One of the great traditions of trips to India is the truly disgusting food that’s available at the airport in Madras as you wait to fly back west.  You’re bleary-eyed, struggling to stay awake as you wait for your 1-2 A.M. flight back to either Singapore, Brussels, London, or Frankfurt.  Port Royal is the latest iteration of airport diner in Madras as you wait for your flight to leave.

As I waited for my flight at midnight, my last meal being at 9 PM, I was hungry and needed some energy to get me through the extra two hours before my flight actually left.  There were many options for vegetarians to eat at Port Royal, including a “veggie” sandwich (two slices of wonderbread with tomatoes and cucumber), a cheese puff, and a masala puff.  Considering the name of this blog is “Cheese Sandwich”, I figured it would be apropos to actually order the cheese sandwich.  As much as I complain about other place’s cheese sandwiches, Port Royal’s is probably the worst.  It is literally just cheese and bread, with the bread being disgusting white bread, and the cheese being processed cheddar.  But they do give you a packet of ketchup with it!  I don’t understand India’s obsession of adding ketchup to anything that has cheese (including pizza), but it did actually make this sandwich slightly palatable.  Nevertheless, if you’re in Madras Airport, there are very little options (there is a cafe, but it doesn’t look like anybody works there at 1 AM), so this disgusting cheese sandwich will have to do.  Make it one and a half disgusting cheese sandwiches.

One of the great banes of my childhood was trying to eat food with my hands off of a banana leaf at weddings I would attend. Ultimately, you’ve not experienced true Indian dining unless you’ve eaten on a banana leaf.  There are so many factors to contend with when eating off a banana leaf - liquid running off the leaf, sweet and savory mixing together, and fans blowing the leaf away. These concerns may seem bizarre to you, but you likely eat most of your meals from a ceramic or metal plate (lucky).

My cousin was getting married, and Indian weddings start very early in the morning (6 AM!), so often times they serve breakfast.  A typical south Indian breakfast included a vadai, coconut chutney, pongal, sweet, idli, and sambar (clockwise from far left).  There was also mini-dosas served, but they were too thick for my liking.

If you ever attend an Indian wedding, roughly 50-75% of your time will be spent being asked if you have eaten or want coffee or tea.  If you have any intention of actually watching the wedding take place, you will be woefully disappointed.  A typical Indian lunch begins with you sitting at an empty banana leaf.  Then progressive waves of servers walk by with first curry (potato and beans with purrippu, top left), then random crap that I don’t like (aviyal, moru kazhambu, top middle), raitha, and then finally rice, ghee, purrippu, and sambar.

This wedding was interesting as there were a few items which I’ve never seen before, banana chips and masala vadai (center) are standard, though the ginger paste and the unknown sweet (foreground) were firsts for me.  If anybody has any clue on this sweet (the bride is from Bengal, so this may be a Bengali dish), please comment.  Nobody at the wedding I knew had any idea what this was called.

Finally, more traditional sweets, payisum and a sweet vada.  I never understood why people serve everything all at once, as it’s very common for the sweets to get mixed in with the savory, and turn into a disgusting melange of flavors.  It’s common to eat the sweet before anything else comes (as the sweets come as early as the curries), but I am a sweet after kind of guy.  After all this indulgence, it’s common to have a moru satham course and/or rasam satham course, but I wasn’t able to take any pictures because my hands were quite messy.  So, this’ll have to do.

When I was growing up, going to India was always a difficult experience, as I would often be forced to go 2-3 months in the summer without any possibility of eating a pizza.  Thanks to the crumbling of the Soviet Union in 1991, US capitalism was free to come into Non-aligned India and bring its sweetly glorious pizza.  Pizza Corner was one of the first bastions of Indian pizzadom, and I would actually enjoy those pizzas, because they were a stark contrast of my 30 straight days of masala dosas and rasam satham.  After trying it for the first time in 2 years, I began to question what it was that I really liked about Pizza Corner.

Possibly the highlight of the Pizza Corner meal is the garlic bread, which tastes roughly like a loaf of Pepperidge Farm garlic bread topped with cheese.  But I do love Pepperidge Farm, so I’ll give Pizza Corner a pass.

While the pizza base texture was akin to a pencil eraser, and the sauce akin to tomato ketchup, I did enjoy the paneer tikka masala pizza, as the overwhelming presence of onions, capsicum (green peppers), and paneer cheese (as well as mozzarella) made up for the other failures of the pizza.

What’s wrong with this pizza you ask?  It’s probably that disgusting outgrowth on the starboard side of the pizza, most would call baby corn, but I prefer to call “corn abortion”.  I think if more people adopt more unsavory nomenclature describing this disgusting compound many argue is a vegetable, I think we may make strides towards its eradication from our culinary establishments.  I don’t know why pizza places in India insist upon making pizzas called “Corn Exotica”, as there are hundreds of different vegetables that would be delicious on a pizza.  I’d try an okra-chayote pizza; it would probably be very strange, but I think it’d be better than Corn Exotica.  I don’t even know what’s exotic about this, outside of the fetishism required to eat corn abortions.

Out of the pizza establishments in India, I would argue that Pizza Corner does the best job (between this and Domino’s).  I have not tried the Pizza Hut in India, but I would argue that Pizza Corner is probably better based purely on nostalgic reasons.  As such, I’ll give it three and a half cheese sandwiches.

