Gluten Free in India Part VI: A Home Cooked Meal

One of my favourite experiences of my trip was the evening I spent at a colleague’s family home eating a meal with his lovely wife, beautiful spunky kid and gorgeous German Shepard.  I am so grateful for this evening.  His daughter is five years old and only speaks Bengali and Hindi, with a few words of English so it was really cute watching her try to speak with me!  We bonded over ice cream and Angry Birds, two of her few English words.

On the way to his home, we stopped at a market to pick up chicken so his wife could make chicken tikka.  Sandip assured me the meat was fine and I wouldn’t get sick so I just went for it since I wanted to experience a real homemade Indian meal.  I knew I could trust Sandip’s judgement, so I kept all thoughts about if the meat was refrigerated at this outdoor market in my head.

A kilo of delicious chicken tikka

A kilo of delicious chicken tikka

We ate a kilogram of chicken tikka as an appetizer over the course of 1.5 hours before we were allowed to start dinner!  It was delicious meat, one of the best things I ate in India.  At first it was really spicy and they offered to get me some sweet curd to compliment it, which tasted like candy by the way.  But I got used to the heat after about my tenth piece of chicken.  Delicious!  I have to find out how to make Indian food when I get home!

I made a goof though when I realized I ate my first piece of chicken tikka with my left hand, instead of my right.  Whoops, smacks head!  How did I do that.

By the time we started dinner at midnight, I was already full and on my fourth vodka soda!  Pinkie prepared egg curry, another chicken dish and rice with peas.  The rice and peas were so sweet.

It was so lovely to be able to meet Sandip’s family and share a home cooked meal with them at their family home.  I learned so much about their culture.  Then the business talk also came out!  It was a great evening!

A lovely home cooked meal

A lovely home cooked meal