Week 15, Sweets

I’m not a big fan of sweet things and dessert back home, but one of the fun things about India is that all the food is different. We have a favorite sweet shop on MG Road here in Pune that we sometimes stop at on the way home form work. Here are Jenny and Susan buying our usual selection of chocolate and mango barfi, and kaju katri.


My favorite desert is gulab jamun (one of the things we learned to make at Pratima’s house the other weekend). The first time I had it was in my first week here, and I had no idea what it was. They are little fried dough balls made mostly out of milk powder that are soaked in a sugar water syrup… YUM! Here they are before and after cooking.


At home I don’t drink coffee at all, I only drink tea. I love the tea with milk that they drink in England, but I also like herbal tea, which they do better in the US. Here they drink another variety of tea called Chai. (I drink chai tea at the coffee shop formerly known as Beaners in Michigan, but it’s not quite the same.) Here they boil a kind of black tea in milk, and add spices like ginger, cardamom and cinnamon; it’s really good. We get it in the office in the morning and the afternoon, and they always offer it to you whenever you visit someone’s house or other offices. A few times I’ve been given coffee instead, and you have to drink it to be polite; it turns out to be more of a chai-coffee, which isn’t too bad. I could get used to drinking it.

And just to make it seem like we’re not eating only junk food, I decided to include sithaphal (a funny fruit). It looks a little like and artichoke on the outside and is quite gooy inside; it’s made of lots of little cells, each of which contains a black seed.