Indian Food: Fresh
Fruits and vegetables
At first we jokingly called India 🇮🇳 a country of unripe tomatoes. But after visiting Sri Lanka 🇱🇰, we realized this was a typical issue in countries with a tropical climate. When it's too hot, ripened tomatoes go sour very quickly. So now we (stoically) buy barely red tomatoes and enjoy their not-sour taste.
In general, the set of vegetables sold in India isn't totally foreign to Europeans. This set contains potatoes, tomatoes, brassica varieties (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi), cucumbers, eggplants, zucchini, onions, garlic, asparagus beans, and a few local varieties.
As for the fruits, mainly bananas, papayas, pineapples, apples, watermelons, melons, guavas, and kiwis are sold.
But there are also pomelo, mango, and several other tropical exotics, depending on the location and time of year. The “ripening issue" did not skip out on fruits either. Overall, we've found riper and sweeter fruits in southern areas of India.
Nuts
There were cashew nuts, almonds, and peanuts 🥜. The prices were similar to those we were used to.
I enjoyed eating roasted peanuts. Street vendors put a pot filled with fire on a pile of peanuts to heat them up. This looks very authentic. We've met many such vendors' shopping carts in the northern part of India.
And the most delicious in our lives cashew nuts we've bought driving through the mountainous outbacks, somewhere in central India. They were so fresh, tasty, and sudden that it felt like a miracle ☺️🪄.
Beverages
We preferred drinking Bislery or Kinly water. It cost 20 rupees per liter, or 50 rupees for 5 liters. In some places, drinking water was sold at a price of 60 rupees for a five-liter plastic bottle. On returning the bottle, 20 rupees were given back.
In cafés, one may select from a range of fruit-based beverages: juices, milkshakes, lassi (an Indian yogurt-based drink). All this at very reasonable prices, averaging 60 rupees (a little more than a dollar) per glass.
