STREET FOOD (part 1)

I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the subject the longer I live here--especially since for the first few weeks we were here I barely touched street food, following the advice of a well-meaning Travel Clinic nurse who clearly does not have a food blog.

Because street food, in general, is the best.

But I haven't eaten THAT MUCH of it yet so I'm sure there will be a Street Food Blog part 2 coming up.

Liam ordering breakfast from our favourite street stall near our house

Yet another time my camera doesn't show how delicious things are. This is the amount of breakfast you can get for LESS THAN A DOLLAR at the stall in the previous photo. 3 really soft, delicious warm idly, and 3 crispy vadai, with yummy sambar and chutney.

Chili bajji! My favourite. Bajji is basically deep fried anything, and for the chili bajji they use long green peppers that aren't crazy hot. At real street stalls this kind of food is served in newspapers. Also it was raining when I took this photo.

Ok so technically NOT streetfood, but this lakeside cafe differs from street stalls only in that it has a seating area. It has all the same food. This picture depicts chili bajji in a somewhat more beautiful form than the previous image. Also samosas.

Same cafe. Fried noodles. Also, this cafe bizarrely serves ketchup with literally ANYTHING YOU ORDER. 

Okay, also not street food. Muncheez is a takeout place where you order wraps at a window. You can eat there if you perch on this ledge with a table, looming over the people selling stuff on the street next to you, as you can see in this beautifully framed photo. ALSO in this photo: Mehndi on my arm that was done on Diwali by the niece of one of the teachers at
the school I'm working at. 

IN WHICH I Give You an Easy Pasta Recipe, Liam Eats Giant Lunch, Oreos Are Better Here, and Everything Tastes Like Cardamom (and Sand)

read on for more GIANT LUNCH

In the interest of you-all-whoever-is-reading-this not getting tired of constant Facebook newsfeed items that are like I Ate A Sandwich Come Read About It OMG!!!, I’m now going to just toss a whole pile of foods into one big post. Here’s the agenda:

1. Some delicious pasta you can make in basically ten minutes.
2. yesterday’s lunch it was very delicious
3. Dark Fantasy (mysterious)
4. Various and Weird Grocery Store Desserts.

One. A RECIPE

I wasn't going to blog this recipe but then it was SO PRETTY 

Serves 2

Very Easy

like ten minutes prep time, plus cooking of the noodles time

it's so pretty but you definitely still want to eat it

Ingredients:

• rotini or other fun bite-sized pasta shapes (enough for 2 people. I can't help you there, I always make way too much)
• 2 red onions, sliced
• 2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• oil for frying
• 2 medium tomatoes, diced
• 1 green chilli, minced
• a Whole Lot Of Olives (I pretty much just made this because I love olives and we hadn't found any in grocery stores until yesterday)
• dried herbs: Basil, Oregano, Sage.
• salt and pepper

Cook your pasta. While it is cooking, start onions and garlic frying in oil. Stir a bit so that the garlic doesn't burn. When the onions are like, approaching translucence, throw in the chilli--you can include the seeds if you want it fresh and spicy. Now add the tomatoes and spices to taste/smell. Fry it until the onions and garlic and tomatoes are all mixed and juicy. Throw in the olives at the last minute so they have time to warm up. Serve over the pasta, with cheese if you want. 

Two.  Dosa Varieties

 As much as I love cooking, when a meal out is like between $1.50 and $4 CAD per person it’s hard to be like nah I’m gonna stay in the kitchen for always. 

Liam and I went for lunch at Astoria Veg, one of the highest internet-rated restaurants in Kodaikanal. It is fairly normal here for restaurants to advertise in their name whether they are “veg” or “non-veg”

onion rawa masala dosa

I got Onion Rawa Masala Dosa. A dosa (friend pancake thingy) made with Rawa (wheat flour), with onions tossed in while it’s cooking, giving it a delightful hashbrown-esque consistency (very fancy), and which is wrapped around masala potatoes. It was served with 3 chutneys—a coriander coconut one, a roasted pepper and peppercorns one, and a sambar (soon I’m going to try and make a sambar—STAY TUNED)

Liam, because he is a teenaged person, ordered 2 meals. Great for me, She Who Wishes She Could Try Entire Menu.

