India Week!

This week we explored India! This is another country where we barely made a dent in the huge and diverse culture. Still, it was fun getting a taste of India.

Crafts

Since the beginning of covid, I've been keeping a stash of recyclables that I can use for various art projects. It's been really handy having cardboard boxes, egg cartons, and toilet paper rolls to use each week. This week, we made elephant masks out of old cereal boxes and construction paper. I just free-handed some shapes based off this tutorial. I only managed to get a picture of Asher's, but Zahara colored hers and decked the elephant crown out with jewels. 

Culture

I don't think this is the kind of culture that we typically aim for, but Dan and I have been watching Indian Matchmaking on Netflix. This series has garnered a lot of attention--both positive and negative. For me, it's been interesting to get an inside look at a culture with which I am not very familiar. Have you seen it? What do you think about it?

We also found a YouTube compilation video of top Bollywood songs. We learned a bit about Bollywood and enjoyed listening to the songs. Of course, we then had to learn some of the moves. Asher and I had a blast hopping and jumping and learning new steps to this tutorial.

As we often do, we found some NatGeo videos on India. We watched videos on Taj Mahal, Holi, and even an Indian Safari.

Food

There's an amazing Indian restaurant near us, so we knew we'd be ordering in a good portion of our week's food. Up until now, we've only had vegetarian Indian food. This week was a good opportunity to try some of the delicious-sounding meat meals. We made rogan josh and tika masala. We ordered in naan, egg biryani, vegetable chettinad, paneer butter masala, mixed vegetable curry, mango lassi, and channa masala.

All of the food was excellent, but I really loved the paneer butter masala and the channa masala. The Lassi was so refreshing and delicious.

The rogan josh was outstanding. We used lamb and it was perfectly tender and flavorful. I'd absolutely make this again. The tika masala was very...boring. In retrospect, this wasn't the best representation of India, since the dish didn't even originate there. It's a British interpretation of Indian cuisine. I found it pretty bland and far too tomato-y. We did tweak the recipe to make it non-dairy (dairy-free yogurt and coconut cream), but I still think even without those modifications there would have been many better options for us. Oh well, next time.

India was fun, but now we're off to Australia!

See our other country weeks here.