Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Fwd: Cooking Class in Delhi with Jyoti

Our last day in Delhi we had a cooking class with Jyoti in her home.
The food great fresh ingredients were mostly already washed and
chopped (by 2 live-in teenagers who are her help) so we spent most of
the time talking about the spices, techniques, and then actually
watching her cook. She made it look simple but most recipes have quite
a few ingredients and tons of spices. Watch out because I'm coming
back with plenty of recipes. They were all delicious!  The best part
was seeing a typical middle or upper middle class living, complete
with the teenage son sleeping late then getting up, eating, and going
back to his room to watch a blaring episode of Modern Family.  The
house was in an area of housing for government officials that belonged
to her father in law.  It is typical for a married couple to move in
with the father's parents, so the houses tend to have lots of people
living in a relatively small space. One of our guides lived with his
parents, 4 brothers and wives and kids for a total of 18 in the house.
Everyone of any means has help, as the labor pool is huge and very
inexpensive. Even if they don't live-in they come every day to help
with cooking and cleaning.

Jyoti took us for a tour of a beautiful food and spice market (what
produce!), a sweet shop (wow they love the sweet sweets) and found us
some safe typical street food called gol goppa (a deep fried hollow
shell, in this case filled with spiced chickpeas then dunked in mint
water right before you pop it in your mouth). We could barely choke
down else when Jyoti determined that it's wouldn't be right for us to
leave without sampling some southern Indian food so we then went to a
southern Indian restaurant in the Defense Colony area for some dosas
with special sauces. We finally had to scream uncle - no more food!

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