[Hyderabad, May 2025] Day 4 - Rain and Trotters

 I'm nearing the end of my brief and work-related trip to Hyderabad. It's 6AM here, and I've been up since about 4AM, having never really adjusted to the time difference. Hopefully, that means I'll have less of a difficult time returning to PDT normalcy, but I'm not holding my breath. Today was by far the busiest meeting day for me. I gave a presentation, had one-on-ones with six people, and adlibbed a 'fireside' chat for half an hour with a team of artists who had literally travelled together from across the city just to meet me. Social interactions are, at the best of times, draining to me. I'm a secret introvert, though I can passably put on the mask of an extrovert for my job in short bursts. 

It is, however, quietly and utterly draining for me. So that, coupled with the increase in the intensity of my jet lag (shouldn't I be adjusting by now?), made me feel like I was wandering around in a fugue state for the latter half of the day.

Mutton paya, "Trotter Stew"

Back in the morning, however, we are having my next-to-last breakfast at the hotel's excellent multi-cultural breakfast buffet. I am an adventurous eater and not afraid to try things that might not resonate with American culinary sensibilities. So, when I saw that they were serving a lamb trotters stew called Mutton Paya as one of the dishes, I was genuinely excited and curious to try it out. All apologies to the fans of baby animals for this bit. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a trotter, it's the foot of the animal -- what they trot on, and eating pigs' trotters (aka pig's feet) is pretty typical of south-eastern parts of the United States. Lamb trotters, on the other hand, I hadn't even considered.

Dim sum enthusiasts will have, at some point or another, at least attempted to eat chicken's feet. They are typically steamed or boiled for long enough to be falling off the *manifold* tiny bones, until the cartilage and skin nearly turn to gelatine. In my humble opinion, they are more trouble than they are worth, yielding very little actual meat by the...foot. The same holds true, it turns out, for lamb trotters. The stew itself was highly salted, and there wasn't much else going on for it. The meat I did manage to carve out between the microsurgery of extracting as many of the wee foot bones and the tasteful spitting out of the bones I missed wasn't unpleasant, per se. However, again, the whole dish was predominantly salt-flavored. But there, I've had them. Check that off the unwritten list of adventurous eating. I might pass on lamb's feet in the future, but you never know; I usually try foods twice before I settle on an opinion. The stew was served with a mildly sweet flat bread topped with seeds and segmented into four quadrants. I liked the bread, and it did have a nice contrast with the salty stew.

The small portion of trotter stew wasn't enough to satisfy a newfound hunger I'd acquired for breakfast. (It's probably that India's 8am is my 7:30pm, exactly when my husband and I typically eat dinner). I decided to try the rest of the dishes I hadn't previously had the room in my stomach for from the Southern Indian portion of the buffet. I loaded a plate with small scoops of various pastes and stewy vegetarian things, including: Doodhi Halwa,  Rava Umpa, and Bisi Bele Bath. All dishes I'm sure you're all familiar with.

Oh, alright, I'll go into a bit of detail. Halwa is a sweetened porridge, and Doodhi Halwa (no jokes, please, children) is made from bottle gourd, sometimes called calabash squash. It actually does grow in the Americas, but it's not something you'd typically find on a table. There, they were traditionally dried and used by indigenous cultures to make musical instruments like maracas and drums. Anyway, the bottle gourd flesh is reduced for a good long while, as it has a high moisture content, sweetened with cane or palm sugar, enriched with ghee and whole milk, flavored with cardamom, and topped with slivered almonds and/or pistachios. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.

Rava umpa is another thick sort of reduced porridgey dish, this time made from semolina, and made savory instead of sweet. It contains a lot of other very common South Indian ingredients -- green chilies, curry leaves, lentils, onions, ghee, and a common but not-very-western-friendly tree resin called asafoetida. It has the root word for fetid right in the title, and in its raw form, its smell is really something else. We have a container of it in our pantry, and even double-bagged and in a plastic container, you can still smell it when you roll out that drawer. When it's cooked in things, however, it transforms and adds a complex, leek-like taste, and the smell, blessedly, disappears. I liked the Umpa, but next time, I'd eat it with some coconut chutney (a classic addition), since it's a bit dry on its own.

