Thali and Masala: Eating through India

I spent a weekend in Paris when I was in college, and I always tell people that I just ate my way through the city. I traveled with four friends who were also on my study abroad program, and one of them suggested a new snack every hour. We had crepes from a street vendor, then found ourselves in a pastry shop soon after. We stuffed ourselves on a four course meal at a small restaurant, then walked immediately into the Häagen Dazs next door. I took this trip before I went vegan, obviously, and I pretty much consumed my lifetime allotment of butter and cream on that trip. Since then, eating while traveling in a foreign country has been a little difficult. Indian food, with its vegetarian tradition, was something I was looking forward to. I felt like in India, I could actually experience the food culture easily, without relying on plain noodles from the 7-11 like I did in Japan.

And the food definitely did not disappoint. I wrote a bit about our food experiences on this blog while we were still in India, but I thought I would expand upon this here and show you some more pictures. Our days with the Modi family were the best. The Modis practice Jainism like most Gujaratis, where finding meat at restaurants is actually uncommon. We shared breakfast and lunch with the Modi family, eating a variety of grains, roti, daal, and cooked vegetable dishes that included a lot of eggplant, which Theo and I loved. Each evening we attended a wedding event, where we ate full meals on little plates as we mingled with the other wedding guests. The food at these events was a little more varied and usually included a hot soup served in small glasses, traditional Gujarati recipes, and Indian interpretations of Chinese and Mexican cuisine. (Theo got a good laugh at the enchiladas.) Chinese food in particular is incredibly popular in India and always good. I ate a lot of Chinese style noodles with chili on our trip, strangely enough.

After the wedding, we traveled to Delhi and through Rajasthan, where we found more meat, but also more food that we recognized from our experiences at Indian restaurants in the States. Our hotel in Delhi had a great restaurant on the roof, where we had the best Aloo Gobi I've ever had. When we got to Jaisalmer, we took a camel safari and camped out in the desert. Our tour guides cooked us a full meal, with vegetables, daal, and chapati an open campfire, which amazed all of us. The vegetables were great, especially the tomatoes and cabbage, but we did have to deal with a bit of sand...

All of the food was incredibly inexpensive and delicious. We didn't have a bad meal while in India. Okay, the greasy food from the bus station restaurant wasn't real great. We bought food on the train from Jodhpur back to Ahmedabad, but food at most train stations was rather limited, and we pretty much subsided on bags of potato chips while we were traveling. Most bottled drinks in India were incredibly sweet. I swore I was drinking mango juice at our hotel in Delhi until I saw them fill the juice dispenser with a container of orange juice. Theo enjoyed Thums Up, while I was partial to Limca (which tasted a bit like Fresca to me). But my favorite drink was fresh sugar cane juice. You really can't get more pure sugar than that! At one of the wedding events held in the late morning, servers offered small glasses of green juice, which was just fresh sugar cane crushed in the largest juicer I've ever seen. It honestly looked a bit like a wood chipper.

We returned to Ahmedabad at the end of our trip to catch our flight home. After we shopped for gifts on our last night in the city, we went to a thali restaurant. Thali is basically a bunch of regional dishes in small bowls on a large tray. They're also all-you-can-eat, so about five servers hovered around us refilling our dishes any time it looked like we might get low on something. I tend to clean my plate, but I had to learn to leave food in the bowls, or they just would have kept refilling them!

I was inspired by all the wonderful cuisine from throughout our trip, I just had to pick up a vegetarian Indian cookbook in India. I hope to have some of my friends over to enjoy some of these recipes soon. बोन एपीटिट

Wedded Wine and Dine

Just a few weeks after I proposed to Ambi in Agra, the Buck family con-fab kicked into high gear to start planning next year's nuptials. Once my plans for a pirate themed party were quickly sunk, and the baby blue leisure suits with a dazzling disco design were discarded, Tammy and Amber got down to business. And to be frank, I'm fine with that. I'm playing Polonius and it's already Act IV. Well, to thine own self be true, right? This is Ambi's drama, so she gets to direct the drama.

