What's for dinner?

Many of you have asked about the food here, so I'll attempt to shed some light on the subject.  As I have mentioned before, we get lunch every day in the office.  The manager asked us when we arrived what kind of food we'd like, and we said to bring us Indian food, so he's been obliging us.  He's been doing a great job of keeping it interesting, going so far as to bring a different chicken curry every day for about a week that was from a different region of India.  This has been really helpful, as it's somewhat bewildering to figure out what everything is sometimes. For example, here's the menu for a restaurant that is right across the street.  If I didn't sit here and google everything prior to going, I'd have no idea what the hell it was.  We've not been to that place yet, because it's mostly a lot of snacks, or things you'd find as street food, plus it's strictly vegetarian, or "veg" as they'd say here.  We'll try it eventually.

Speaking of work food, we got these last week:

Those are called Vada Pav.  They're essentially fried balls of mashed potato, but there's more to it. There's turmeric and spices mashed in with the potato.  The bread seemed unnecessary at first, but it was all nice and warm, and was really tasty.  The idea is to sprinkle some of the red powder over it, then add one or more of those chili peppers, which had been salted.  Those peppers were initially not too hot, but 15 minutes later we'd all finished a bottle of water, and were sniffling and wiping our eyes.

Speaking of spices, I'm often asked if the food is spicy.  For the most part, nothing has been ridiculously hot.  That being said, there are a lot of spices in the food (it's science!).  One of my favorite Indian foods is Biryani, which is a rice dish that can either be veg or non-veg (that's seriously what they say). There are two main ways to make it, but the most common in restaurants is "dum ki biryani" which is common to central India.  It's made by marinating the meat (if included) in spices, cooking the rice in more spices, then cooking the chicken a bit, adding the cooked rice on top of it, then a layer of caramelized onions and herbs, then another layer of rice and onions, and finally adding saffron flavored milk over the whole thing.  It's then sealed up and cooked through.  When you first open up a good Biryani it smells like perfume from all those spices and flavors.  I hope I'm able to make that when I get home.

We get a lot of curries here, which most of you probably know is just chunks of meat/vegetables in a sauce, or what they refer to as the gravy.  These dishes are a staple here, and it's been a bit of an adjustment for me, as I'm not used to such a soupy kind of dish as a main course.  They normally serve them with a bread of some sort, normally naan, paratha, or roti to mop up the tasty sauce.  The breads are a whole other category that we've only just began to experience.  The favorites of these that I've had so far are (links to recipes for each):

Chicken Tikka Makhani (also known as butter chicken)
Kolhapuri chicken
Palak chicken
Matar paneer

Yes, you're right, that's a lot of chicken.  We're getting sort of sick of it, quite honestly.  I'm thinking I'll be eating a lot of steak when I get home.  We do also visit places that have foods we're used to at home, but we often find that something gets lost in translation.  A dish that sounds good because it is something you'd get at home comes out with something just not right about it.  I do have a tradition that I was able to maintain this year.  Everyone has a food that if they could eat it every day with no consequences, they would.  For me that food is donuts.  Because eating donuts all the time is obviously counter to longevity, I only allow myself to eat donuts one day per year, on my birthday.  Last Friday was my birthday, and thankfully there's a Krispy Kreme in the neighborhood just south of mine.

I could eat all of those.  Watch me.  

We got those on our way to the office, and proceeded to get a nice sugar high.  It was nice to be able to have something that felt like home, and they were exactly right, probably due to being an established chain despite being all the way over here.

Something that's been an adjustment here that was totally unexpected is the milk they sell here.  Evidently this is common in Europe as well, but none of it is refrigerated.  It's what they call "ultra high temperature" pasteurized, and combined with an aseptic (sterile) container, it's shelf stable at room temperature for up to 6 months until it's opened.  You also find something called "toned" milk, which I don't like at all.  It all tastes sort of funky compared to what I'm used to.  Even weirder, they sell a lot of it in these sealed plastic bags, and I have no idea what you do with them once you open them to keep them from spilling all over the place.  To tie in with what I said in my last post, about the bikes, there are guys that ride around with these canisters attached to their bikes, and they deliver these bags of milk to people/businesses that purchase them.  This is done even in the torrential downpours of the monsoon, or when it's 110 degrees outside:

Get your weird milk here!

That's it for now...it's time to go eat!