Local food – Page 5 – What's Next?

Let kids experience the joy of living a simple life!

11th August 2015Posted in Local culture, Local food, Maharashtra, SaffronStays Diaries, Weekend getawaysTagged culture, farmstays around Mumbai, Homestays, kids centric holidays, kids friendly, Reliving childhood, Weekend Getaways from Mumbai, weekend tripsLeave a comment

I remember when I first traveled with my family, I was very curious about why the roads were so curvy; why the railway tracks went criss cross; why it rained at one place while some miles ahead we could only find breeze to accompany us and so much more. Today, I wish to see the same excitement in my children. I don’t want to take them on a lavish vacation where all they can do is admire the beauty from far and brag about it when they meet their friends. I prefer taking my kids for a trips wherein we live in a homestay, spend some time with local people, and children can mingle around with the localites learn how to adapt new life, get their hands dirty with mud, eating a cuisine which they would not otherwise get in the city.

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are” – Samuel Johnson

Although the internet has changed the world into a global village, one still needs to travel. Children are like butterflies, they remain in the cocoon for a purpose and they adapt the change only when exposed to it. And as a parent when I think of what is that one thing I want to give my kids, the answer unanimously is Education & Travel. Education is taken care of by the schools, while travel for us, it teaches children the cultural diversities and to appreciate and relish that experience forever.

Considering the weather, I thought it is time for parents to take their kids to places where they can engage themselves in activities that will not just entertain them but also teach them how to embrace the change. Often families going on a trip miss out on whether their children will enjoy as much as they will. Is the place kids friendly? We hardly find places that could teach the basics of a simple life to our children. I found few such places and am sure kids will absolutely cherish the experience!

# 1 Help them discover themselves

While we decide to lay back and relax in the amazing weather, your kids could get a chance to lay their hands on gardening, fishing, bird watching and everything that excites them about nature. This Agro-farm located at Kamshet offers a comprehensive range of terrestrial and aquatic adventure activities, and a series of horticultural and farm-based educational experiences within the premise. With a variety of outdoor experiences it will help children discover oneself & hone one’s capabilities.

Click here to know more about the place

# 2 Spice up their trip with different Cultures

Nestled in the majestic Sahyadri valley, surrounded by lush green mountainous forests, blessed with abundant rainfall, this place at Pali can make your stay comfortable. While we laze around the place, taking a stroll on the half km walkway, the kids can engage in learning how to fly a kite. One thing every parent must consider doing here is to ditch your car for once and hire a bullock cart to visit the nearby scenic locations like Padsare waterfall, Jatayu temple and Pali Ashthavinayak Ganpati temple.

Click here to know more about the place

# 3 Teach your kids to care for animals

farm stay at Pali — Kids love this lake; adjacent to the property

Far from the maddening crowds, just 100 km from Mumbai, cocooned among the western ghats, in the Raigad district, this place is a recreation of all the simple elements of village life within 7 acres of land – fields, orchards, temple, pond, waterfall, farm animals, and last but not the least – Indian country homes, made by unskilled hands, with natural materials and rustic decor, which are comfortable, clean and furnished with necessary amenities. If your kids love to pamper animals and play with them, this is an ideal place for petting. They can enjoy the simple joys of waking up with the cackle of geese and spend their day walking in the fields, swinging, kite flying, rowing, fishing, planting, feeding the fowl and cattle, riding a bullock cart, star gazing or just watching time go by with nature. Having ponies and horses is an added attraction for kids.

Click here to know more about the place

# 4 Ecology will surprise them with its balancing skills!

In a place surrounded with rustic village atmosphere along with 1200+ trees, you can get an easy access to peep into nature’s beauty at Kolad. With the help of the caretaker one can arrange for river crossing and river rafting at Kudalika river. One can also arrange for kayaking, day and night trekking and river body surfing. Not just the kids, but parents too can enjoy these activities.