We're still about a year and a half away from 09-10-11; we have plenty of time right? Well, not exactly. We've already secured the church and the reception hall, and really, not a moment too soon. In 2008, September was the fourth most popular month for weddings, with its popularity increasing year by year. It could be the milder weather, the decreased costs of avoiding the summer crush, or even for a time when more friends and family have a weekend free of events or other familial obligations. Both our selected church and reception hall called to confirm our date mentioning that several couples had inquired about Sept. 10, 2011. And here I thought we were a bit early to be planning so much!

On Sunday, June 6, Ambi and I met with our vegan caterer, a lovely lass named Lisa. Lisa invited us to her home to share some samples she had prepared. To say she did an excellent job would be an understatement. We had submitted a number of suggestions to represent our appreciation for global cuisine. I'm sure we'll eventually scratch out a post about our wedding theme, (which fits nicely into the scope of this blog.)

I thought we'd share a few pictures of the delightful delicacies Chef Lisa prepared for our consideration. We haven't fully decided what the menu will look like, but it will certainly reflect our love of food and international flavor.
For the appetizer, Lisa presented some homemade baked baguettes topped with a spicy veggie sausage and vegan cheese. She included samples with a tasty cucumber cream cheese dill spread, and toasted for pita triangles for dipping in a delectable baba ganoush.

I'm a big fan of baba ganoush and this was awesome.

Look how happy Ambi looks.

Since we're presenting a full course meal, we also tried a salad with Lisa's own pomegranate vinaigrette. I'm not a fruity dressing fan, but her balsamic mixture was really good.


When we first began looking for a caterer that could do what we wanted, we first and foremost established that our meal must be vegan and should be able to put even the strictest of carnivores at ease with an eye pleasing fare. People will buy into quirky vegan tree hugging hippies for only so long. They try some of my "abnormal" cuisine at family functions, but pigging out on it? That's a whole 'nother ball o' wax. We want to prove that delicious rib sticking meals are possible. Secondly, we want the cuisine to be representative of our international travels.

This seitan stroganoff was simply awesome. Lisa made her seitan from scratch and it was delicious, it had a much different flavor than most of the commercially available seitan. She also used noodles and bedded it with mushrooms and peas for a hefty and savory bite. Of course, stroganoff has its roots in Russia, but it has remained popular throughout the world. Don't believe me? Just ask Ambi.

It was also important for us to have a dish representing where we got engaged. India will always be special to us for that reason, and not just because it's where Ambi received her ring. Indian cuisine was a favorite of ours even before we traveled to Ahmedabad. After traveling through much of northern India and the Golden Triangle, we discovered new flavors that we just had to find back here. Lisa made a south Indian dish for us to try, composing a light curry with cilantro and a mixture of crisp tasty veggies.


When we tried her kale and potato enchiladas, I turned to Ambi and said, "Sorry, babe, these are better than yours." They had a strong smoky ancho flavor, but the spiciness of a strong jalenpeño pepper. We're both big fans of cilantro, and this was fresh from Lisa's garden.

Doesn't that look delicious?

Ambi really enjoyed both desserts Lisa made, a fruit tart mixture of blueberries and blackberries drizzled with agave nectar. Lisa's friend Mark begged her to bake apples for us (methinks someone wanted leftovers), and Amber devoured them happily.


All told, we had a wonderful time with Lisa who was gracious in opening her home to spend some time with us. As I said at the beginning of the blog, this is Amber's show, and I think she was very happy with such a good start on the menu. If everything goes as smoothly, as this first tasting, the wedding should be a breeze. (I know, I know, easy for me to say.)

Sorry it's been so long since either of us sat down and typed out a blog. Blame my YouTube addiction and Amber's studies. I promise she'll be back soon with a blog on how we ate our way across India.