Malvani Food

I’ve only been here a few days and I swear I’ve gained a few kilograms already. The food here is awesome. The places we are going don’t look anything flash – just a little room or two with some plastic tables and chairs (the kind you buy from The Warehouse). Most of the ones we’ve been to are family establishments, with the family sometimes even living out the back of the restaurant. The women generally do all the cooking, with the menfolk serving, or just supervising.

I was going to get Gopal to tell me all the names for everything I’ve eaten, but we never seem to have time for that, so I’m just going to post pictures.

My favourite place in Malvan was Hotel Ruchira. Hotel means a place where you can get food, not a place where you can stay.

Here is one of our dinners, the vegetarian thali with a side of fried prawns.

Bottom left is my half finished plate of kolambi fry (fried prawns). I’m a terrible food blogger, most of the time I’d finished eating before it occurred to me to take a photo. This time we had started eating, but we (mostly) reconstructed the plate for the photo.

All meals came with roti (flatbread). While there are sometimes spoons, the common way of eating is to use your fingers, right hand only. You break off a bit of roti and use it scoop up the other things and eat them. We also often had bhakri, which is a softer, puffier flatbread usually not made from wheat flour.

The little white dish is yoghurt. The yellow is , and the pinky purple liquid on the left is sol kadhi, which is a drink based on coconut milk soured with kokum (a local fruit) and garlic. Some places where we ordered glasses of these it came with coriander leaves in it also.

The vegetarian dishes on the plate include a lovely one made of coconut and fennugreek leaves, which is delicious. The others are delicious but I don’t know exactly what they are. These sometimes bordered on too hot for me.

Meals generally come with rice too, so that you can mop up any remaining sauces after you’ve finished the roti. To avoid the rice getting cold, they’ll sometimes bring it at the end of the meal. Often we skipped it altogether.

Here is a close up photo of another batch of kolambi fry:

We also had quite a lot of fish dishes. Generally they just crumb and fry the entire fish:

We also had these absolutely divine things for dessert.

And for all of that, here is the bill:

185 rupees is about $4.47. The bill usually comes with a bowl of fennel seeds which serve basically like breath mints and most restaurants.

Also, every restaurant (sorry, hotel) has a washbasin where you go and wash your hands before and after your meal (since you do eat with your fingers, after all).

Being right on the coast and having access to so much fresh seafood, we also had crab a couple of times:

It was incredibly tender and utterly delicious, but very difficult to eat. It requires a LOT of effort to get the meat out of the crab with one hand, and is virtually impossible to do without making a mess. I confess I wimped out and mostly left the difficult parts to Gopal, content to let him feed me little bits he’d extracted every now and again.

We had pohe for breakfast a few times. It is very tasty, made from beaten rice and flavoured with onions, cumin seeds and curry leaves.

Below is another thali from a different place, with a side of bhurji – beautifully flavoured scrambled eggs. The little white dish in front is shrikhand, a delicious dessert made from thickened yoghurt whipped with sugar.

I also tried some sugar cane juice. They take a bunch of sugar cane ( looks like bamboo sticks) and feed it through a shredder and collect the juice.

The result is as delicious as you’d expect pure sugar juice to be :). These juicers are quite a common sight on the side of the road.

The other delicious thing we had was this wonderful coconut and sugar confection. It is kind of like coconut ice, but more delicious, flavoured with a bit of cardamom. We bought lots of this, but sadly, we eventually lost some of it to ants in Goa.