Food and bonus rush hour video

Food in India seems to fall into two opposing camps: exactly what you’d expect, and nothing like you’d expect. Every Indian restaurant offers a nearly identical menu listing every common Indian dish, including a “Chinese” section. Indians love Chinese food. I haven’t tried this Indian Chinese food myself, but I hear it’s either really spicy, or really salty. The Indian restaurant dishes fall solidly into the “what you’d expect” category, once you recognize the dishes by name.

On the other hand are dishes named in English, where the name conjures up an image of something an American would understand and be familiar with. Veg sandwich, for example. You’d think you’d know what you were getting, but a friend ordered that and ended up with something kind of pasty on a spongy bread. And it was spicy. Veg soup sounds pretty self-explanatory, but what arrived was a thick, deep brown kind of broth with noodles. A green salad means a plate of sliced vegetables, with no lettuce or leaves of any kind. Ginger honey tea was a slice of dried ginger and a ginger gel, partially dissolved into the hot water.  So weird.  And again, spicy.

One exception to this general rule was a meal at a Mexican restaurant in a really touristy area of Mumbai, near the Taj Mahal hotel. The meal was actually reminiscent of Mexican food, and plus, the staff knew what gluten was. The more dishes they told me I couldn’t have, the more delighted I became. It sounds ridiculous, but I always feel like I’m in good restaurant hands when a waiter is telling me I shouldn’t eat anything. (I got fish.)

Veg Pulav

So, I’ve decided that the safest thing to do is order the common Indian dishes where I know what they’re made of, vehemently gesticulate and repeat, “nehi maida, nehi atta, nehi hing” (no wheat flour, no other word for wheat flour, no spice that often has flour in it), and hope for the best. I’ve basically given up on trying to avoid dairy in restaurants, since ghee just pops up out of nowhere. For the record, I almost always order veg pulav, which is basically rice with cooked vegetables and considered to be on the less spicy side. It still sets my face on fire.

I guess the third category is food we’ve been cooking at home. It’s kind of like a camping diet plus fresh fruits and vegetables. Rice, potatoes, tuna, other canned food, cereal. One of us just graduated from culinary school and has turned out some fantastic meals from the above ingredients.

Recently, two of us attempted to replicate some canned salmon-potato patties our chef had invented a few meals earlier. We mixed together canned salmon, mayonnaise, mashed potatoes, and caramelized onions. Instead of frying them, as she had, we spread the mixture in the bottom of a glass dish and baked it.

Our attempt at dinner

I’ll digress here to mention a story which has become family lore. When my mom was a kid, my grandma prepared a layer cake for dinner. My mom and her brothers were so excited; cake for dinner seemed like such a treat. It was tall with white frosting. When they tasted it, though, they were hugely let down to discover that the layers were tuna salad, salmon salad, and egg salad, and the frosting was sour cream.

So the dish we attempted in our apartment reminded me of what a single layer of that cake must have been like, even down to the taste of disappointment. Our chef roommate got a huge kick out of our attempt, at least. My next couple meals were the ever reliable boiled potatoes and ketchup.

Mosambi juice

Mosambi display

Mosambi juicer

I’ve included some pictures of my favorite exotic juice. Mosambi is kind of like a yellow orange, but it tastes slightly milder. The juice is sweet and tangy, and they sell it fresh squeezed right on the street. I bought some today and sat on the stoop of a store, sipping and taking videos of rush hour in the intersection right down the street from our apartment. I actually laughed out loud a few times. I've included the video for your viewing pleasure. 

I arrived in India on January 28^th to volunteer with Gabriel Project Mumbai, through JDC Entwine, teaching English to kids from the Kalwa slums and working with the Indian Jewish community in Thane, a suburb south of Mumbai, where about forty percent of Indian Jews reside.

