Food and eating are consuming lots of time and effort. The kitchen is sort of equipped and I’ve gotten some staples, flour, sugar, some soy flour I heard advertised, syrup, crackers, peanuts for Jack to snack, almonds, cashews, some cheese. Keeping fruit in the house is a challenge – I try to keep mangoes, papaya, bananas, and California oranges (yes, and for a little less than we pay in the States) in stock but we do eat them up quickly.
There are 3 main ways to get supplies. First is to take a taxi to INA market (not sure what that stands for, but it is a warren of little shops, all huddled up against each other, with sort of tin, cloth coverings over the walkways in between, envision the Kasbah sort of). INA has everything, a refrain frequently heard from Delhi-ites. That includes almost any American breakfast cereal you can name, all kinds of things like Pam, olives, balsamic vinegar, every kind of cheese imaginable (all at Stateside prices).
The second is, there are two little carts, one with vegetables and one with fruit, that circulate around our neighborhood and people or their cooks come out and buy what they want. Because we’re on the 3rd floor we never see him. We have to work out the system. Our little house cleaning woman could go buy us things – if I got organized and tell her what we want.
The last is try and find things in the neighborhood. Jack walks over to a place called Spencers (of all things) and gets us sausages and some vegetables. It’s all set up like a grocery store but isn’t very well stocked outside of cereal and cookies. He gets diet Coke and Pepsi too. Also got a pretty good loaf of multi-grain bread this week.
Then there is the Mother Dairy Store up the street where we can get ice cream, packaged yogurt (looks just like Dannon packaging), and milk from a dispenser. Will probably pass on the dispenser for the time being. But we did buy ice cream – vanilla on a chocolate cake base! And the yogurt is fabulous.
We just had dinner with a major first for me in India – salad with lettuce from INA! I soaked it in this baby bottle sterilizing mixture they sell – mostly chlorine – smells bad enough to make things really sterile! I also bought sprouts from the subzi wallah (vegetable man) because a very educated looking woman had a recipe book open and was ordering things while I was there and she got some! Figured if she thought they were safe I’d be okay. I made a salad dressing with lime juice, olive oil, chopped garlic, some spice called “basilica” that we think must be basil, and some salt and pepper. With cucumbers, tomatoes and parmesan cheese we thought it was delicious. I’ll let you know tomorrow morning if it really was safe!
I’ve made a couple other inventions we’ve really liked. One was cauliflower, broccoli (yes, lots of it at INA), steamed in the micro-wave, made a cheese sauce with skim milk and Amul cheese, chopped up chicken Spam and mixed it all together. Made some bread crumbs with the crusts off of a loaf of dahlia bread and baked it in the grill (microwave oven is also a “grill”) for a few minutes. Great mostly vegetable dinner. I left out the part about how it took me an hour after work to go to M Block Market in GK1 to buy the baking dish the night before.
Also made a whole wheat penne pasta dish the other night Рsaut̩ed about 6 plum tomatoes and a couple onions, mixed it with the pasta and a cheese sauce I made in the microwave with 3 ounces of cheese. Really, really good.
A lovely woman came to talk to me about being our cook but until I get a regular schedule at work it’s hard to tell her when we wanted her. She mostly knows Indian food. I may hire her for a couple months. We may have to take on “Louis” who started work in the student’s residence hall while the cook there recovers from TB. Yes, TB. When he is better he’ll be back and I think I would like Louis. He is from south India and about 4 ft. 8 in. tall. But he’s been a cook for 30 years and he’s Christian.
We have found a place to buy wine (yes, at INA) which was a wild adventure. But we got 6 bottles of great Indian wine – vineyards in the south, about $10 a bottle. The days of $3 buck Chuck are a pleasant memory!
Enough about food – when we get tired – or I get home really late – we walk across our little neighborhood to the Neeti Bagh Club and order Indian or Thai food. They have good food and great prices and we’re usually the only ones in the dining room. They make the dinners for our students every night. The place has a catchy little name that eludes me at the moment. More about food later – it is one of our chief preoccupations.
