Food, Glorious Food

Some people like Indian food, but I never really have. However I came here to serve not to eat. So now let me take you on a culinary tour of my Indian experience.

The day of food begins with a breakfast including a fruit salad, a bowl of corn flakes, a piece of bread with jam and butter, a milk tea and a banana milk shake. Sometimes I drop a course or mix things up but this is a general breakfast. There’s also a dish called Poha, which is rice with several herbs and nuts and lime squeezed over top, which we tend to eat if we have no fruit. The interesting thing about the fruit salad is the way it transforms depending on the season. When I arrived in India we had oranges, and in the middle we had mangoes but both fruits are out of season and now we have a lot of sweet limes, papayas, bananas and guava.



Because the kids and Nicole have celiac disease, which means they can’t eat gluton, the range of meals is severely limited. To further complicate things Armon is lactose intolerant and Sohayl is a vegetarian. Because one never knows when there’s gluton in some dish, unless you make it yourself, we can’t eat out very often. Sohayl was saying just the other day that he misses taking the kids out in the evening and eating from the street vendors.

At about ten thirty in the morning we have tea and either samosas or kastas. The samosas here are filled with potato and a mixture of other herbs and spices. I usually eat it with a thin red sauce. Kastas are bread pastries, which you use to scoop up a mixture of potatoes, chickpeas and some sort of brown sauce. Sometimes we have Barifi, a sweet made of condescend milk that often has a layer of real silver on top. They hammer the silver into the thinnest flakes imaginable and apparently it’s fairly good for you.



As you can see in the above picture there's an industry of making plates out of pressed leaves. This is a good industry because it employs people, and the plates are bio-degradable.



Of course it can leave a mess, but since most of Lucknow is devoid of garbage cans, that's to be expected.

Lunch usually consists of rice, dahl, subsi (vegetables that usually include potato) and yoghurt. After lunch around three we usually have another cup of tea.



I've also had some other meals such as dosa, a south Indian crepe made from lentils and rice and which is generally eaten with some kind of sauce and potato filling. Another south Indian dish is idli which are small cakes made of lentils and rice and eaten with various sauces.

In Canada, we have a large variety of food: Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Greek, Indian, Fast, British, and that’s only in my small retirement town. In Lucknow, city of several million I’ve only seen Indian Food, Western Food (Fast food) and Chinese Food. Not much variety for someone with international tastes. Still I'm luck to be fed at all and my meals are very healthy.

The other side of food in India is the health issue. When I first arrived here I got sick a few times, but now I've gotten used to it. Strangely enough its safer in many ways to eat from the street shops, because at least you can see the vendors preparing the food. In the restaurants there's no way to know what's going on in the kitchen. But you have to take it with a grain of salt and a bit of adventurous spirit. When you find your sugar is full of ants, you just sift through them with a spoon and hope you catch them all.