Eating Indian at 35,000 Feet

Hi, I'm here. It's time to clear the backlog and share some of my recent travels. After departing Edinburgh in February I headed to Chennai, India for a week and a half. I have a lot to share about my Indian experience but I first want to share my British Airways experience. This was my second trip to India in six months, both times flying British Airways. I remember from my trip in September that the food on the plane was actually good, making the 11 hours from London to Chennai a little more bearable.

Shortly after spotting the London Bridge on my way up and out of London, lunch was served: Saag Paneer with lime pickle, a garden salad, and Rachel's Organic Divine Rice. Saag is a spinach and mustard leaves based curry and paneer is unaged, acid-set, non-melting farmer's cheese, it's like cottage cheese that has had all the water squeezed out and pressed into a form. The salad was a nice mix of red, orange and yellow peppers with some tomato, cucumber, red onion and iceberg lettuce. Pickles are common with every meal in India. My lunch was served with lime pickle but other varieties like mango pickle, garlic pickle and mixed pickle are also very common. On my first trip to India, I came home with a few jars of garlic pickle. It's very much like chili paste, very spicy, very tart, only manageable in small doses, but very good. I mix a little with rice or eggs, but I digress. Rachel's Organic Divine Rice is a traditional Indian rice pudding; it's delicious.



Later on in the flight, an hour or so we landed in Chennai, "breakfast" was served. Breakfast was pakora and paneer with a piece of lemon cake, some grapes, and some lemonade. The pakora in this meal was cauliflower, dipped in gram flour and deep fried. It was served with cubes of paneer and this tasty morsel, seen on the left of the dish, made from spinach. I'm not sure what it was, but it was very good.


We landed in Chennai less than an hour after breakfast, it was around 1am local time. After cruising through security - I had to go through a metal detector after passing through immigration and just before getting into the baggage claim area. I'm really not sure what the point was, my carry-on went through the x-ray machine with no one watching the monitor, and the metal detector lit up as I passed through it. No one sitting there even noticed. So I walked on, grabbed my luggage, and headed out into the warm, humid night of Chennai. My driver was there waiting to take me to the hotel. I was in Chennai, again.

Stay tuned for some delicious tidbits from South India.