Ode To Food

In restaurants, I'm the kind of person who always wants what everyone else has ordered. I want to try it all and taste all the different things on the menu. On the rare occasions where I know my food is a damn good choice, I feel smug about it for days, and will keep slipping into conversation how wonderful it was.

Before I left for my travels I was making sandwiches every day for work (saving the pennies,, oh yes), which were always soggy and I would watch, drooling a little, as others bought Chinese takeaways and chips while I tackled the wholemeal bread with odd vegetarian insides. To give my lunches credit they were always tasty - as a general rule I grabbed everything mushy in the fridge and slopped it in bread or into a pot, so it was, if nothing else, inventive.

Now that I'm paying for every meal I eat, though I do miss home cooking, each meal is an excitement. Actually that's always true at home too, because I find any food exciting, but in India when there's an affordable extensive menu with several different cuisines to choose from each time it's like being in Helen Heaven. More so when I was with a big group and could try maybe 5 or 6 other dishes every dinner. Naturally putting that into action involves not trying to sound too desperate each time you ask. It can't be straight away, give it a while and then it still should be a subtle display of greediness:

"Is it good?"
"Yeah"
pause
"Yeah? Really?"
pause

and then they have to let you try it, that's the rule.

We were right fatties in Goa. No meat though, as it's a risky business in India. Justin had tandoori chicken and was dramatically sick the next day so that's proof enough for me. Meat = bad. I thought I was dealing with the absence of it just fine, until I found myself sat opposite a couple sharing some kind of beautiful looking meat feast, and found that I could not stop staring at it, and was on the verge of asking them if I could have a bite.

For my last proper meal in India I took the advice from my Bible, the severely outdated Rough Guide to India. At times this Bible has led me to buildings that no longer exist, hotels that had moved places or been renamed, and led me to expect prices that are long, long gone. In any case, this time they had it right; I sampled their recommended onion masala dosa at this place and it was d e l e c t a b l e - its a kind of crispy rice pancake which you have with several different curried dishes and ohhh it was one of the best things I've ever tasted.

Also, who told all the Indian chefs how to cook pizzas? Seriously, it baffles me. Because most of them were brilliant. And yet some of the things they got so wrong, like tortilla, which arrived as a pile of boiled potatoes, and a chocolate pancake in which "chocolate" meant a tiny sprinkling of drinking chocolate powder, comparable to what you get on top of cappuccino froth.

A dessert that sticks with me and I think of daily (is that unhealthy?) is the banoffee pie in one of the restaurants in Goa: a mush of all things good, and we couldn't get enough of it. It wasn't really banoffee pie per se, just a collection of yumminess and squidgy goodness all piled up in a massive helping. Unfortunately, the restaurant where this heavenly sweet stuff was made, was also the place where we ate our total disaster of a Christmas lunch. We thought we'd be special and get a couple of lobsters to share, and me being a lobster virgin was deeply excited. It turned out to taste a bit like dry chicken. It was overcooked and probably not fresh. Then this enormous fish turned up looking fabulous, but the moment each of us dipped a fork in, we all simultaneously spat it out eeeEUUurghhh it was off. Definitely off. Even the prawns were bad, and I'd give an arm and possibly several toes of each foot to be able to afford to eat prawns all the time in England. The waiter took the news of the off fish so badly he nearly cried, and said he wanted to quit his job. His heart seemed to snap in two as we sat there awkwardly, our efforts to reassure him that it wasn't his fault having no effect whatsoever. One broken man and several unsatisfied tummies meant no more banoffee pie for me, as I couldn't face returning to the restaurant and having to converse with the poor waiter again.

I'm famished! Goodbye.