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My sister just visited before I did and left behind an open half bottle of pasta sauce, which I was thinking of making, but it had sadly gone bad. Still, interesting that non-Indian cuisines are slowly getting normalized as home cooking in India.
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Back in the day, chow mein was as far as most households ventured. And besides a few indo-chinese staples in restaurants (with no unusual ingredients like tofu), there was no foreign food around. Iirc I don't think I ate pizza or pasta before getting to the US in 1997.
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Might look for those break-off-and-bake cookies. Doubt I'll find it though. Much as I like the Indian-style biscuits with chai, It'd be fun to try to bake a soft fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. Not gonna try from scratch though.
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Damn. An entire pasta section. The Chinese noodle section is still all Hakka chow mein though. Hasn’t expanded except in number of brands.
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One thing that's still not mainstream I think is protein powder. I meant to bring some but forgot. I'm sure you can get it online or specialty stores, but the closest thing I found in local grocery story is this diabetes control protein mix that's more of a full meal replacement.
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Parents' flat complex has a sad little gym with limited weight equipment (non-standard light barbell, and weights that get up to maybe 90lbs at most) so I am kinda letting it go. And I'm pre-diabetic anyway, so might as well cop to it and drink the diabetes drink.
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South india in particular is extreme carb country. Everybody is noticing and commenting this trip how little white rice I'm eating :D Back in college in the 90s, I knew of a guy in Bangalore who got his protein from like 20 idlis. Idlis are like 15% protein at best.
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In the north, trad pehelwani wrestlers (who've been winning olympic medals lately) basically do the gallon-of-milk-a-day approach, supplemented with nuts. But basically, in the tropics, a high protein diet is basically unpleasant to maintain. It's just too heavy.
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High-carb/low protein didn't matter in the past when everybody had high-cardio lifestyles, even if they didn't literally work in the fields. Now the Indian diet (both north and south) is a recipe for a diabetes/CVD pandemic in which I'm on the cusp of becoming a data point.
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I'd guess my family here, who eat the trad south indian diet 90% of the time (and with white rice >>> roti) probably gets <15g protein/day, most of it from milk (~1 cup in coffee) and yogurt (maybe 1 cup of thin yogurt, not the strained greek kind).
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Non-vegetarians do better, but even they eat vegetarian 90% of the time with meat as a treat. This works only if you're basically on your feet and in moderate cardio mode nearly all day. You still end up with low muscle mass, but that's not something that is fetishized here.
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In related news, my mom’s been cooking up a storm this trip. Possibly because I’m visiting after a longer gap. These have been my last 4 meals. Sevai, biriyani, puri, paratha. As a kid I’d get 1 of these in a week if I was lucky 😆
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