Food post #2

We're blogging on two computers at once to save some time since we have a lot to catch you all up on.

I'll cover some meals that pop out in my mind that we enjoyed in the past few weeks:

5. The meals that we had at the free kitchen at the Golden temple in Amritsar were pretty amazing, not necessarily the food itself, but the overall experience. Attached to the temple is a kitchen that gives free food to anyone who wants 24 hours a day; all of the servers, cooks, and dishwashers are volunteers, and all of the food is bought with donations. They feed over 10,000 people a day. We were ushered into one of two large halls and seated in lines on the floor next to a few hundred other diners. Volunteers walked by carrying buckets of rice, lentils, veggies, and chapatis that they would shovel onto our plates. The food was simple and spicy. We had to eat quickly because they were eager to mop the floor and bring in the next group of hungry guests. Later we took a tour of the kitchen and saw many volunteer chefs stirring humongous colanders and a mechanical chapati machine that makes 10,000 chapatis an hour.
4. I just ate four warm, doughy momos outside the Tibetan temple here in Dharamasala, and enjoyed it so much that i'm putting it on this list. Three were filled with a spicy potato and one with some leafy greens.
3. In Udaipur we ate at a fancy restaurant called Ambrai on in island in the would-be lake. The food was really good: some curry, naan, and biryani, and the view of the lake palace and the city palace lit up at night was really nice also. In the dark at night, you could almost pretend that the lake was filled with water.
2. While on the camel safari, our guest family cooked us three great meals. All were carefully prepared by the two women of the house over a small wood fire that they kept hot by constantly blowing on it through a metal rod. We had some really good food, among them were some spicy fried onions, many carefully rolled chapatis, and a tangy yogurt and vegitable dish made from yogurt that they made from their goats' milk and stored under a basked outside so that they birds couldn't get to it.
1. The best meal that we had was the dinner from our cooking class in Udaipur; I think that things taste better when you cook them yourself. We made okra cooked in onions and spices, biryani with potatoes and zucchini, dahl, chai, and chapatis and parantha (stuffed chapatis). The food was surprisingly simple to cook, the only secret to making it great was the loads of fresh spices. Though we'll have to work on our chapati rolling technique, and maybe after making chapatis for every meal for the next 20 years we can be as good at rolling and kneading them as our cooking teacher.

All this food talk has made me pretty hungry.