When I was first learning about the program, I was told we’d be living in a quiet suburb outside the big, crazy city. I think in my head I imagined something a little bit like Brooklyn neighborhoods: still urban, but running at a lower key than Manhattan. When we arrived, I couldn’t believe what it means for a town here to be considered a “quiet suburb.” Here in Thane, there are stores and people lining our street all the time, late into the night. Not to mention the assortment of vehicles trundling back and forth, honking indiscriminately. Crossing the street is a skill I thought I had mastered, especially as a freely jay-walking Bostonian, but I clearly still have more to learn. Auto-rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians and trucks all share our little “suburban” street. People walk in the street because the sidewalks are too full of merchants and stray dogs. It’s a crazy place.

The businesses here don’t always make sense to me. For example, not too far from our apartment is a sign for a practice that specializes in both brain surgery and cosmetic surgery. So if you want to have brain surgery and liposuction on the same day, I guess that’s the place to be. Another treats dermatological maladies, and counsels on weight loss. Totally bizarre.

It is hot here. It feels like Boston in August, and it’ll only get hotter. I’ve been wearing a pair of stretchy yoga pants around, but today, I bought my first Indian clothes. Four loose shirts and two pairs of leggings, one turquoise!  A woman at the store helped me pick them out. One of the shirts I tried on had some gold thread detail, and she thought it would be nice to pair it with some metallic sparkly gold leggings, like straight out of a disco. I told her I was still getting used to it here and maybe I’d reconsider in a couple weeks.

Today we also visited the Synagogue in Thane. It is decorated with Jewish stars, and is basically set up like a Sephardic shul inside, with a podium kind of bima in the middle and benches surrounding, with a women’s section above. There’s a mikvah behind the sanctuary, and they also prepare kosher meat there. The history of Jews in India is really fascinating, I’ll write about it more later. They get about 70 people in shul on Shabbat. You know, on second thought, I guess they don’t call it shul. Right across the street from the synagogue is an apartment building, also decorated with Jewish stars… and a few swastikas. The swastika doesn’t have the same connotations here as elsewhere in the Jewish world, as it actually represents good fortune. It is still incredibly unnerving to see them.

Yesterday we had our first Hindi lesson with a student named Viraj (I keep mistakenly calling him Vijay), who is studying economics. We learned how to say things like, my name is Ilana, I live in Boston, and I am 27 years old. On special request, he also taught us how to ask, is there wheat in this? I wish I knew how to say that a couple nights ago. We went out to eat at a restaurant in the mall (the mall! A whole topic in and of itself!) and it was quite overwhelming. There were about as many waiters waiting on us as diners at our table, and they went around dolling portions of various sauces, croquets, and pita-like bread onto our massive oblong plates. I have to watch out for use of a seasoning called hing, also known as asafoetida, because it often contains wheat as a filler. I asked over and over if everything contained wheat or hing, but still a couple of the breads ended up on my plate. I just sectioned that part of the plate off as a danger zone.

Right now we’re making a group Shabbat dinner. It’s very complicated here with everyone’s food restrictions. Most people keep kosher, but two are much more strict, and then plus there’s my gluten issues. So we have the regular kitchen dishes, a couple of my own dishes, and then some of the extra kosher dishes. Plus actual food preferences, like two of us don’t like cilantro, one almond allergy, some of us don’t like rice, and I’m sure more I don’t know about yet.  We’re making do so far, but with seven people using one small apartment kitchen, it’s a challenge.

It’s very weird to go from living on my own in a city where I can freely walk around in weather-appropriate clothing, to having six roommates and being so physically close to people all of the time, in and out of the apartment. Everyone volunteering with me is great, but it’s a big, big change. I guess my camp days were longer ago than I realized.

Sorry about the haphazard appearance of my blog. I wanted to get everything down before I forgot it, and while I can build a kickass website, aesthetic has never been my strong suit. I’ll make it nicer in a few days, when I actually take some pictures. As for my blog URL: I might change it, but it currently summarizes our group’s main topic of conversation. Everyone brought a ton of diarrhea medicine, but people are far more constipated than anything else. I basically ONLY brought constipation medicine, so I am making fast friends. TMI? Sorry. Now you know, for your own future trips to India. You’re welcome.

I miss everyone at home so much, and I’m excited to hear about what’s going on with everybody. So send me an update whenever you have the chance!