Click here to know more about the place

# 5 Let them take the Monkey’s ride

Besides streams and scenic beauty this place at Karjat is situated amid 120 acres of thick wooden mango orchads. Visit here in monsoon for the lush greens, fresh forest smells, and gurgling river that is safe even in monsoon to play in. Remember the last time you climbed a tree? Probably not! It’s time for you to let your children jump and hop around the trees like monkey and relive your childhood days. The farm attracts a splendid variety of birds. One can take walks around the property and swim in the river or even have a family barbeque or just sit back and read and listen to nature.

Click here to know more about the place

# 6 Let them learn the art of farming

Are you a Konkani? Or have you heard alot about Konkani tales? Then this place at Khopoli is ideal for you to travel with your kids for them to taste the many flavors of this region. We would love to live at a traditional Konkani Cottage with veranda overlooking mountain ranges. The place is doing its best to preserve and protect our ecology, our native culture and food habits. And they are prepared to share the natural beauty and comforts of their place with the guests. Kids would enjoy farming and they can learn the very art of rice cultivation, soil building, poultry farm and brick furnace. Also, camping and barbeque can be arranged on request.

Click here to know more about the place

# 7 They will understand the value for money

Living within the wooden interiors and a place that follows agro-toursim, I am sure this place at Mulshi has great deals for our kids to learn. This place is been taken care of by the local villagers and they gladly welcome you to witness their warm service and mouth watering food over your weekend trip. The villagers believe that everything is of value and use and the homestay itself is been built with a lot of recycled material. What could be a better way to teach our kids ‘best out of waste’! The localites are known to indulge kids into fun activities like crab hunting and rice plantation. Now every time they will crave for sea food, they know where it comes from! The best thing about choosing this place as a farmstay is to realize that the money raised by the guest visits is being used for the education of village children which is an amazing effort!

Click here to know more about the place

If you think your children would love to indulge in similar fun activities, then visiting these places is a must! On your way back home if you sense the same curiosity in your kids which you had years ago on your first travel trip with your parents, then your weekend trip to the above places is worth it!

About the Author:

Keenjal Patel

A reader at mind, a writer at heart, a believer at soul and an achiever overall, is what she want to be. She loves to express through words. She’s a firm believer that imagination rules the world and the day this world absorbs the essence of her words, that would be a day of pride for her!

Kargil – Of Breads and Apricots

1st December 2014Posted in Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh, Local culture, Local foodTagged Apricot, Chachura, Girdeh, Jammu, Jammu & Kashmir, Kargil, Kashmir, kashmir homestays, Khambir, Kulcha, Ladakh, Ladakh homestays, Lavasa, Local bread, Local foodLeave a comment

By Harsh Mehta

There is some serenity about a morning in the Himalayas. The might of the massifs seems humbled by a morning Sun, the cold a little less biting, more like an embrace to a new day and the freshness of the dew under one’s feet, a subtle reminder of age-old childhood memories. If the stay is longer, mornings in the mountains become a ritual. One grows to like the freshness of the air, the calm walks around and the breakfasts to soothe the pangs of hunger that beckon with the cold. I remember starting my volunteering stint in Ladakh with an utter dislike for the apricot jam & the local ‘khambir’ bread and ending it with an insatiable longing for both of them every morning.

And so, during a recent visit to Kargil, in spite of staying in a hotel, I couldn’t get myself to have the ‘English’ bread-butter-coffee breakfast that it so generously offered. A morning walk around the town was in order and off we headed, over the roads that surrounded a gurgling Suru river. Few shops seemed open at this early hour in the morning. Carcasses of lambs hung down from meat shops in the goriest of their forms. Not the best of sights to begin one’s day with. So I turned away, looking for a less overwhelming experience. A little girl waited in front of the window of a shop, her gaze fixed upon the simmering ‘tandoor’ on the other side of the window. The owner then took three breads from the tandoor, wrapped them in a newspaper, and handed over to the girl who scurried away in the same direction as us. As we walked further in the market, more and more such bakeries became visible. Full-fledged baking stores, smaller shops, sometimes merely an ignored corner between two adjacent stores, just wide enough to accommodate a round tandoor and the equally round belly of the man behind it, these bakeries rule the morning hours of Kargil. Men, women, kids, line outside these bakeries, grab a bread or two and head home, like any other morning chore. I was left wondering how different these were from the khambir I ate in Leh during my last stay.

