Place: Spice Paradise

The best day we’ve had in my time thus far in India! Walked by this spice shop on the way to the market and saw that they hold cooking classes, so we decided to give it a gander. Ended up staying here from 5pm til midnight, cooking, talking, having a blast.

Rekha, pictured, runs the cooking class and basically treated us like family. She taught us how to make chai, chapati (correctly, unlike our derpery at the Sikh temple), biryani, raita, lassi, and random other things like a yogurt and rice concoction she came up with, and a variation of a momo.

We talked about everything with her and her husband from Hinduism to the caste system to Holi to arranged marriages. I’ll talk more about those subjects in later posts.

Also at one point a group of older French ladies walked in to buy spices and they didn’t speak English, so Ivana and I ended up translating for them to figure out how to use the various spices they came to buy.

Food: Veggie biryani

Biryani is a Muslim dish. It originated from the Mughal empire. During the war soldiers needed to pack food for long distances and that meant they couldn’t do a curry separate from a rice, so they came up with this pre-mixed dish.

The middle is an edible silver. Apparently eating silver is supposed to boost intelligence.

The way biryani is made is actually quite similar to paella! Both technique and ingredients-wise. Pretty much the spices are what separates them apart.