Rapattoni KT 2007: Haven't had dinner in a week and a half

Food, glorious food,
Eat right through the menu

Just loosen your belt

Two inches and then you,

Work up a new appetite,

In this interlude

Then, food, once again, food, fabulous, food, glorious food!

- Oliver

We ate like kings. For two weeks we paid virtually nothing and ate like kings. We've eaten in our hotel (Delicious) other posh hotels (Delicious), nice restaurants for the upper class of Chennai (Delicious), restaurants for the regular folks (Delicious), room service (Delicious), mall food courts (Delicious).

We've been introduced to Sambar (a hot vegetable breakfast stew), Idli, (a moist, steamed rice cake used to sop up the sambar), Vada (spicy donut shaped things that are dipped in Sambar) Aloo Gobi (potato and cauliflower), Spicy Aloo (spicy potato) ...basically aloo everything. We've had (and this is by no means an exhaustive list) Malai Kofta (solidified milk balls with a red center in a spicy yellowish paste), Ven Ponjigal (imagine mashed potatoes with spice), Tutti Frutti Kesari (kinda like a really super firm cream of wheat with, um, yeah, fruit...if you didn't pick up on that from the name), Sag Paneer (spinach and cottage cheese)...actually, I ate a lot of paneer. It's firmer than the cottage cheese you get in the States.

Anyway we ate a boatload of things (pics at the bottom of the page). And it was all delicious. And for the most part, really spicy. And except for one of us for one day, no one got Dehli Belly...as they call it here. Thank God. Of course we never ate on the streets either.

Because people mostly eat with their hands, we were also surrounded by breads. We had piles of the north Indian staple Naan (plain, butter, garlic or ginger), which anyone who has eaten at an Indian restaurant has had. Loads of Parantha which is a south indian bread (it's kind of like a whole wheat tortilla, but thicker and cut into eighths), and Papar which is a little lighter than Parantha but is deep fried for a second or two.

That's right. You have to ask for utensils when you eat anywhere but in a hotel. It was fantastic. A big staple of the Indian diet is Basmati rice. Basically you take a pile of rice, pour a small amount of your fave curry over it, form it into little balls with your fingers and...down the hatch. After the inital shock of doing something so foreign, it became easy.

Mostly, though, we ate at buffets (That's the way most hotels and restaurants serve food. You can always order off the menu), and tried a little bit of everything. Not only was it a grand experience to try all these new things, but our gluttonous excess (ok, my gluttonous excess) has forced me to go to the hotel gym almost every day.

So why buffets? Well, it's a city of 4+ million people and they're all hungry, all the time.

No wonder, the food is delicious.

In one hour we have our last meal together, Ted and Anil fly out tonight and I fly out in the morning. Another post about those two in a bit.