Nevertheless, in our hunt for a simple chai, we kept walking further, past more butcher shops and vegetable stores. The Suru was now way closer than earlier, its waters muddied by the rains, flowing ferociously beside the road. The market however, was far smaller than the expanse of the Suru. It ended earlier than anticipated. At the end, we noticed a ‘Darjeeling Hotel’ selling tea and a bakery right beside it. A desi’s delight would know no bounds at this sight. Chai and local bread. Just the way mornings in the mountains are supposed to be. While my friend occupied himself with the task of getting two cups of chai extra-sweetened, I cozied up to the bakery.

Two men worked in the bakery. One sat right behind the tandoor, his head constantly bowed in search of the latest bread to turn golden brown inside the oven. The other stood beside a table on the far side of the room, extracting the dough, leavening it, turning it into balls of even sizes and then pressing them into flat breads ready to be shoved and slapped inside the tandoor. The bakery was a version of the tandoor in itself, its walls blackened by the soot, its air warmed by the heat. One wall in particular sought attention. It was actually a notice on the wall which deserved a good read. As I went through the prices for the several items mentioned on the notice, I realised that it listed much more than a menu – it listed an entire tradition in baking in this part of the world. Girdeh, Lavasa, Chachura, Kulcha, most of these, names of breads I’d barely heard. When probed about them, our bakery men told that these were local breads and only girdeh and chachura were available in the morning and lavasa in the afternoon. We took our two pieces of girdeh and gulped them down with two cups of tea from ‘Darjeeling hotel’ (actually run by a Nepali). The men also pointed in another direction to the bakery on the other side of the road, which sold ‘chachura’, more importantly, this being one of the only two in Kargil that sold it. The chachura is a crisp, hard bread, actually more like a cross between a bread and a cookie. We took just two of these, they were bland, in desperate need of some accompaniment, and then watched a ministerial cavalcade pass by.

It was only after we began our journey back when we realised that the market had sort of changed from how we had left it. Several men and women now lined both sides of the road. Beautiful faces, accompanied by equally beautiful fruits, basketfuls of which they’d brought along to be sold here. Fresh apricots from farms and households,lay stored in aluminium and plastic containers to be evaluated by passers-by, held in their hands, smelled through their noses and the apricots’ reddish-orange velvety skin to be carefully inspected through their gaze. Nearby lay crates full of apples, but surprisingly smaller, the size of the apricots and green in colour, yet tasty enough to fill one’s morning with sweetness. On both the fruits, the sellers maintained that they were the best in India – those from Kashmir would fade in comparison to the ones in Kargil. Now that was a big claim to make but I could not agree more with the apricot seller. On apples, given that I have a soft corner for the Kashmiri ones somewhere in my mouth, I decided not to argue.

We turned back to the hotel as a life size poster of the Ayatollah watched upon us. The market was even livelier now, this being a Sunday. Several carts with vegetables, fruits and even clothes dotted the street now. Reaching the hotel, I glanced at its restaurant. Portions of generous butter cubes and jam extracts peeped at me through its windows. I smiled and headed back to the room. Had I stayed back for these, I’d never have known what a Chachura or a Girdeh was!

Visit our website to book from 21 homestays in Srinagar & 141 homestays in Ladakh

About the author: Harsh Mehta is your typical 20-something traveller who roams around from Krakow to Kerala and Hungary to the Himalayas in his quest to unravel the gems of the world. Having successively lost his heart to the mountains of Kashmir, the sweet traditions of the Ottoman cuisine and the old town squares of Europe, he now fancies anything that travels, from food and culture to music & languages and their linkages across the world. And so, even as he spends dreamy days at his 9-5 job, he derives inspiration from the messy streets of Mumbai to pen down the best of his travels and believes that the best destinations are not the ones that you go to with a wishlist but those that you return from with one. He shares his experiences on his personal blog – Travelbyts, tweets at @harshm09 and can be shown some love at Facebook- TravelByts. He’s also reachable at travelbyts@gmail.com.

