Daily menu

I usually lose weight when I am in India - not because of gastrointestinal upset (knock on wood I have never been afflicted with Delhi Belly or in fact anything worse than a cold in all my travels to India) - but because a) the heat lessens my appetite, b) my 'fattening faves' (chocolate, cheese, desserts to name a few) are either completely unavailable here and/or rendered unpalatable by aforementioned heat and c) I am so cheap I squeak (though I prefer the term 'frugal' - much less derogatory) and thus tend to eat much the same as the local people which frankly has very little variety and thus I eat less and less at meals as time goes by.

My breakfast is the delectable puttu which has featured before in this blog.

Pen just included for scale - you don't eat it!

It is made from ground rice mixed with water, salt and grated coconut then put into a tube and steamed. Surely the puttu cooker is to our mind an odd looking contraption! I usually eat this with banana (smush the peeled banana between your fingers, break off a lump of puttu and take all to your mouth with your fingers) but you can also eat it with kadala which is a curry made of garbanzo beans (I think - this recipe from the tourism department refers to 'black bengal gram' but I think they are simply darkened, perhaps by roasting, chickpeas). In fact this combination (puttu kadala) is part of the dialogue of this cute ZooZoo ad from 2009 (at about 17 seconds).



Lunch is usually 'meals' or what would everywhere else in India be called thali. I eat thali at the Kerala Cafe which is a little outdoor kitchen stall with two 'dining' rooms - each about 10 feet square - that caters to mostly local men and women that work at Kovalam (in the hotels/guesthouses, selling fruit, waiters, masseurs, lifeguards). Very few people (in fact I can think of only one that I've seen - a shop owner whose wife probably packs his midday meal for him) bring a lunch and since most live too far away to go home for a meal they patronize places like Kerala Cafe where they can eat simple food inexpensively. Most of them run a tab and what they consume is written down in a book and totalled periodically.

The meal is served on a flat rectangular stainless steel plate with depressions - a cheaper version of the classic 'thali' (which just means plate) which is usually a circular rimmed plate in which individual dishes (katoris) are used (as in the picture below which shows the thali served at the Ariya Nivaas in Trivandrum). In the Kerala Cafe meal the largest rectangular depression is filled with rice (the fat, short-grained Kerala rice which I am not particularly fond of as I find it bland and usually mushy/soggy) and the 4 small round depressions across the top (each about the diameter of a tennis ball) are filled with 3 different kind of vegetable curries and a pickle. You also usually get a papad (very distinctively Keralan as cooked in coconut oil). If you want for an extra 10 Rs per item you can get fish fry or fish curry. The former is placed in a deck-of-cards-sized depression to the side of the 'rice depression' while the latter is served in a separate dish. Finally, you will be offered dal (lentils cooked with spices & onions to a soupy consistency), sambar or more (pronounced, as near as I can tell, more-ay, this is a yogurt-based liquidy stuff) to go on top of your rice. All of the depressions will be replenished as you empty them.

Thali refers to the larger rimmed tray/plate as well as the meal itself

So that's lunch dealt with. Dinner is usually one of two things - either chicken fry (which is delicious but audaciously greasy and unhealthy seeming - see picture below from 2008) or an omelette - with parottas (a particular kind of flaky, Indian flatbread). I accompany either of these with a big plate of 'salad' (see earlier shopping post).

Parottas on the left, next a bag of curry to go with the egg and on the right the chicken fry