daily differences: food edition

One of the things we have had to learn about/adjust to since moving here is food. 

Thankfully, our teammates have given us lots of wisdom/advice about so many different things... from shopping for food items to substitutions we can use and everything in between.  

All produce we get that we do not peel (cilantro, tomatoes, grapes, peppers, etc.), we soak in this stuff...

This is one of those things I would have NO CLUE about had someone not taught me! We buy this stuff from the chemist and soak our produce in it for about 20 minutes before we eat it. It cleans it and makes it safe for us to eat. We then just rinse it with filtered water and it is good to go.

Anything that we can peel is fine for us to eat. Like pomegranates! This is a new favorite.

Some of the basics are packaged quite differently from what we are used to. The picture below on the left is our milk. The nice thing is it doesn't have to be refrigerated until you open it, so we can stock up and always have milk on hand! 

The picture on the right is yogurt. This is something I just bought recently because I didn't realize it was yogurt. It is in a bag and definitely isn't the same as American yogurt (It is kind of chunky and isn't sweet. It kind of has a sour taste). 

EVERYTHING here is labeled veg or non-veg. Those two terms are on everything. A lot of people here are strictly veg because of religious beliefs. Menus are broken up into veg/non-veg categories, restaurants even advertise it in their name such as "Udipi King: pure veg" or "Kareems: best veg and non-veg restaurant"

This works out great for me since I mostly eat veg

We also get our chicken delivered. We call a chicken place and place our order and in a couple hours they deliver the order to our door. We usually order small boneless, skinless chicken breast pieces and ground chicken.

We definitely eat a lot less meat here than we used to and it is all chicken... no beef whatsoever. We are already excited to get hamburgers in Thailand on our visa run in December.

Another difference is that pretty much all you can buy here is instant coffee. We have found one place where we can buy ground coffee, but thats it. And a lot of the restaurants only serve instant coffee. This country is all about the chai!

Even though there are a lot of differences, we can get a lot of similar stuff! Here are some of our groceries...

(notice the green dots advertising things are 100% veg)

and here is some of the candy we can get here (this tray always has candy in it). Chad's favorite is definitely Alpenliebe- it is a hard caramel candy. The gems are M & M-like... but not the same and the Cadbury chocolate bars I cut up for chocolate chips.  

So there you have it, some food differences. We eat very good here (that seems to be a popular question- what do you eat?), just not exactly the same. I especially have had to learn to be a little more creative with recipes and such. This stretches me because I am very much a go-by-the-exact-recipe kind of girl. We have made stuff from scratch that I never would have thought to even try to make from scratch! But that is another post for another day...