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
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