In Pictures: What I Ate Wednesday:: Dosa

If you follow us on Facebook (and if you don’t, you should!) you may have noticed some excited posts about dosa this past week (including a video wherein our students demonstrate the art of 'dosa slapping.') We've talked about our love for dosa here on Riding in Rickshaws, too, as both Fabian and Deepni both listed dosa as their favorite Indian dish.

ISP Peer Mentor Extraordinaire Fabian pours water off boiled potatoes to be made into dosa filling.

Some of you may be wondering what this ‘dosa’ is. Let us introduce you, in our first of hopefully many "What I Ate Wednesday" posts:

Blogging world, meet the dosa.

Dosa is a South Indian breakfast food, a sort of gram flour pancake served with savory potatoes (called ‘masala’), egg, onion, mushroom or just by itself. Dosa typically comes with several side “dishes” or chutneys, usually one made with coconut, one with tomatoes and then a watery, spiced vegetable mixture called sambar.

Dosa and coconut and tomato chutneys, and masala potato mixture.

We’ve been having ‘breakfast for dinner’ the past few weeks, sharing Bombay (French) toast with caramelized apples the first week and carrot cake pancakes with homemade cream cheese the second week. Last week Wednesday, our friend Fabian came over and made dosas for a small army, keeping with our breakfast theme!

Bowls of dosa mix, ready to be fried.

Jon has the tough job of cracking and cleaning out a coconut.

Here's Jon. An hour later. Still gutting a coconut.

Fabian was kind enough to share several of his dosa-making secrets with us, and by the end of the evening, Team Pinckney (Kandyce and Jonathan, ISP Program Assistants) got fairly good at making photo-worthy dosas. (And we're the judges.)

Jon and Fabian frying dosas.

ISP Program Assistant Jonathan Pinckney brings out a fresh round of dosas off the griddle!

We’ve been having a tremendous amount of power cuts lately (it’s up to 8 hours per day around these parts), but Fabian and the dosa-making team were not dismayed. They just turned on their headlamps (or rigged their own by attaching their mobile phones with flashlights to their heads!) and forged on!

No current, no lights, no problem! Fabian flips dosas in the kitchen by the light of gas stove.

Jon frying dosas by headlamp.

Hannah Brown, one of our students this semester, commented that lately, she's planning on generally not having power. That way, when the power does work, she's grateful that she has it at all! We love our gas stoves, because we can still cook dinner (or breakfast, or lunch, or make tea) even without the current.

We're thankful for gas stoves that work even when the electricity does not!

A hungry crowd assembles and waits on Fabian to make his magic!

Our Breakfast for Dinner nights have been very enjoyable, both for the food and the fellowship and being able to share time with our Indian friends and peer mentors. We've added to the crowd each week!

Photographic proof of our rocking good time.

Thanks for joining us for What I Ate Wednesday. Tomorrow, we'll continue to chronicle our weekend trip to the Nilgiris, even as we prepare to travel to Chennai this coming Friday. Never a dull moment around here (even without power!)