Curry, Curry and More Curry!

We love Indian food! And we love spicy food! And we love trying new foods! Needless to say, we didn’t have any trouble adjusting to eating in India…

And just to keep our stomachs happy, taking 2 Pepto Bismol with every meal and 2 before bed works wonders! Oh, and so does only drinking bottled water.

This is a pretty typical meal in India. Chicken curry, fish curry (served cold), a vegetable and rice. Nothing is ever hot and is normally just served at room temperature. To counter act the spiciness of the food, every meal was followed by a tiny little banana. Sweet foods cut down the heat! We also had chai at least twice a day. Mmmmm…

Usually there were always eggs for breakfast, either fried with plenty of black pepper served with toast on the side or curried hard-boiled eggs.

egg curry over rice noodles 

At IEM, all the cooking for the Bible College students and children is done over an open fire in HUGE pots. Three cooks make all the food three times a day. Children help with the clean up and those pans sparkle!

roasting some kind of spice over the fire

 

As a special treat, we had a catered dinner after the concert our last weekend. And as an extra special treat, we had little plastic balls of ice cream. We also ate lunch in the dining hall our last day in India…

Kunjumol made our meals in the kitchen at the main house…

a vegetable she prepared and two bags of milk for chai 

We ate at almost every clinic we did. Sometimes we ate before it started, sometimes after we were done.

We had a magnificent feast at a pastor’s home after a clinic in Idukki! We even had soup! It was the first and only time we had soup in India. It was very much like a curried pea soup. 

While we were traveling, we ate at some very wonderful restaurants. Most were “family restaurants” inside of hotels, but not always. Many had signs out for “homely” food…

Sometimes we ordered for ourselves, but mostly we ate whatever was ordered for us…

whole fried fish before

and after

  

Breakfast on the way to Achenkovil. We were their first customers! The donut was a very tasty treat, although not what we expected. It was savory and had some kind of chili pepper in it. Mmmmm!  So good!

dinner at the Kottyam Club

garlic chicken and fried rice (Indian Chinese food)

We were also treated to dinners at people’s homes. It was rather awkward to sit and eat while Reji’s family served and watched us eat. They didn’t eat their dinner until we were done and had gone home. The hospitality in America wants guests to feel like family. In India, they want you to feel honored. And they won’t take no for an answer no matter how stuffed you are!

Dinner at Reji’s home. What a fantastic meal!

a fat red banana and a giant plate of mango at Lizzy and Philip’s house

  

Babu and Shirley had wanted us to come to their house for dinner before we left but Abigail got very sick. But they came to the house just the same and made a delicious dinner for us with fried rice and a super yummy cucumber salad! It was so sweet I almost felt guilty eating it!

Babu and Shirley also had us to their house before we left for the airport for coffee and treats. These sesame balls were so tasty and I liked them so much that Babu stopped in Cochin on the way to the airport and bought us some to take home!

One of my very favorite food memories was at the clinic we held at the church in Achinkovil. While we were busy working one of the church members sent someone to climb up the coconut trees out front so we could have fresh coconut to eat and drink.

all ready to drink

   

Reji cutting out fresh young coconut meat for us to eat

But my favorite thing was the jackfruit. They had a giant bowl of it and I ate a LOT!

eat piece of fruit had a large pit in the center

A few days later, Kunjumol had one delivered. I never would have guessed that was what it looked it!

And we were even more shocked when we saw how they grow! They seem to defy the laws of physics!

In all our walks around the campus we didn’t notice this jackfruit tree until the day we left!

Actually, they grow quite a few different fruits on the IEM campus…

Bananas:

Rambutan: These look like something aliens would eat. On the inside they are a slimy white sweet fruit stuck to a pit.

Mystery fruit?: Then there were these things that we never quite figured out what they were. Kunjumol got out a big metal stick and got some out of the tree for us to eat. Chris liked them but I wasn’t very fond of them…

While we loved the food I never would have imagined how hard it would be to eat essentially the same thing three times a day for 3 weeks! By the last 3 days, I didn’t cream if we never had curry again. It was a long 3 days! Ice cream has never tasted as good as it did when we found this stand on the beach the day before we left! Honey fig ice cream is BRILLIANT!

I guess our love of Indian food made an impression on the Indians. We were often teased about how much we loved everything and were often compared to other visitors who complain constantly about the food. I have to say, it was easy to love!