India : Curry On

Sue me.

I failed to honour my word that I would write 'soon' about my adventures in India, and hey look how time flies it's already 11 months since my trip there! *hangs head in shame*

Well, life and work and other stuff came in the way (lame pathetic excuses I know) hence the hiatus. In recent weeks I have been contemplating a 'return' and today is the day I finally get off my lazy arse and post my first entry for 2012 can you believe it?

I would still like to talk about India at some point ... hmm, how about now? Maybe I'll just mention the highlights?

What I can still quite clearly remember about India is the food. Yummy. You know I do enjoy Indian food - spice and curry and all. Of all things that I worried about before the trip was catching the infamous Delhi Belly. That would just ruin everything not to mention the unpleasant blah of suffering in a foreign land while on the move. Thus the week before we left I armed myself with a mini-pharmacy of medications in case I get a tummy bug. Well I ended up not using any. Thank God! But one can never be too sure so it is a good idea to pack with you oral salts, lomotils, antacids and what nots, in addition to panadols, minyak angin, ubat sapu, band-aids and other things you might need when faced with a minor medical emergency.

Back to the food.

Jipp, my travel buddy said I am the Bold, Adventurous One when it came to eating choices. Yes I am, thank you very much :) (So Mourinho-like, eh?) I was very very wary at first but after a few meals I caved in and gave in to my curiosity and took the risk of trying some street food.

Here's  a rundown of what we ate. (I am having trouble uploading the pictures with this new Blogger format. Dang. How to tell a story about food without visuals? Im-possible)

  Our late night dinner was at Pahar Ganj. Why I do not have a picture of that I don't remember. Up in a restaurant that had a steep and narrow staircase. Appropriately named Mount Everest Restaurant.

 

We ate this on the train to Agra. It was lovely. The vegetable cutlet is the most delicious cutlet I have ever eaten. Alas, it was only one serving :( I was quietly disappointed as I have a good breakfast appetite (there goes my secret).

 

Our lunch in the only air-conditioned restaurant in Agra (for us on a backpackers budget). There was a steady waiting list. Everyone wanted to stay on after finishing their lunch because of the air-cond. 

While waiting for seats to be available at air-cond resto, (we were given an hour) I bought and ate this from the street vendor. Some kind of samosa. Cheap and tasty, but Jipp hated it ;-)

This was dinner in Yashi Cafe, Agra - and there was a blackout. At first we were at another rooftop cafe but the service there was atrocious. Horrible. Rude even, I thought. They seemed more eager to serve the other tourists and leave us Asians waiting so we walked out.  Oh, Taj Mahal during a blackout. What did that look like? I am trying to remember.

Arriving in Jaipur, we were determined to seek out ANYTHING else other than curries for lunch. Fortune favours the brave, we were led to KFC! (well, we saw McDs first but the store was experiencing an electricity failure or something) And they had virgin mojitos!

Lunch in Jaipur after a sweltering day out was at a restaurant near Jantar Mantar that's recommended in Lonely Planet (pinch of salt, nothing great actually) We ended up there as we were already sun-beaten and hot and grumpy. I do not have a picture of the food. Strange.

This was one of the meals we had at our hotel in Jaipur. The uncle there got used to our requests - roti, instant noodles (Maggi Masala!) chai masala etc. Simple and filling. 

  

This was a breakfast at one of the cafes along Pahar Ganj. Not bad. We had lunch here once as well I think. Not bad. I forgot the name. Something Bakery?

 

  Back in Delhi, we found the Golden Arches! Actually we made sure we locate McDs. It took effort you know. If you saw how excited we were, you'd think that this was our first McD experience! holy yum! I had the huge Chicken Maharaja for lunch. Thanks Jipp for the sundae!

Best momos everrrrr. Well not that I eat them all the time but the momos from this stall on Pahar Ganj were the bomb. Simple straightforward flavours.

This was an uninspiring dinner in Delhi. I ordered vegetarian noodles. It came like this and tasted like ... noodles drenched in tomato sauce.

 

Our dinner feast in New Delhi. We re-ordered after delightfully discovering how tasty the tandoori was! I loved the jeera rice amd the aloo gobi.

 

Alas, our final meal turned out to be .... Mc Donalds at the airport :D haha. We wanted to use up the balance of our rupees and McDs was within what we could afford.

Okay I lied. Our very last rupees were used to purchase coffee! Turns out we had enough for one more coffee at Cafe Coffee Day.

I still need to ask Jipp for a picture of what I thought was my 'best achievement in India' - buying and drinking a huge glass of cold, fresh sugar cane juice from a street vendor outside of Masjid Jama. It was way too hot, it was way too crowded, I was sweating like a pig, it was a long wait to hail a tuktuk, there were many locals buying drinks there etc etc. I gave in. After a few minutes of quietly observing their preparations methods and decided it was acceptable, I went in for the kill.

I swear my thoughts then were, if anything is going to make me sick here, this is it. I told Jipp that if anything happened, please take me to the hospital. Again, I thank my lucky stars as I did not suffer from even a smidgen of stomach discomfort.

And I tell you one thing - it was refreshingly DELICIOUS. True story.

So that's some of the food we ate.

More India and others soon. Otherwise I owe each one of you a drink.

Chai masala, anyone? :)

Note : As this is written 11 months after the trip, any inaccuracies are to be blamed on old age. Thank you.