Fruit Salad

After two weeks of eating out in restaurants where ordering fresh fruit is either not an option or more than a little precarious, I've been looking forward to purchasing some of the delicious looking local fruit that you see everywhere in India on roadside stalls.  All fruit and veg needs to be sterilised (and usually peeled) before eating, so we needed to wait until the necessary utensils had arrived in our shipment to allow us to do this (bananas excepted).

Phil was housebound for most of yesterday supervising a carpenter hanging our mirrors and pictures.  He asked our driver to go and buy some fruit, providing 250 rupees (~£2.75) and the remit to get "a selection of fruits, preferably including papaya".  Sagar returned with the following:

• One papaya
• One melon
• One mango
• One apple
• One pear
• Two peaches
• Two plums
• One sweet lime
• One orange
• Four grapes (? we were surprised too)
• One kiwi fruit

 Giant fruit salad

This was all very nice and well intended, although Phil went away with work this morning and I will fly to Hyderabad to join him on Friday, so I have a two day window in which to get through this fruit mountain.  Oh, and we have five more bananas in the fridge. Mental note:  In future specify exact fruit to be purchased when instructing driver, or significant restrict rupee allowance for fruit purchase.

Owing to the need to start the fruit comsumption as soon as possible to maximise my chances of working through this, I spent a pre-work hour this morning dunking fruit in disinfected filtered water, rinsing, peeling, chopping and sorting into tupperware containers.

 This morning's work station

And was it worth it?  Yes, indeed.  The ripe, juicy fruit is deliciously sweet and the mango (all now snaffled) in particular was wonderful.  Mangoes are not even in season here, so I can't wait to see how these taste when they are.  Papaya too is wonderful stuff.  A slightly acquired taste and with a peculiar smell but I've grown to love it and could eat it all day.

Given the amount that I've got through today, completion by Friday morning should be no problem, and if not I will find a happy home in India.

On a separate point, I've never liked wasting food (or anything really), but morally it hits me much harder in India.  You see people who genuinely have absolutely nothing here every day, so chucking anything when it could go somewhere useful is much harder.  Just walking along a typical street is a daily reminder of how lucky we are.

Just to destroy any illusion that we are being super healthy out here with all the fruit, here are the sizzler platters that we enjoyed for dinner on Monday.

 Weird expression - not quite sure what was going on here.  This is the veg sizzler platter at Yoko Sizzler

And in close up

More gym sessions required...