Indian food: Street snacks and dal

A love for Indian food was a major reason for embarking on this trip around the subcontinent. I've had an affinity for curries -especially Indian ones- for some years now. I loved the curry nights with friends from school where we'd stuff our bellies almost to bursting point with meat in rich spicy sauces and mountains of rice, always washed down with plenty of cold lager. I loved those curries, and still do. I also love the curries dad makes at home, often Malaysian style, served with large quantities of stir-fried vegetables. He also makes an amazing thing called "Devil", which is a tangy, vinegary curry with lots of sliced onion in made from the leftover meat from a roast. We are all big fans of Devil in my house. At university, my flatmates and I made a worthy purchase when we moved into our flat: Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible. We made loads of recipes from it over the following two years and rarely, if ever, did it disappoint. Just about every dish we made from that book was amazingly tasty; they were a big step up from what I previously considered to be a good curry; delicately balanced complex flavours and meticulously prepared (the ingredients list was usually fairly long, with a very detailed method accompanying it), these were quite different from the "curry night" dishes I'd had before. Were these more like proper Indian curries? I'd always had a suspicion that the curries served up in your typical British curry house weren't quite the same as what Indians eat in India.

I was keen to find out what the food in India was really like, what the locals eat eat on a day-to-day basis. I had read that street food is commonplace - fried snacks like samosas - and indeed it is true: since our arrival we have sampled quite a range of greasy fried morsels. They are readily available and the street side pram-like contraptions, mounted on old bicycle wheels and with rickety corrugated roofs, are omnipresent in all towns. We don't know the names of most of them, so we just point. The samosas are excellent everywhere and are firmly placed at the top of our street-food popularity chart. Another favourite is the fried dough rings with bits of chilli and onion in - a soft bread inner surrounded by a crispy fried outer. Delicious.

Enough about street food, I could go on all day. In Pune we enjoyed many delicious dals. In the small dingy restaurants nearby our hotel that we frequented, the menus were never in English as these places were not expecting many tourists. We just had to point at what the locals there were eating, which was mostly dal. They were invariably excellent, those dals. Much thinner than any I'd had in England, but full of flavour. It seemed that the dal was used more as a sauce to flavour the rice, which was the bulk of the meal. A favourite of mine was dal tadka - a dal which is garnished by frying a selection of spices, often including lots of cumin, and pouring over the dish, giving it an extra boost of flavour. Lip-smacking stuff.