the confined nomad

Once again, Team Confined Nomad’s progress has been delayed due to overseas travel.  This time, I was in India for a month, teaching in the international course SOIMA: Safeguarding Sound and Image Collections, organized by ICCROM.  This was my second time in India, and I’m happy to report that I experienced none of the gut-wrenching encounters with parasites and other food-born bugs that I did last time I was there.  In fact, nearly every meal I had was splendid.  Although in the end I was getting a little tired of paneer and naan, after a week back in NYC I’m really missing it. Well, I guess that gives us a good excuse to go out to Jackson Heights, or perhaps pay a visit to the Lexington Ave location of South Indian chain Saravanaa Bhavan that happened to have a location two blocks from my hotel, whose thali‘s I’m dreaming about even now.  My only regret is that I spent too much time enjoying my food, and not enough time taking pictures of it.  Or writing down the names of the things i was eating.

Here are just a few culinary shots of my trip.

Chai (tea) is served at least three times a day.  Typically the tea is brewed together with milk and sugar, and maybe a bit of masala if you are lucky.  The result is sweet and creamy.  I love it.

A street vendor in Pune selling berries.  I have no idea what kind they are.  There was a pit in the middle.  He wrapped them up in one of those paper cones and sprinkled chili and salt on top.  Kinda like they do with green mangoes in Thailand.  A sweet-salty-chili treat.

Nearly every day we had some sort of buffet lunch.  Usually it’s all vegetarian, meaning paneer (literally translates to cottage cheese, but I think that’s a terrible translation since it does not resemble cottage cheese in the least) plays a starring role, rice, some type of daal (lentil dish), naan (flatbread), and a few other vege curries are featured.  On this day a sort of Indian-Chinese stir fry noodle was offered.

Snack time! A little sweet and a little salty.  On the right is jalebi, a warm and sugary treat (you can find this at sweet shops in NYC, although these were better than any I’ve had in the city.), on the left, well, I dont know what that’s called, but it was good.  Rolled up spices.  Lots and lots of different spices.

McDelivery.  Never tried it myself, but I do dig these scooters.

Turkey? In India? Why yes, for a very special occasion — Thanksgiving! I was definitely sad to be far away from family and friends during this important American holiday, so I gathered up 9 of my SOIMA family members, and dragged them all to a nice restaurant that was serving a buffet-style Thanksgiving dinner.  Traditional dishes were given a bit of Indian flavor, such as the chili and cumin mashed potatoes (yum).  I asked the carver if they had turkeys in Indian, and he said no, they came from Dubai.  Turkeys in Dubai?

For one week of the course we were at the Archive and Research Center for Ethnomusicology at the American Institute for Indian Studies in Gurgaon (about 30 km outside Delhi).  The cook there was incredible.  Each day, she prepared food from a different part of India.  On this day, we were eating Bombay street food.  Delicious!

I’m struggling to remember what this is called, but it is so good!  We stopped by this famous sweet shop/fast food joint on Chandi Chowk after a tour of Old Delhi one morning.  Somebody help me out here with the name of this dish.

Tags: Delhi, India, Indian cuisine, Pune, street food

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 am and is filed under Special Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.