First he got Poori, which are excellent mostly because they look like blowfish or balloons.

or something. 

Really it’s just a thin layer of hollow pastry, and a lot of air. Served with 2 chutneys, fairly mild compared to most.

NEXT HE ORDERED THIS!

yep

Called a Paper Dosa, it was like a regular Dosa but a little crispier, and huge. It was actually not what he was aiming for: we kept seeing waiters carrying basically this same thing, but shaped like a gigantic cone. Like a 1 foot tall wizard’s hat of pastry. We guessed wrong about which menu item that would be, although luckily Liam still had the opportunity to eat a crunchy dosa larger than his head.

3. Dark Fantasy

When I return to India I will be very fat as many of you have probably guessed already. Part of that may be the fault of THESE COOKIES

which look exactly, deceivingly, like oreos, and taste like what oreos might have originally tasted in the dreams of whoever first invented them. 

4. In Which Two Grocery Store Desserts Both Taste Like Cardamom/Sand

These:

 

yet another turd-like dessert

they have the texture exactly of it you mixed brown sugar and sand in a bowl, and packed it altoghether into hard balls. And they taste very strongly of sweet cardamom.

I also bought this little can (very heavy)

Gulab Jamun

 full of little dessert balls floating in a syrup. Sometimes they come with Thali lunches. Anyway, they are basically a sugar-coated, liquid-infused version of the exact same ball of cardamom-flavoured sand.

Improved by the sweet liquid, as eating sand would be improved by a glass of water. (No but seriously, these are actually way yummier than the dry version)

Coming up soon: chick pea and okra curry, $2 chow mein (kodaikanal style)

Cheap Samosas: 2 kinds

Cheap samosas: the comfort food of every McGill student at the low price of 3 for a toonie, and available for EVEN LESS at basically every depanneur across Montreal. I've eaten them so often in the past 4 years I pretty much forgot they were Indian food.

Shockingly enough, my first actual Indian encounter with this delicious food was one purchased at a uni cafeteria. We were at the The University of Mysore, which the internet tells me has 53, 000 students, to visit the folklore museum. The campus is great, with an enormous amount of green space. We weren't allowed to take photos inside the museum but some of my favourite pieces were the sculptures outside anyway:

yes, these llamas have their tongues sticking out. .

Apparently samosas are popular student food here too. I wish I had taken a photo of the "line" to order food in the cafeteria, because it was...more like a riot. People pressing each other against a counter in a disorganized horde, shouting their orders and I have NO IDEA how anyone knew if they were grabbing their own food or someone else's off the counter. I basically ordered samosas because they were the thing that I knew what it was...

look at that flaky pastry mmmm real spices mmm

I'm sure this is not the best India has to offer because...cafeteria food. Cold cafeteria food. But so much more delicious than I'd tasted before. Crunchy pepper pods inside, and cardamom, and I don't know what other spices along with soft potatoes and carrots and who knows what else. Really, who knows? Cold cafeteria food is pretty much exactly what the travel clinic person told us not to eat but...what could possibly happen (don't answer this please anyone).


Now, for our second variety of cheap samosa, we take a step even further into the realm of cheapness, and try this:

mmmm taste of tradition

Yes, these are the potato-chip-equivalent of samosas. Like, dried and in a package. Like, hard little balls...Samosa shaped...with stuff inside it... to be honest I wanted chips but the sour cream and onion Lays that they sell here are really sweet? So this was the next best option. And it was far better, and far weirder. What more can you ask for from a Mini Samosa in a plastic package? They are trying their best.