An average Saturday

Tomorrow we will be leaving for Kutch, an area north of here. There is a fabric producer that supplies predominantly tie-died fabrics to The MarketPlace and we will be spending a week up there to study his production methods and try to pinpoint specific problem areas. When I write tie-dye it can be easy to think of the semi-psychedelic t-shirts from earlier decades, but these fabrics are truly work of arts and nothing like the t-shirts. One of the patterns is made by tying off a tiny amount of fabric that results in a dot size pattern after dyeing. Hanna read that it requires 75,000 of these “dots” to make a sari and the producer here in Mumbai said it takes 2-3 months to create one sari like that. Just amazing! Can’t wait to see it and post some pictures. I am not sure if we will be having internet available, I hope so.

We have our train tickets to a 16 hour, overnight train ride and were a little...eh…”curious” what such a sleeper train could look like, especially after the less pleasant experience we had yesterday. Hanna looked for pictures on line and I read other people experiences. All I can think after that is that it will be blog worthy.

Today we spent most of the day preparing reports. Every week we need to submit various reports regarding our week and I find it at times challenging to translate our experience into a report. After our first few weeks of “Survivor Mumbai” I now feel more like a contestant on The Amazing Race, constantly trying to stay in the race from the moment I wake up until I go to sleep.

True to the reality shows, we too have tasted some of the local cuisine, but we were clearly the winners of this experience. The food is absolutely amazing here. I even like the vegetables!
One of the most common lunch items you will see people bring to work is a sprouted lentil dish called Moong Daal. This dish is eaten with unleavened bread called chapattis and is absolutely delicious and they bring it in these cute little tin dishes. Last week, we were treated to an absolutely delicious lunch which included fried chicken. Here is Shameema’s fried chicken recipe:

Make a paste with red chili powder, pepper, salt, white vinegar and cornflakes. Cover the chicken pieces and let them sit for at least an hour. Then fry (in lots of oil).

To this treat, we enjoyed rice with some kind of delicious, spicy sauce, really good green beans, home-made chutney that could take any sinus specialist right out of business (was really tasty too) and again chapattis. As I continue my culinary journey as well, I will make sure I both get pictures and recipes. Yum!