I was fortunate enough to spend the better part of June and July wandering around India. I have a couple friends living there who invited me and my fiance to come and share their adventure for a while. Nothing could have prepared us for the food monsoon to come. Our culinary culture shock began in the Kolkata airport, where we were greeted by our friends with fresh alphonso mangoes and sweet hot cups of chai, and didn’t end until our arrival in London on the way home.  Every region we visited offered a completely new menu consisting of local, seasonal produce guided by who knows how many years of refinement. Each street lined with food wallahs of every imaginable kind. Pani Puri, Tandoori Kebab, Aaloo Tikki, Jalebi… (mouth watering, tears welling). I could go on and on about every strange and amazing thing I shoveled into my mouth but that would take days so I’ll focus on one particular experience I found rare and enlightening.

We were invited to stay a week with Mummi, Sumi and Mayna Deka, an Indian family living in North Guwahati in the state of Assam where we were treated to the greatest delicacy India has to offer; home cooking. An average day at the Deka’s would begin at 9am with cups of hot home Chai made from assam black tea and masala boiled in fresh fatty milk, and homemade sweeties and cookies. If we woke up early enough we would walk Mayna to school with Sumi, dropping off an empty bottle at a nearby neighbors on the way and picking up our fresh days milk on the way back. This calf’s mommy kept the chai coming.

Breakfast would come an hour later; mounds of crispy puffy luchi bread for scooping Dum Aloo (Bengali potato curry). Any left over luchi finished with fresh honey. Mummi and Sumi didn’t speak much english but they both knew the word “FINISH!” and we would obey and clean every plate.

Usually we’d buy some fruits and veggies from the wallah down the road, plenty of strange curly long spikey gourds that I’ve never seen before, including one called a Bitter Gourd which, according to Sumi, no one likes but everyone eats. Now and then we would take a ferry into south Guwahati where we would buy food from the market. Shopping with Mummi was always an adventure visiting five or six different vendors before settling on the days price of a daikon.

Lunch would happen at around 1pm and was usually the biggest meal of the day. Mountains of rice served with three or four sabzis(veggie) dishes, some pickle, lime and blistering hot jolokia peppers from the back yard. Home meals are eaten on the floor with your hands, always lots of fun!

Back at home chicken, fish and eel vendors would ride their bicycles down the roads calling out their wares “MURGI! MURGI! MURGI!” (“CHICKEN! CHICKEN! CHICKEN!”). We would run out and get a couple chickens just to watch the vendor  masterfully slaughter, skin and clean them on the street in seconds.

With the heat of the day at it’s highest and our bellies at their fullest lunch was usually followed by a little nap on the cool concrete floor (much more comfortable than it sounds). After a nap we would sneak out and get some gulab jamun and rasgulla with chai from the sweetie shop around the corner. Preparation for dinner would start early as dinner was usually a little more elaborate than lunch. After showing alot of interest we were lucky enough to be allowed in Sumi’s humble kitchen to help with cooking, often guest in India aren’t allowed any where near the kitchen, especially men.

It was amazing what Sumi could do with two burners. West Indian food was nothing like what you eat in north American Indian restaurants. The veggies where simply prepared with just a few key spices often fried in mustard oil used to cook two or three different veggies before becoming the base of a gravy which was always light and saucy. No heavy meats, just chicken and seafood. Every meal is accompanied by rice and a delicious runny lentil curry called Dahl. Guwahati was prone to power outages so we where often left cooking by candle light transporting us back a generation or two.

So here we were, a big family, cooking a fresh, seasonal, locally sourced, sustainable, nutritious and delicious feast for about $4 canadian without electricity. This just seems to good to be true. What in north America would require research, special sourcing, planning, a drive to opposite ends of the city, careful label reading and a lot of money, in North Guwahati, happens out of habit. This is what I found enlightening about eating in Assam. The simplicity in which eating fits into the lives and economy of a small community. It makes every other food system look like a giant mess.

We decided it was important to show the Deka family a little bit of western food culture but since cows are sacred in India burgers where out, so, we settled on the next best thing. We had heard that Baskin Robbins had set up shop in South Guwahati so we brought Mummi and her son Pressant to try some real north American Ice Cream. They had never tried it before, probably because a cone costs more than a days wage on an average Indian income. We all pretended to like it (it’s really got nothing on a two ingredient mango lassi) but really couldn’t wait to get home for a quick chai before bed. The sooner we go to sleep the sooner we get to live this day over again!