Breakfast of Indians

We got up around 6:30 on what was, somehow, January 16th. It felt like we had lost about a week in transit, so it was disorienting to know that it was, in fact, Monday and that we would complete a significant portion of our production that day.

One of the benefits of being so sleep deprived and traveling through so many time zones is that when you do finally sleep, it is immensely restorative. Giving in to the exhaustion and jetlag was not an option, anyway, since we had so much to do.

We had a "seaview" room on the 4th floor with our own screened-in balcony overlooking the Gateway of India and the Arabian Sea, and this fact made it extremely pleasant to wake up in the morning. This was our first view of Mumbai in the daylight:

Smoggy but stunning!

Getting ready involved slathering ourselves with both sunscreen and mosquito repellent, dressing in long sleeves and pants, and putting on shoes with good traction, since we would spend a portion of the day on a boat and a few hours on an island. I pulled a George Costanza and wore my Timberlands (and yes, they did make me look taller).

At 7:00, we went downstairs to meet Rob and our Indian celebrity host for the video, Biplab Ganguli. We needed to go over portions of the script and plan out how, where, and when we would be shooting that day, and make sure that we were ready (more on that in subsequent posts). We met at Shamiana, the "coffee shop" (casual-dining restaurant) right off the lobby, for a buffet-style breakfast. This was our first encounter with Indian food, and we were nervous because we didn't know what to expect from an Indian breakfast. Everything was labeled, but that didn't really help because we still didn't know what was in it, whether it was savory or sweet, or even how it should be eaten (Was it finger-food? Should we use silverware?).

Here's someone else's slightly blurry picture of the restaurant. Shamiana is a kind of tent used for weddings, parties, and feasts, so the fabric draped around the light fixture is meant to evoke that.

I've always considered myself a relatively adventurous eater, and when I'm in a foreign country, I figure I should take my chances and eat the local food. I have had a few bad experiences from not knowing the language, most notably in Naples, when I ordered a thin-crust pizza only knowing three out of four toppings. Ten years later, I still know that "alici" are anchovies. In India, my biggest fears were spiciness and improperly washed produce. The former was something I could deal with; the latter would hamper our production schedule, and we couldn't have that.

Aaron is definitely not an adventurous eater. He isn't picky, exactly, he just has a strong sense of what he likes (and dislikes) and tends not to deviate from that. I make fun of him because every time we eat at Big Boy, he orders fish and chips. He looks at the menu, but he always orders the same thing. He also needs to know what ingredients are in his food, in case there's one or more ingredients he strongly dislikes--a sentiment I share, to a certain extent (we'll talk about cilantro, anise, and cloves in a future post). Like me, though, his biggest concern was illness, since we had read on numerous websites that even in upscale restaurants, there was still the possibility of contracting an illness from the water used in food preparation.

There were some typical American breakfast foods on the buffet: French toast, home fries, eggs, chicken sausage, bacon, oatmeal, cold cereal, and fresh fruit. Rob and Aaron seemed to stick to the familiar.  I took a little bit of everything and ate with gusto, because once I started eating I realized just how hungry I was.

Everything I ate was delicious (and this was by no means the tastiest meal we had). I had banana sheera, which was sweet and kind of like oatmeal, but smoother and thicker. I ate something crusted with some kind of legume. The chicken sausage had really interesting spices in it--a faint burn at first, and then a second wave of flavor. We drank fresh-squeezed juice. I joined the clean plate club. I just wish I had brought a pen with me to write down the names of the things I ate, because I'd love to get an Indian cookbook and make some of the dishes here.

A lot of our dining experiences in India involved filling our plates with unfamiliar foods, taking a test bite, letting all of the flavors and textures register for a minute, and (usually) digging in eagerly. Everything was an experiment.