Indian Food Impressions

I still don't know much about Indian food. During our one-week stay in India, it was quite hard to get people to explain the type of food we were eating, what it was called, etc. At one point, someone even answered my question by saying: "Just try it. You'll like it."

With that as a background, I guess I'll just give you some impressions I have of Indian food.

A lot of the viands are "saucy." They're heavy on chicken, lamb, and veggies (I don't think I got to eat any seafood or fish while I was there) and most of the dishes I got to try had lentil, mushrooms, cauliflower, and cubed cottage cheese. There were also lots of salad - cucumber and yogurt; cucumber, grated coconut and peanuts; cucumber and chickpeas. Of course, there's curry - which was not as spicy as I expected - although the hotel may have adjusted the flavor for the sake of us tourists.Their papadum was likewise spicier than what we have in Manila and lighter in color too.

In The Oberoi, they serve some Indian dishes for breakfast. Sheelendra, a staff at the hotel, was very helpful in answering my questions about the food. Here are some of the information I got from him:

VADA: Lentil coated in some sort of flour covering; served with rice and can be eaten with chutney (tomato-garlic)

PARANTHA: Local bread - round like a pancake - made with cauliflower; can be eaten with yogurt

SAMBHAR: a kind of curry from Southern India; served like soup - it has pumpkin and other vegetables, cooked with lentil

UTAPPAM: some sort of rice pancakes - taken with chutney (with coconut or chili sauce).

We ate a lot at the hotel. Previous visitors to India had stories of bum stomachs so we were quite careful about where we ate and what water we took. They had Himalayan bottled mineral water for us at the hotel which worked fine for us. As for the restaurants in The Oberoi, try Baan Thai - the food is quite tasty and the servings generous. Taipan, the Chinese restaurant, had food which was quite dry and not too flavorful so I still prefer the Chinese restos here in Manila.

We also got to try McDonald's. Of course, they don't serve beef burgers and beef products there. They had Veggie Burgers though and I got to try their Vegetarian pizza mcpuff - looks quite like apple pie but with veggies inside. It was quite good.

All in all, Indian food was interesting and different although I really did miss my seafood...

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