Discovering local food in Homestays across India

15th November 2014Posted in Local foodTagged Chicken with bamboo shoot, Goa, Goa, Goa Homestays, homemade food, Homestay India, Indian family, Indian food, Indian hospitality, Karnataka homestays, kashmir homestays, Kashmiri Dum Aloo, Kerala homestays, Maharashtra Homestays, Malayalam cuisine, malvan cuisine, Nepalese cuisine, Poi, Puttu, Sikkim homestays, Vegetable thupkaLeave a comment

As travellers, we’re always on the look out for restaurants and dhabas that will give us a taste of local food, irrespective of whether we’re in a city or somewhere exotic. Sometimes, we stumble upon, or are directed to the right food joints, but other times, we come back from a beautiful place with no idea what the food there tasted like.

Call us lucky, but when we travelled, we managed to satisfy both our curiosity and cravings without stepping out of the comfort of the home stays that we were staying in. Our team and some of our favourite travel bloggers share their stories about discovering local food in home stays across India. Get your taste buds tingling.

New found love for Bamboo shoot – tasting Assamese cuisine in Guwahati

Homestay in Guwahati — Delicious and flavoursome Assamese cuisine. Photo by Tejas Parulekar

“We’d reached Guwahati after a long day of travel and once in the beautiful home stay run by Mrs. Sheila, we began pining for some authentic local food. So, at a short notice, our cook-cum-caretaker, prepared a flavoursome chicken curry with bamboo shoots – a traditional Assamese dish. I was reluctant at first as I recalled the vegetable curries infused with bamboo shoots that we make back home in Maharashtra and one that I am not a big fan of for its pungent flavour. But as I slowly took a bite of the chicken, I was in for a surprise. It was delicious and the chicken seemed to balance the flavours perfectly well. Just when I thought I was done, the cook served us with another surprise – a delicious chocolate pudding – not a local cuisine but it’s definitely one of the best desserts I have ever eaten.” (Click here to book a stay with Mrs. Sheila)

– Tejas Parulekar (Co-founder, SaffronStays)

Stress busting menu – Cocktail and hot Nepalese cuisine in Sikkim

sikkim homestays — Delicious Nepalese cuisine in Sikkim. Photo by Sarita Santoshini

“I reached the village of Chota Singtam after a long day in Gangtok and stepped into Mrs. Lalita’s large, stand-alone Bungalow a little more tired than usual. The whiff of fresh vegetables being cooked in freshly grounded spices welcomed me through the verendah and lifted my spirits instantly. After a long chat, she set the table with bowls of hot vegetable soup and a plate full of chicken momos –delicious Nepalese dishes that are a part of most locals’ everyday diet in Sikkim. We also took long swigs of Bay Breeze, a delicious cocktail of white rum, cranberry and pineapple juice perfected by Mrs. Besnett in minutes. Breakfast next day was home-made bread, mayonnaise and peanut butter. Needless to say, I am a huge fan.” (Click here to book a stay with Mrs. Lalita)

– Sarita Santoshini (Content Editor, SaffronStays. http://crumbsfromyourtale.wordpress.com )

Not just another bread, but a delicious souvenior – Tasting Poi in Goa

Homestays in Goa — Poi with Chicken Xacuti makes a perfect set for a dinner spread. Photo by Amrita Das

“It was a memorable moment for a non-bread lover, the first time poi’s light husk fell on my fingers in a home stay. I remember tearing the perfect round bun into two and as my thumbs gently broke into the soft texture of the fresh dough, I knew this would soon become a part of my every day diet. Poi is a Goan local bread which is served with almost everything from rasa omelette to chicken xacuti. It can be had with anything or nothing. As a part of my seasonal job as a property manager of a boutique homestay in Goa, I was expected to know the local delicacies. However, poi wasn’t just another local delicacy in the state. Very subtly spiced and hollow in the centre, one fresh poi is good to set you throw the day as a part of your breakfast. My friends and guests have packed poi and returned to their homes, as if it were a Goan souvenir.”

