I heard South Indian food was spicy, luckily I was prepared. Two of my roommates in the US love spicy food and they cook for me often so I am more accustomed to it. Several students in the program have difficulty eating the food and usually drink loads of water with their meals. None of the meals have been too spicy, to the point which you can’t even taste the food. Most of what I eat is cafeteria food so I suspect that the cooks don’t make it as spicy as it should be because they know Americans aren’t accustomed to it.
I don’t know the name of most of the things I eat, but they are delicious and vegetarian. When I get a plate of food, I never know if it’s going to be sweet, salty, spicy, or bland. It’s always a surprise. All I do know is that there is usually rice and some type of roti or bread.
Breakfast is usually western style oatmeal or cereal. Sometimes they also offer more Indian type breakfast. I had breakfast once at the shopping complex and it was completely different then the breakfast we get in the dining hall. I had puri, vada, and curry. I didn’t take a picture of it and I wish I had.
In the first picture you can see the small glass of grape juice and in the second picture there is a glass of watermelon juice. The juice is handmade every morning before breakfast and it’s thick. It tastes delicious and I don’t think they add any sugar.
Every morning I have a cup of chai. It’s so good, I wish the cup was larger.
There isn’t much difference between lunch and dinner. Both are usually served with a soup, but dinner also gets dessert too. For cafeteria food, it’s pretty tasty.
I have no idea what this soup is called, it looks gross, but it’s actually pretty good.
That green stuff I was told is palak. It’s my favorite stuff to eat, once I finish my plate, I always get more.
Those square things are really sweet. It tastes like fried shortbread covered it sugary syrup, yum.
Dessert is usually a fruit salad, rice pudding, hot chocolate, or ice cream. The fruit salads are good, they usually have apple, pineapple, papaya, bananas, and pomegranate. The ice cream is by far my favorite dessert. The texture is much smoother and softer then ice cream in the US.
I had a home cooked meal at Meg’s house. It was much spicier than the cafeteria food I had been eating. It was delicious.
I ate a ton of these, they are so good! Meg told me they are also good for health.
I’ve also eaten Indian restaurant food.
Tomato soup before the main course.
Puri, it was the dish of the girl next to me.
This was my lunch. My two favorite things were the green stuff, palak, and the red stuff, paneer. When you finish the rice, bread and the curries, they put more on your plate.
This my favorite junk food item that I’ve come across. To get them I have to take an autorickshaw to the closest convenience store because I can’t find it on campus.
