Travel photos: India

I thought I’d put up some of the rest of my India photos (I suspect there will be two or three more installments, one featuring d*gs). I found that I still had food pictures, and some others as well.

A sari shop at night, Kolkata:

The king of Indian yogurt sweets: misthi doi (also called mitha dahi, or “sweet yogurt” in Hindi). It is silky, creamy, and scrumptious. This was served to me at a small, unprepossessing but locally famous sweet shop—one that’s so humble that you’d never enter unless an Indian friend told you about it. Wikipedia describes this famous Bengali snack as follows;

Mitha Dahi is a popular dessert in the states of West Bengal, Odisha and Bangladesh. It is prepared by boiling milk until it is slightly thickened, sweetening it with sugar, either guda/gura (brown sugar) or khajuri guda/gura (date molasses), and allowing the milk to ferment overnight. Earthenware is always used as the container for making Mitha Dahi because the gradual evaporation of water through its porous walls not only further thickens the yoghurt, but also produces the right temperature for the growth of the culture. Very often the yoghurt is delicately seasoned with a pinch of elaichi (cardamom) for fragrance.

This portion was indeed scooped from a big earthenware pot:

Another sweet shop that we patronized. Sweets are always made on the premises. My host, Shubhra, is on the left:

One of the sweets for sale. I’m not sure what this was, as we didn’t buy it, but it’s attractively decorated with rose petals and cost 10 rupees (16 cents) each:

Lunch at a friend’s: a home cooked vegetarian meal of cauliflower, peas, and kachuri (Bengali bread filled with mashed peas). This was one of the best home-cooked meals I had, and was washed down with mango juice. There were, of course, sweets afterwards.

Offerings on sale at a nearby Hindu temple; they include food, incense, and other stuff. You buy yourself merit by offering these to the gods in a private ceremony, off limits to Western eyes. After the god (goddess in this case) “eats” the food (metaphorically) in a ceremony called darshan, they’re then offered to the poor:

South Indian food in Kolkata: medhu vadai: savory “donuts” (not sweet) made with lentil flour. Eaten as a snack, they’re dipped into the coconut chutney (on the left) and nommed with sambar, the spicy soup on the right.  Here they were served in traditional fashion on a banana leaf.

Perhaps my favorite South Indian dish: an uttapam (this one with tomatoes and onions), a savory pancake made with a rice- and lentil-flour batter. You must eat it with copious lashings of the wonderful coconut chutney that’s ubiquitous in South Indian meals:

A paan shop, where various mixtures are rolled into betel leaves to act as a digestive or as a stimulant. Stalls have different reputations; this was supposedly one of the better ones in Kolkata:

Here’s the paan-maker, whpping up a bunch of mitha paans (sweet paans) for ourselves and the extended family:

A fancier paan stall at the Poush Mela fair in Santiniketan. Note the variety of ingredients you can choose:

A chaat (savory snack) stall at the same fair. Indians are very good at arraying their noms in an attractive and tempting way:

Breakfast: an Indian kedgiree, but made with non-rice grains (I have yet to suss this out) served with bananas and fresh papaya:

 Jhal muri: a savory snack with puffed rice and spices that I’ve shown before:

Finally, one of the beautiful sights of India: a woman in a sari with glossy braids draped over her back. The women often anoint their hair with coconut oil: