Mystery Produce Episode 1 - Bitter Gourd

Occasionally I see produce I don't recognize or at least have never cooked with. Today I picked up some Karela, aka bitter gourd, bitter melon, etc.

Isn't it pretty all cut up? It smells like crushed dandelions.  It is often salted and rinsed before cooking to remove some of the bitter juices, like eggplant. Or stuffed, which sounds interesting.

For dinner I planned saute it with lots of garlic, onion, tamarind pulp, coriander seeds, turmeric and chili powders.  They are not kidding about the 'bitter' part.  I kept adding that tamarind, sugar, water, salt and cooking the heck out of it.

Served with chapati, packet dal (Yes, I am lazy. It is also surprisingly tasty.) and a green salad. Not to be confused with a leafy side salad back home: in India a 'green salad' is composed of various sliced fresh veggies, usually accompanied by cilantro and lime. Yum! We're pretty reckless and eat these at restaurants a lot too.

Making chapati

Boaz's coworkers do not believe something constitutes a meal unless it includes rice or chapati.  Samosas?  A snack.  Pizza?  A snack.  Fettuccine alfredo?  Also not a meal apparently.  The western style bread here is pretty terrible.  And we love bread.  So I have to make lots of chapati.  I don't mind.  Today I am going to experiment with making and rolling a bunch of dough to cook up as needed later.  Wish me luck!

(Siera's version of a) recipe and pictures after the jump.

Symphonies of India

I really enjoyed sitting out on our hotel terrace in the evening, listening to the cacophony of horns, whooping sirens, utterly charming 'my car is backing up!' jingles, children laughing, music playing. It all sort of blended together, the symphony of India, I thought.

The house in Kumar City is usually quiet and the exceptions aren't pleasant. Most of our neighbors have dogs. Do the security guards do rounds at night? They get up to barking like mad at all hours. In the morning there are supersonic flybys, helicopters, whathaveyou (a lot of military establishments are in Pune, including the Indian Army's Southern Command HQ and the National Defense Academy). Pigeons freak out in the airshaft adjacent to the bathrooms. Their cooing (that is so not the right word) is loud and guttural, like they have been crossed with monkeys.

Hiring a maid

Turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. In fact I didn't have to do anything. Shama works for one of our neighbors. Catching me sweeping our driveway, she kindly offered her services. Her english is excellent and she comes highly recommended.

Monday was her first day. She arrived earlier than I expected. I hadn't cleaned the kitchen yet! So she did it for me. I'm going to have trouble getting used to this. But the house is nice and clean and she isn't a mop breaker like I am.

She was very surprised that Boaz doesn't come home for lunch nor do I bring lunch to him. 'He eats at the office?!' I guess it's time to buy a tiffin, make a big batch of dal, veg munchow soup, and chapati dough? This seems like a lot of work.

Best household gadget EVER!!!

Now I'm the hunter. A rain of fire in my wake.

And Boaz is a little disturbed by my enthusiasm.

Squisito

We had dinner recently at Squisito, one of few restaurants here with Mexican food. It's an iffy proposition in India. Boaz has tried several other Mexican restaurants and wishes to return to none. The hotel in Magarpatta City had nachos on the room service menu. They were on the 'Do Not Order' list. It's kind of like somebody told them about Mexican food, but they haven't actually tasted it.

I think part of the problem is that they don't make the right kinds of cheese here. Squisito's nachos were drenched in gas station style cheese sauce, only redeemed by the delicious salsa.

The tacos were good. Boaz was impressed with the quality of the corn chips and tortillas. He found it perplexing that a country with myriad fried foods would struggle so much with this element, but his previous experiences were limp. Everything at Squisito was delightfully crunchy.

They also have an Italian menu, a common marriage here. I was impressed with the wine service, given that wine connoisseurship is only an emerging thing in India. They offered a taste, promptly refilled my glass only when it was down to less than 25% and never over-poured. American restaurants foul this up all the time.

An evening in KP

Koregaon Park is an older and very nice part of Pune. It is known for being the expat area, which is why I wasn't terribly inclined to live there when Mr. Boaz was looking for houses. I saw more white folks in an hour or two there than I have in all the rest of my time in Pune. But it was nearly impossible for me to judge from afar and as it turns out its, shall we say, Indian-ness is not at all overwhelmed by the relative concentration of foreigners.

As an older part of Pune, it doesn't have the same sort of planned development that we live in and around. The architecture is a little more interesting, trees a little more grown up. Here's a shot of a side street. The main streets are lined with shops, especially handicraft and gift emporiums.

Spices!

I am totally excited about the variety of quality, inexpensive spices available. Every time I go to D-Mart I get more. I fully intend to buy every single spice they stock. Probably not all of the masala mixes, though this picture does include dosa and sambhar mix.

So far most of the spices are pretty familiar. I picked up some Jaipatri (Mace), the dried lacy reddish stuff covering nutmeg seeds. I'd heard of it, but had no practical knowledge of it. It indeed smells just like nutmeg, but is milder I guess? I was surprised to find they don't seem to carry the usual green cardamom pods. I did find Elaichi (black cardamom). It smells like campfires.

First of many a cooking experiment

I haven't been here long enough to miss food from home, but I think Boaz mentioned wanting for decent pasta. So for the second time in about 7 years I am making pasta from scratch. There is dried, shaped pasta available at the store, but not any brands I recognize. And what's the fun in that anyway?


I guessed at 600g, which wasn't too hard since I knew that I had 2kg of flour. The well I made however would not accommodate the 6 eggs called for in my recipe.

A tour of our Indian kitchen

We have a pretty big kitchen here, which is stocked with all the basics now. Here is a view from the entryway. You can see the fridge, counter top stove and laundry area beyond.


We got a pretty inexpensive non-self-starting, 2 burner stove. I'd conceived of these as glorified camping stoves, but the burners are as capable and even as any I've used in the states. Yesterday we had the 30L gas tank installed. Anil said to turn the gas off at the source if we would be gone for say two weeks, leaving it on the rest of the time. I turn it off whenever I am not cooking. We don't have smoke detectors or anything.


Here's a view of the rest of the kitchen. Ovens are pretty uncommon, though not unavailable. It would be fine now, but I'm sure in summer I won't want such a thing around. So I've embraced the microwave, which managed to produce some surprisingly acceptable, humble meals over the last couple of days. And of course a rice cooker. As you can see, there is plenty of cabinet space.


I may have spoken a bit about the Geysers in an earlier entry. There isn't a central water heater for the whole house, as there would be in the states. Each bathroom has its own heater with a pretty small capacity, but it gets surprisingly (like the fires of hell) hot, if you leave it on long enough. The kitchen also has a small in-line water heater that comes out its own tap. I mostly just use cold water to avoid the burning.

We are still looking into bottled water delivery and in-house filtration. Since I've been going to D-mart nearly everyday anyway to slowly accumulate food staples and kitchen supplies (salt, sugar, rice, pots and pans, tupperware, towels, tea, spices, etc.), I just get a few bottles of water at the same time.