun instant noodles at some hotel restaurant and, of course, we enquired about it. The hotel restaurant had packets of the noodles but didn’t know how to cook it. So we bought a few packs, for lot a more than what we would pay in Canada, went back to our guesthouse, and made instant noodles for lunch. That was a very satisfying meal.

Having indian food is always a treat when we’re in Toronto. When we were in london for our honeymoon, we had chicken tikka masala for dinner 4 out of the 7 nights we were there. But in india, it was a slightly different song. We were pretty much suck of curry by day 5... don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t that the food wasn’t good. There’s just something called too much curry for us. We found it a little too rich and heavy for every single meal; the amount of butter and oil in curries didn’t sit well in our stomachs (plus, daniel got a bad bout of delhi belly, otherwise known as diarrhea, which made him hesitant to eat). We started visiting a lot of those "German bakeries" that cater to the tourist longing for some western food.

- emily