Food

Food consumes way too much of my time/thoughts. Let me be very clear, the food here is great and I am in no way at a loss of things to eat. We always have plenty of fresh fruits and veggies-which I am eating CONSTANTLY. I thought I did fairy decent with fruits and veggies at home but compared to the amount I eat here I wasn’t eating much of them at home. I do miss large green salads though. Lettuce and cabbage can be found here, but it is not as safe to eat as other vegetables such as cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, carrots and green peppers. I still haven’t come to love green peppers though—I don’t know that I ever will, but its cool because I’m obsessed with enough other vegetables that it doesn’t really matter. After one of our meetings we were served with this AMAZING carrot dessert. We called it carrot pudding for a while simply because we didn’t know what it was really called. Then we found out that it is called carrot halwa-which translates to carrot carrot. In the end it doesn’t matter what it is called because the point is it is really really good-and this is coming from someone who doesn’t really like carrot desserts much (aka carrot cake-but I “eat” it anyway because I do have a slight obsession with cream cheese frosting/cream cheese anything). We cooked it as a going away dessert for the session #1 volunteers, but we could of eaten all of it by ourselves. Honestly, it was kind of hard not to. Look at that yummy lunch!

 We also eat a lot of bananas, watermelon, apples, orange and pomegranates. I can even cut and remove the seedlings (I have no idea what they are really called) of a pomegranate without inadvertently creating abstract art now! I didn’t think that day would ever come. For whatever reason I have been freezing different fruits lately. I am not sure if I like it because it changes the taste (in fact I’m not sure it really does that) or simply because it is cold. Let’s be honest, it’s probably a little more of reason number two.

Typically, we have some kind of vegetable curry for dinner, along with fortified red rice, another kind of vegetable side and the fresh fruits and veggies. We do have different protein nights—like a masala with hard boiled eggs or curry with fish or chicken. I still can’t do the fish but I make sure to eat nuts, peanut butter and beef jerky throughout the week as well. Which reminds me---did you know beef jerky can mold? I had no idea. Discovering that was really hard for me because I am about 99% sure I won’t ever find a place to buy beef jerky in India. It is UNREAL the amount of rice the people eat here. I only take a little bit and I think they have gotten use to it now but at first they would always try to give me at least three times more then I put on my plate. 

Of course there are the random little things that just make you laugh—like when we were served Diet Water. It is a for real thing here. I don’t know it qualifies as diet water because it is so little of because of some other reason I can’t think of—because in no way does diet water make any sense. I can honestly say that it is about the only diet beverage I can tolerate though.

 As volunteers we always seem to end up talking about food. There are for sure things that I miss but I think I’m doing just fine until I get a taste of American food. It. Makes. My. Taste. Buds. Go. CRAZY!!  For example, someone brought powdered ranch dressing mix from home and then graciously shared it with everyone at dinner. 1. I would like to think I would share my ranch dressing with everyone but I can’t honestly say that I would. And 2. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. For reals, I didn’t expect such a strong response to ranch dressing of all things. Another day, a volunteer made spaghetti with Prego sauce from home, and I literally licked up every last bit of sauce I could. The only negative experience I have had with American food is when I ate a can of spaghetti-o-s  that one of the nursing students left for me. They tasted so chemically like, they were nasty so either A. I got a bad batch (they were the microwave kind after all) of B. I may have finally outgrown my love of spaghetti-o-s. I can’t fully accept that until I try them again though so the jury is still out as far as that subject is concerned.

I was going to go into my cooking experiments but I realize this is a super long post about the non-exciting subject of food. But like I said, it is a very popular subject around here that takes up way to much of our brain cells so whatever, I would say a long post about it is fitting.