Date: March 12, 1998
Subject: A Bit About Food
Hello from India!
So glad to get a few messages from you via email. My Hotmail address is still current and active but I do not have regular or easy access to the Internet yet. To get online I need to go to the office early in the day (before work) because the local Internet provider gets sooo busy later in the day you can hardly use it. Supposedly a few new providers are going to enter the market and so hopefully that will help the service.
Let me tell you about my lunches. I order Indian food every day from the Consulate commissary. I get a hot dish (either a vegetable, or fish, or mutton or chicken curry sort of dish, though it isn’t called curry here) along with plenty of rice and three chapati, the Indian equivalent to pita bread. This satisfying and definitely not fattening meal costs me anywhere from 12 to 17 rupees. Since there are 40 rupees to the dollar, I pay about 30 cents or so for a great meal. Our cook makes a wide variety of food at home, a lot of it Western, so the lunchroom at work is my only steady source of Indian food which I love. Katie is not fond of much of the food here. Aaron likes about 75% of it (though eats it all), and Eric likes almost as much as I do. Last night our cook prepared a fish for us (that even in death stared at us from the serving platter). Eric and I loved it; Aaron and Anita liked it; Katie ate the rice and snacked later. Our cook has discovered that I like chicken gizzards and hearts, so with the fish last night he cooked the egg sac that came with it. I ate all of it except for the bite my brave Eric ate. It sort of tasted like chicken liver encased in a leathery skin…not as bad as my description sounds.
About our variety of food, our south Indian cook has made everything from a beef (buffalo) roast to chicken, to apple pie and home made french-fries, to Indian, Greek and Chinese cuisine. He is older and has had a lot of experience with families from many places. It still seems strange to eat what we had for supper Saturday night: fried chicken, french fries, and apple pie (locally available apples!!) Enough for now.
