a Mysore meal

I took a cooking class on Sunday from an amazing woman named Ragini. We learned to make dosas, aloo palya,
vegetable curry with homemade masala, &
spiced rice with lemon.

A dosa is a thin crepe made from a mixture of rice and lentils that has been fermented overnight. They are absolutely delicious and almost always served with sambar (a thin spiced vegetable soup) and coconut chutney for dipping.

Aloo palya is potatoes seasoned with onions, green chili, mustard seed, curry leaves and turmeric. It is simple and very good. A dosa stuffed with aloo palya and with sambar & chutney is called masala dosa.

I loved learning to make masala for the vegetable curry. Ragini says that Indian women often have a little set of the spices they favor for masala; hers is kept in a circular container of cute little stainless steel cups. We blended freshly ground spices with garlic, ginger, onion, cilantro, grated coconut, and tomato to make a flavorful paste to stew the vegetables in. Yum!

Idli are another riff on the rice and lentil batter but they are steamed instead of fried and shaped like cute little puffs. Idli are dipped in sambar and chutney just like dosas.

There's a wonderful fruit and veggie stand around the corner from our apartment and I'm getting familiar with the beautiful couple who run it even though I don't speak Kannada (the native language here).
You can buy tons of produce for under $2! So we've been eating lots and lots of fruit: fresh bananas, watermelon, pineapple, pomegranate, oranges, and papaya. And now that we've got a stove and a knife we've started to buy vegetables too. I'm craving raw veggies which can be risky to eat here because they may be washed with bad water. So yesterday I was thrilled when we made a raw salad of carefully cleaned and peeled carrot, cucumber, beet, pomegranate, ginger, and lemon.

There's so much to say about the food here so this is just a start. More to come!