– Amrita Das ( Writer at http://travellingidesofmarch.com )

A hearty Malayalam breakfast – eating Puttu right for the first time in Kerala

Kerala homestays — When in Kerala, make sure to try a hearty breakfast of Puttu. Image Source : mydiversekitchen.com

“Puttu, honestly, is not something I thought I liked. But after having tasted it at Maranat Mana, I realised I hadn’t eaten the right stuff till then! Imagine alternating layers of ground brown rice and coconut, steamed in bamboo cylinders and then tumbled onto your plate in neat sections of white and light brown. This is then topped and surrounded by a dark, rich kadala or gram curry. Roughly ground coconut against the soft texture of rice chased by spicy curry that breaks through the sweetness of that coconut. What you have is a breakfast that could easily masquerade as lunch! But it didn’t end there. This was washed down with a cup of strong filter kaapi, and then sealed with sticky and sweet steamed plantains. Excuse me, can you ask for a stretcher please?”

– bhavani (Writer at merrytogoaround.com )

Simple, authentic and delicious – Feasting on a Malvani spread in Maharashtra

“It’d been a nasty ST bus journey from Mumbai to Velas. The sight of the welcoming shore was something to feast on. But the body demanded a real feast or at least some nourishment. Settled on the floor right next to our homestay host’s kitchen from where the aroma of hot pipping food engulfed our nostrils, we decided to play the let’s-guess-what’s-been-cooked game. In true Malvani style, coconut was the mainstay ingredient permeating the air. Our lunch spread comprised of steamed rice, nachni/ragi (cultivated in their fields) bhakris along with ladiesfinger/okra prepared with groundnut, and – the icing on the cake – prawns, fried as well as prepared with the local curry (on special request just for us). Right from the rice, which wasn’t the basmati a hotel would serve you, and the bhakris roasted over the embers, everything was authentic in spite of the simplicity. Or may be because of the simplicity!”

– Elita ( Writer at nomadicthunker.blogspot.in )

A non-vegetarian’s confession – Enjoying Dum Aloo in Kashmir

Homestays in Kashmir — Enjoying a preparation of Kashmiri Dum Aloo in Srinagar. Image Source – tasteofindiafoods.com

“After the long and tiring jourey from Mumbai to Kashmir, the only thing keeping me up was my craving for Kashmiri food. There was a curfew and going to a restaurant wasn’t an option. This is when the cook at our pure -veg homestay served me some delicious Kashmiri dum aloo, prepared with perfectly fried baby potatoes and the right amount of spices, with a stack of rotis. I am not a fan of vegetarian fares, but this was definitely an exception.” (Click here to book a stay with Mrs. Anita)

– Greeshma Soley (Travel ninja, SaffronStays)

Developing a taste for Organic food – Home made meals in Chikmagalur

Homestays Karnataka — Delicious home cooked food in Chikmagalur. Image Source – sugarandspice-nz.com

“Our trip to Sunkasale was made pleasant not only by the heavenly location, but also by the scrumptious meal prepared by Guna aunty in her homestay. The stark contrast of the spicy baby cabbage curry and sweet rice made for a hearty lunch. Homemade butter and rice papads kept us seated on the dining table and chatting even after we had greedily wiped the plates clean. I realised then that there is something different about organically grown food which makes you yearn for more even though your belly screams no!” (Click here to book a stay with Mrs. Guna)

– Sameer Tambe (Travel ninja, SaffronStays)

Have you ever discovered and enjoyed local food in a homestay during your travels? Share your experience with us.

Visit our website to book homestays across India – www.saffronstays.com