While in India, I am essentially homebound, partly from the delicious home cooking that I received, and also because outside of my house is a dark, desolate place filled with mosquitos, mysterious pools of manure/trash/blackness, and feral dogs and mendicants.  So, come nighttime, I tend to want to stay at home.  As such, the only dining options available to me are either dosas or whatever my next door neighbor cooks for me.  Thus, I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to learn how to make a dosa, which turned out being much harder than I thought.

Every good dosa starts with a good mavu (batter), and this mavu was made by Vidya (so, consider this cooking experience comparable to Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee, except I’m way hotter and less blond.  A close approximation of the recipe for making the mavu is the following:

Ingredients:

• Idly rice- 4 cup
• Urad dal(whole round)- 1 cup
• Fenugreek seeds- 1/2 tsp
• Salt - to taste

Recipe:

1. Soak Idly rice, Urad dal and Fenugreek seeds for 4 to 5 hours.
2. Grind the soaked idly rice into a nice batter.
3. Grind the soaked Urad dal and Fenugreek seeds nicely. Use wet grinder or mixie to prepare the batter.
4. Combine the two batters and Salt by hand.
5. Allow the batter to ferment for overnight in a warm place. It may take up to 6 to 8 hours to ferment. Stir it with a ladle after fermentation.You can prepare idly or dosa using this batter.

Once you’ve made the batter, and it’s fermented overnight, you’re ready to make dosas!  There are two important things to keep in mind when making a dosa: pan hotness and mavu thickness.  After the mavu has been fermenting overnight, it gets pretty thick and gummy, so if you try to fry a dosa, it looks like a little pancake turd.  So, it is important to add some extra water; however, you don’t want to add so much that the mavu is too runny to make a good dosa.  This in itself is a difficult feat to master, and I still haven’t gotten the hang of proper mavu consistency.

When heating the pan, you want to make sure that it is very hot.

I wouldn’t recommend the above technique as a hot pan is really hot, and you’ll just get burned.  Perhaps flick some water on the pan and see how quickly it evaporates.  Once the pan is sufficiently hot, you’re ready to add the batter.

I use a rounded ladle to add the mavu, which is a little flatter than your typical ladle, as it allows for better spreading of the dosa.  First add a teaspoon of oil, then put 1-2 ladlefuls of mavu in the center of the pan.  Turn down the heat so that you don’t burn the other side and press the ladle (bottom down) onto the mavu, and move slowly outwards in larger concentric circles (clockwise or counterclockwise).  Once you have a desired dosa diameter, add more oil to the top of the dosa, and around the sides.  Once the oil starts sizzling, you’re ready to start flipping.  Gently put a spatula underneath the dosa, removing it from the pan, and flip it.

Try to flip it into the center of the pan.  But flipping is tough, especially when you’re trying to show off.  Allow it to cook a little bit longer, feel free to check for brownness underneath (I usually have one dark side and one light as a metaphor for racial equality).

Now you’re ready to eat!  Dosa are usually folded in half to allow space for putting mulligapodi (spicy powder), various chutneys, or potato kari.  Really, you can eat dosas with anything your heart desires, as its a fairly ubiquitous dish, but I think if more people start working on dosas, the world will be a better place (primarily because then I can get dosas anywhere).

You may wonder why there hasn’t been a lot of posts about eating out in India.  One of the main reasons I go to India is the opportunity to eat some good old fashioned home cooking.  Normally, that used to be done by my grandmother, who would always regale me with the most scrumptious meals, snacks and sweets on a daily basis.  However, my grandmother has been in really poor health (part of the reason why I went to India), so my family hired a cook for her, named Vidya.  It’s a pretty good deal, where all I do is go to the vegetable stand, pick out what vegetables I want to eat in the next few days, and she’ll come up with something great.

Above is a meal I had with okra kari (bottom left), spinach kari (top), rice and onion menthi kuzhambu (the “zh” is actually a weird palatal R sound - it’s reasons like these that I can’t speak Tamil well).  The food Vidya makes is intended for my grandmother, so it is very minimally spicy or sour (pullippu).  Despite this, the food is quite tasty; I attribute this to her overusage of ghee and salt.  The food is sometimes too salty or buttery, but that is the fine line that must be tread when cooking tasty food intended to be bland and flavorless.

This lunch was moru kuzhambu and chayote and carrot kari.  Normally, moru kuzhambu, a yoghurt sauce, has some vegetable like okra or squash in it.  Unfortunately, I forgot to get vegetables this morning, so Vidya improvised and used brown dumplings fried gram flour, which weren’t as good as okra, but after living in India for a few weeks, I have realized that beggars can’t be choosers.  Rather, beggars aren’t choosers, so I’m just supposing that they lack the capacity to choose rather than the fact that they have chosen to not choose.

As a special treat, she made me pooris, a type of fried bread, and chole masala (right).  Admittedly, her north Indian cuisine is not as great as her south Indian cooking, but that’s to be expected (I’ve yet to find a north Indian that makes a good dosa).  Nevertheless, this dish was as delicious as it looked, albeit being slightly garam masala-y.

I was truly spoiled to be in India and have somebody make delicious meals day in and day out.  Vidya was an interesting character who was always trying to make fun of me with my grandmother’s nurse.  Of course, all of their jokes were in Tamil, which I was fortunate enough to not know well enough to ignore. So if you think “Cheese Sandwich guy, how could you only be in India for a month and only review 5 or 6 restaurants?”  The reason would be Vidya and some good old fashioned home cooking.