Food, Glorious Food!

One of my favorite things to do when traveling is to visit local grocery stores and food shops. It’s the best sight-seeing around as far as I’m concerned. I love to see what people eat, because what people eat seems rich with personal, social, economic, political and historical information about a place. So here are some pics of some of the food items I currently have in my kitchen.

In the picture above are three miracle ingredients, IMHO. Well, I’m not sure I would call mayo a “miracle” but it is one of those things without which one cannot do, to put it succinctly. What IS miraculous about this particular mayo is the packaging — a little squeeze pouch — no more knives scraping fruitlessly against impossible-to-reach spots in cumbersome glass jars! Best Foods, time to up your game! Next is the pouch of garlic paste — I think that speaks for itself. And finally, Wai Wai noodles. These are just great. They are okay cooked, but uncooked they are a crunchy dream! One of my favorite quick meals is Wai Wai chaat — chaat is a generic term for a wide variety of street food-type snacks usually involving some mixture of crunchy and savory items mixed with various masalas (spices) and other flavorings.

You saw the cows, now you see the milk! I always buy packaged milk, this is shelf-stable milk and comes in red cartons which is whole milk and blue cartons indicating “toned” milk, which I think is 2% milk. Interesting that the color-coding is the same as in the US. The larger carton is one liter and costs 64 rupees, about 90 cents; the smaller carton is 200 milliliters and costs 15 rupees, about 20 cents. I don’t actually drink milk (sorry mom!) but I get this for my coffee and for making “tak doi” — yogurt (or “curd”), which is very easy to make in this warm climate! Amul is the leading dairy brand here. A national company, it produces milk, cream, cheese (processed cheese – yuck), yogurt and butter. I think the Amul girl has come to symbolize that something is trustworthy, wholesome and good. The ad campaigns featuring her are often very cute — as you can perhaps surmise from the slogan, “Utterly Butterly Good”!

Lassi is a yogurt drink that can be sweet, fruit-flavored or slightly salty with a hint of cumin. Also in the picture are some early (and not very good but way better than any I’ve had in the US) mangos. These are not local mangos yet, I think they will come in another month or so — so sweet and delicious, a real treat!

Spices — masalas — come in these kinds of packets. They are ubiquitous — every grocery store will have a relatively largish section selling masalas. And they are very cheap — this jeera powder (about six tablespoons of ground cumin) was 25 rupees, and the lal mirch (about one and a half tablespoons of red chili powder) was 4 rupees — that’s about 36 and 6 cents respectively.

Black salt is a kind of sulfur-y salt — might sound kind of yucky, but it’s really good, it adds a nice little punch. Don’t ask me why the label has a picture of fruit on it — I have no idea! Maybe people use it on some fruits, but if they do, it isn’t on grapes and apples and bananas! In regular cooking, people use white table salt, and in general, to my taste, people like their food quite salty. The peanut butter — wow, was this stuff horrible! I got this tiny tub to make peanut butter cookies for some friends. The peanut butter tastes like it was processed in a machine that had recently been lubricated with diesel oil. Next stop, the rubbish bin!

“Iron shakti”! Shakti means power, or strength, so obviously, these corn flakes make you run faster and jump higher! You may have noticed on the packaging in some of the pictures a little green dot (you can see it at the top of the Kellogg’s box). All packaged foods in India are marked as vegetarian (green dot) or non-vegetarian (red dot). I’m not vegetarian, but it would be a lot easier to be vegetarian here than in the US. In a way, I’ve become de facto “veg” (as they say here) because I rarely have meat unless I eat out.