The Italians came and built a wood burning stove. The mozzarella is locally made, the olives are imported. I don’t know who originally brought the arugula seeds. Most of the ingredients are organic.

The pizza cost CAN$3 and was pretty good (ie. excellent by most people’s standards which are not as stratospheric as mine).

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South Indian thali, or set meal. It is usually all you can eat, usually eaten by hand, and usually spicy. This meal at a local, non Lonely Planet restaurant cost 55 rupees. About US$1, and included everything except the rectangular dish of cucumber raita on the upper right.

The tastiest snacks sometimes come from the most questionable food joints. In Kanyakumari Marc and I ate dinner in a place that didn’t even have running water. The boss man sat on a little stool behind the tiny cooking area picking his teeth and blowing his nose through his bare fingers onto the floor, and when picking same said nose his fingers disappeared well past the first knuckle.

The masala (any saucy or topping food might be called masala) was in two giant, dented steel pots, one on the bare concrete floor that for all the dirt that was on it would have been better served to be the bare earth. Give it a chance to seep through. The plates were dented steel and covered with banana leaf beneath the food. The bright green was so fresh and smooth it gave everything a lovely “what the hell, this is awesome” feel. The masala was spicy enough to kill anything on contact, and the flakey/rubbery paratha was plopped onto our plates straight from the inch thick, three food diameter slab of black steel set over a steel drum fire.

Kerala parotha. Parota, Parrotta. By whatever name, it corresponds to Jamaica’s bust’up shirt style roti, and what it is is a delicious, super stringy flatbread. Kind of like roti meets a dense croissant. Dip it in the three to eight – or more! – sauces that come with it, or maybe just fresh yoghurt, or wrap it around some tandoor fish or spice crusted fried chicken. And eat with the hands, of course! Sometimes I have yellow under my fingertips for days straight from the lavish amounts of turmeric in the meals.

Frothy chai and coconut fritter served on a piece of newspaper at a stand up counter in the street near the temple in Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu province, India.

February 2009.