Food for thought

Celeste's parents arrived yesterday. I dont know thier names or for that matter cannot pronounce even Celeste's real name and though she quite wisely controlled her instinct and hasn't called us by our names as she would have normally done in Singapore; I know for sure that even they would not be able to pronounce ours especially my dad's southie name. But whats in a name they say when there are so many other important issues to worry about. e.g. food

So my Lucknow though is not a small town, you cannot get authentic chinese food anywhere. Its the same with all parts of India as our Indian taste buds prefer the spicy indianised chinese and that is all that you get. So our post lunch discussion yesterday was what to serve for dinner for C's parents. We dont cook meat at home and for them any meal is incomplete without meat. When asked C what constituted a special dish in her place, prawn, crab, duck came the answer. It seems that since seafood is more expensive, thats cooked on special occasions. And the cooking procedure takes 4 hours in slow steaming. They eat bland and for us to serve bland food to guests is difficult to accept.

C's mom doesn't eat beans, peas which meant that daal was out. She did not even eat eggs which was the only non veg my mom was prepared to cook at home. Curd was out too which meant that the painstakingly prepared dahi bada and chutney were not going to be used. Aloo paratha was one dish which C liked and so we assumed that her parents would like it too. We made some more plain veggies like alu gobi and indo-chinese manchurian. Somehow the dinner was done and wound up with some nice herbal black tea which was the only item they liked a lot. The yummy gajar ka halwa was also left untouched for being too sweet.

Yesterday evening I went to JJ to get some rolls and bread items which they may like for breakfast and I just could not find any item which they might like. And in Lucknow paneer bhurji all spiced up filled inside bread is offered when you ask for plain cheese roll. Anyways I picked some puffs, cream rolls and some more patties, there were no sweet bread items no muffin, donut just fruit cakes. These items went in for the breakfast today. I would think that an english breakfast would have been liked by the guests but according to my mom bread, cereal are the worst kind of breakfast served by lazy people and definitey not done on special occasions. So something had to be cooked fresh and we cooked idli with two type of coconut chutney besides other items.

They started with eating cream rolls with spoon fork and then had to switch to hands as they peices started flying off. C's dad was quite adventurous and tried one idli. He loved the tomato chutney and kept pouring more. That was good news atleast they liked something. Seeing C's dad, her mom too mustered courage to take an idli. I think our steamed rice cake is similar to some of thier breads. And then for each food item we had to explain in detail what it was. One saving grace was that since Singapore has lot of Indian population, they were little familiar with the food. Still salad was the only item which needed no explanation and was an instant hit.