Tag: South Indian Cooking Tour
31 Posts
Learning Chettinad Cooking
Our spiritual and culinary adventure is coming to a conclusion and today we had our last cooking class. It was on two Chettinad style dishes. The first was “Mint Chutney” and the second “Kola Urundai Kolambu”. Here’s the recipe for the “Mint Chutney” that...
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At the Ayyanar temple
Ayyanar is a village god, loosely affiliated with Hinduism, but emerging from a folk tradition of protective deities that keep disease and misfortune away from small rural villages. In one area of Tamil Nadu, the Ayyanar cult is particularly strong and many villages have Ayyanar shrines on the o...
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Bathing the Elephant
Driving down the road to Thanjavur, we crossed a river where a temple elephant was about to get one of her two daily baths. We leapt from the bus and hurried down to the river side to watch. Olga led the charge and quickly developed a special affinity with Shamala the elephant. While elephants ar...
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Inside the sanctum of Chidambaram
Through our close connections with the priests of Chidambaram, we were able to go into parts of the vast temple that are rarely seen by outsiders. From an elevated balcony, we can look directly onto the golden roof that covers the inner sanctum where Shiva Nataraja is worshipped. We were given sp...
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Lunch with a priest’s family
The only way to taste true Tamil cuisine is to be fortunate enough to be invited for lunch with a family. We had that pleasure yesterday when we dined at the home of Kailas Deeksitar, a priest at the spectacular Chidambaram temple. We were greeted by his wife, son and daughter. Both sons also ser...
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Eating with your hands
Eating with your hand is something that is common in Asia especially in India. The right hand is used and all meals are eaten with it. Today for lunch as part of our culinary journey we visited Sri Krishna Sweets, a restaurant in Pondicherry that is famous for its sweets on the ground floor of&he...
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Relaxed cows of Pondicherry
Pondicherry is a beautiful seaside French colonial town. Beautiful 19th century architecture and contented cows (although maybe not as Ben and Jerry envisioned them.)
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No Plate Big Enough
After class we took an evening walk along the promenade in Pondicherry which always seems to be bustling with people. Then we headed into town walking past a lot of the colonial type structures that are very much part of this section of Pondicherry. We ended up in Surguru restaurant and had chana...
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