Eat India! Part I

Good news! Bright news! Wonderful news! I bought myself a new digital camera, and it should come in a week. I've been missing taking good pictures, and now I get my own camera. I can do more food entries :,)
I have some pictures from India! And not just some, I have just a small share of all the pictures on my computer, my friends have more and better quality ones. This is the first load I'm coming with. Loading the pictures is so slow that my patience is not enough to put it all at once.
The thing is: we went for cooking classes! And it was awesome. I never understood what indian food is about, before that. Well, I can't say I do understand now, but more than before. We went for three lessons, that held different courses. I think I have photos really only of the first one. That is a shame.
The first lesson was about making south indian thali. It was about learning how to make different rotis, dhal curry, beetroot palya, brinjal potato masala and curd rice. Dhal means lentils, palya means a sidedish and masala goes for a seasoning. Below there is a picture of our teachers maid rolling some rotidough. We learned to make the usual one, indian flat bread just roasted on a pan without oil. And also a sweet one, with sugar and cardamom and oil, chapatis, folded roti and roasted in oil and nutritious roties, with different herbs in the dough.

Here I think is some dhal curry coming on.

Here I can see beetroot palya ( I was surprised about the amount of beetroot that was used.. the only thing about beetroot I know is rosolli, the christmas dish, the icky borsch-soup which reminds me of school days and beetroot-vegetablepattys ) ahead.

I though I uploaded a photo of the whole meal, but I guess it vanished to bit-space. Well, later on. Here I have a picture of "train-food". We were offered some dried, spicy delights by our indian by-passengers in the train. It was quite hot, our noses were bleeding all the way.. but it was good! One thing I loved in India were banana-chips, yummy! Hot or not.

And of course we visited some vegetable markets, didn't buy anything since we didn't cook. But just wish we had the same here!

We ate out, mostly. This time we were quite intrigued by the malai kofta we got, it has never look (or tasted...) like that before. It looked like a birthday-party dish, a huge mountain and dried cherries on top. I can't say what the cook had in mind... good day I suppose.

Oh and we learned to drink coconut water! Everyone drinks it, there are coconut stands everywhere, on the road and in cities. Anywhere you go. There was always a man with a machete ready to brake some coconuts, just put the straw in and enjoy! We were wandering for a long time what it tastes like, and why everyone drinks it. And because yogis drink it.. it must be healthy. (It is said to be one of the healthiest drinks in the world) So one day we tried, and the first impression was, ugh, bad. I couldn't finish my coconut really, it tasted like icky warm water. We were just wondering why does everyone drink these???

But it got better. We tried again, and the whole experience was different. And the coconuts taste different, depending on how raw they are. Of course they are all raw coconuts, picked from the trees like this. If they are riper, they are sweeter and have some white meat inside that you can eat after drinking. These is not the stage where you can get the white meat that we have as desiccated coconut. If the coconut is let to the palm-tree for a longer time, it develops the hard, brown and hairy coconut we know, inside it. And there you get the grated coconut. And if stays even a longer time in the tree, you can get coconut oil from it.

And oh my sweet lord, all the fresh fruits everyday! Papayas the size of your head and sweet mini-bananas! When I came back home, I didn't know how to cope with the "normal" bigger bananas we have. They felt too large to eat at one time, even though we usually ate many small bananas at once. Pineapples, limes, chickus, oranges, pomegranades ... we visited frequently the fruit lady near our flat. And ate for breakfast a bowl of fruit salad sooo many times. I miss my daily papaya portion! The mango season starts in the spring, when the monsoon is coming. Although we got to taste a few mangos, but they weren't as sweet as they should be..just not the right time.