The last bit of stewy, porridgey goodness on my breakfast plate was bisi bele bath, a pleasingly aliterative rice and veggie porridge that gets its name from the spice mix that goes into it, made from fenugreek, cumin, red chilies, gram flour, coriander, cinnamon, clove, and dried coconut. The porridge is loaded with veggies like carrots, green beans, pigeon peas, and flavored with the spice blend, tamarind, jaggery, and of course, ghee. Nothing to complain about here. It was a nice balanced porridge that revels in the complex combo of savory, sweet, and sour.

Tomorrow is my last day enjoying this hotel's breakfast (until I inevitably return for work and hopefully for at least a *little* sightseeing). I will miss it. 

Speaking of the hotel, I learned yesterday (and should have done my research on this earlier), that the ITC Kohenur is named after the Koh-i-noor diamond. The Koh-i-noor is a massive rock, weighing in at 109.6 carats. Its Persian name means "Mountain of Light." Hell yeah. As with many treasures of India and the Middle East and countless other places, it has found its way via colonialism to British 'ownership', and currently graces the Crown of Elizabeth the Queen Mother on display in the Tower of London. India has asked for it back on multiple occasions...

Another lovely set lunch at the studio cafeteria

Anyway, as I said, the day was long. But it was at least pleasantly interrupted by another great lunch at the studio cafeteria. Do you sense the overall themes of this trip by now? The centerpiece of the lunch was Bombay tawa pulao, a Mumbai street food. It's a rice pilaf with green bell pepper, peas, tomatoes, onions, red chili powder, cumin, ginger, garlic, and a spice blend called pav bhaji masala (cumin, clove, fennel, mace, black cardamom, star anise, nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper, and red chili flakes). Also featured are veggie korma, dal tadka (dal means lentils, and tadka is a method of blooming spices in ghee or oil), and chicken rogan josh, which is a Kashmiri curry (rogan josh means "hot oil" in Persian). The little dessert in the lower left was rava kesari. You might remember the word rava from breakfast in this post. Rava is the South Indian word for semolina. This version, unlike the rava umpa from this morning, was of course sweet instead of savory, and topped with golden raisins and cashews. It was very like a sweetened cream of wheat.

This was easily the worst day for my jet lag so far. I left the office at 5:00PM. It had finally stopped threatening rain and started committing to it. It was, in fact, a full-on thunderstorm, Florida style. The drainage in this area is not great, and the usually unpleasant walk back to the hotel was even more unpleasant, trying to avoid huge puddles and guard myself from the downpour with my sad little travel umbrella. This type of rain heralds the monsoon season, which lasts from June to August. From what I'm told, the monsoons are relentless when they get started, and a coworker who used to air-commute here several times a year said it's probably not a great plan to travel back during the monsoon season, as it can be disruptive to travel and to the experience in general, as you might just be stuck indoors the whole time.

Smoked Chicken Pizza with Ketchup...

Feeling run down again, I retreated into my room, so much so that I didn't even feel like going to one of the restaurants, so I ordered room service and got a damn pizza. That's right; I sometimes succumb to the desire to eat something plain and familiar. The smoked chicken pizza with sun-dried tomatoes was accompanied by, of all things, tiny jars of ketchup. Truthfully, this wasn't all that surprising to me. I have a Gujarati friend, and she has told me several times that people in Gujarat always eat pizza with ketchup, not just as a dipping sauce for the crusts (which still seems unappealing to me), but they slather it on the pizza itself. I double-checked with my new friends here in Hyderabad, and ketchup on pizza is only a Gujarati thing, so the hotel was probably just covering their bases. I even tried it on a slice, but it's not for me. 

Sleepy-time Ryan was pushing his way into the limelight by 9:00PM. I was slowly adjusting! Just in time to have to adjust back, of course. During a typical vacation, there are so many things to distract me from my jet lag that I just power through it. Coming to a place for work, and particularly a place where you can't drive (absolutely no way would I do that), means you have more downtime and a lot less moving from place to place, so I think it hit me harder and for longer. Clearly, I should never have quiet time with my thoughts.

Tomorrow is my last actual day here in India. My flight is at 3:00AM on Friday (yes, you read that correctly, it leaves at three am), and it's recommended that you be at the HYD airport four hours in advance of an international flight as a foreigner, so I'll be checking out at 10:30PM. I leave on Friday and arrive on Friday, even though it's more than a 24-hour door-to-door trip because of all the time I "get back" going west. It's going to be a long, long day. But hey, there's one more breakfast, which ends up being even more adventurous than the lamb trotters. Can you stand the suspense?! Tune in tomorrow.