Day5: Indian food day!

Ever cooked indian food by yourself? Yes.
Ever cooked indian food with bare minimal utensils? Yes.
Ever cooked indian food for foreign guests? Yes.
Ever cooked indian food in china? Yes.
Ever done all of the above together?
Well, after last night, i can proudly say--Yes!
(ah, my mom is going to be so proud of me for this!)

Believe it or not, last night divya and me cooked up tradional indian food in china, with all ingredients bought in a chinese supermarket! We did this for 3 of our chinese fellows who we invited for dinner-Kevin,Jina and Jasmine.

The menu: chapati,Dal and puliogre. Fruit salad and icecream for dessert.

The game plan: visit the supermarket and pick up wheat flour for chapati. We had some sunflower oil at home.
problem: How to flatten it?
solution:tap it fith our fingers like we make an indian dish poli(marathi)
Unfortunately we did not find wheat flour and ended up making corn flour chapatis!
Also we found a cylindrical flattening device in polythene contact paper which we used to make chapatis.

Next,
for the dal we thought we could buy the grams and veggetables, boil it, add rasam powder(indian spice mixture) that we had carried!
problem: we dint get the dal we usually make sambhar(lentil soup) with.
Solution: we bought green gram and black gram, also bought chopped veggetables, boiled them all added the spices, some tomoato ketchup to get the tamarind taste and voila... indian dal!

Without the typical indian ingridients of garam masala, without seasoning(tadka-onion, cummin corrander nothing)! and it still tasted good!
Next,
tamarind Rice!(puliogre)
Rice here is very sticky. To add to our woes, we did not have a pressure cooker! so it is more sticky as it is not perfectly cooked. so the puliogre was like a mass of clay!
But a delicious one at that! we loved it and we ate it.

Next,
fruits. Banana,grapes,watermelon and apples!
This was not very difficult...
It was fun carving out the fruits with a swizz army knife.

That was the first proper indian meal I had in 5 days, ah, the joy of eating with my hands!
everything turned out ok....
cornflour chapati, greengram dal with veggies and puliogre!
our chinese friends loved it and what was more fun was teaching them to eat with their hands!
fruits and icecream to rap it up!

Pure joy of having cooked, served to a guest and eaten! the virtues of being an Indian were performed that day.
Indulge in elaborate cooking, call people and feed them and eat till you are stuffed!
It was great.


It was an adventerous evening in the kitchen.