Week 10, Food

After the first two weeks when everything I ate gave me a stomach ache and made me ill, I have really started enjoying trying all the different food here. I’ve eaten at many Indian restaurants in the UK, but they all serve the same westernized Indian dishes, with little variety from one restaurant to the next. We’re trying to be more adventurous now and sometimes order things where we have no idea what they are.

One good way to try new things is to order a ‘thali’. A thali is a big plate served with lots of little pots containing different dishes. Here I am with Susan at my favorite thali restaurant; they come around and keep refilling the empty pots, so you can eat more of the stuff you like and leave the stuff you don’t like. The only problem with thalis is that you never know what the names of the dishes are in case you want to order them again in the future.


One new thing I have discovered here is a ‘dosa’. The first few weeks we were here, Jenny lived off dosas. A dosa is a kind of thin pancake or crepe made of rice flour, with a potato filling. It is always served with a white and a red sauce, neither of which I know what they really are. It’s a south Indian dish and there are about a million variations. The standard one is called masala dosa, which is what I just described. Here, Chris and Euan are eating paper dosas, which are super thin and really big. Then there’s rava dosas, which use wheat flour that makes it a bit crispier, and onion dosas which have onion in the batter.


My newest favorite food is a ‘sizzler’. It’s everything on one plate, which is basically like a hot frying pan so the food sizzles. It’s like how fajitas are served on a hot plate in the US. This one that I had at Bounty Sizzler Restaurant was spicy paneer and mushrooms with rice, fries, cabbage, carrots, beans and cauliflower.


For lunch everyday we pick up a ‘tiffin’ from a restaurant around the corner from our flat, the purple Royal Café. We just started this service; for the first month Jenny and Susan shared a different tiffin service that made my stomach hurt and I made my own food. We get rice, dhal (a weird yellow lentil stew; a staple in the Indian diet), two curries (often palak (spinach) and a mixed vegetable curry), chapatti (an Indian flat bread) and a papad (a.k.a. papadum in UK Indian restaurants); it’s kind of like a take-away thali. I really like our tiffin, except for now we don’t like eating dinner at that restaurant anymore because eating their food twice in the same day is a little much. Here’s a photo of our 4-tiffin that we use to transport our food.