shopping and cooking

There's a kitchen in our apartment, but I haven't cooked a thing (does tea count?) since I've been in Calcutta... I get home-cooked meals from our landlord, or eat out. 

But Rekha (my roommate) woke up this morning and decided that we must make chicken biryani today.  One of her friends, Shreyashi, had slept over. So the three of us set out to the market.  We walked to a fish and chicken market, which was smelly, bloody and crowded, but also kind of orderly and interesting.  It was the first time I have bought meat in India... and I think also the first time I have had live chickens at my feet while buying freshly butchered chicken.  It was a bit uncomfortable for all of us... the other two girls were also not used to buying their own meat.  Besides that, we also bought all sorts of produce.

The onions were 3.5 rupees, tomatoes were 4.  A bunch of cilantro for 2 rupees. We paid 115 rupees for a kg of chicken.  And we also picked up half a dozen eggs (15 rupees) and several guavas (20 rupees) for breakfast.  The exchange rate is around 50 rupees to a dollar, so all that food was a bit over 3 dollars.  Plus we bought rice, yogurt, ginger paste, garlic paste and spices... and kept our total under 5 dollars.  Our biryani was enough for a hearty lunch for four people... three women with reasonable appetites and one guy with an oversized appetite.  (Another of Rekha's friends, Shashank, joined us for lunch).

The biryani making operation was quite haphazard, to be honest.  Once we had the ingredients amassed, we realized that none of us actually know how to make biryani.  Rekha was all about winging it... so we just started combining things.  She turned out to be a marinade master... she came up with an excellent concoction of yogurt and spices for the chicken, using about half a small packet of chicken masala in the mix.  Shreyashi horrified both of us when she proceeded to dump in another packet and a half of the stuff.  But it turned out to be an excellent move--the dish was really flavorful. 

In the end, our chicken to rice ratio was probably a bit high, and our biryani looked... uncoventional.  Partly because its color was questionable, and partly due to the fact that we bought the wrong kind of rice.  But it was surprisingly awesome.

Rekha said many of the ingredients we bought would have been about four times as expensive in Bangalore (but not the chicken).  None of us knew why food is so cheap in Calcutta.  I don't think produce in a regular market is government subsidized, but I'd like to find out for sure.