Found this old clip of me making pakoras for the family the old way… by hand. Cannot do that with the large quantities we used to make
The Black Knight of Faversham
Knife sharpening
And this is how you get your knives sharpened in India
Plum cordial
House smells lovely with these Victoria plums cooking
A celebration of Kates Bees honey for breakfast this morning. Kate Makes Chocolates has traded on our markets and now trades on Best of Faversham regularly. Her honey is fabulous as are her chocolates and if you buy propolis you must only get it from Kate. Thank you for another year’s fabulous honey.
Bubble bubble, toil and trouble … Pluckley Farm Shop have had Madras, Classic and Spicy Pasta curry sauces along with lots of meat and veg curries from us freshly cooked and delivered yesterday
Following on with Pongal celebrations in another part of Chennai, they had sugar cane and were cooking Pongal in traditional pots in wood fire in the streets. Shopping of course is also a big part of it. Pongal over here is one of the biggest festivals, even more important than Diwali in some ways
There was a kolam street festival in a suburb of Chennai where people filled the street with hand drawn kolams. Some Kolams have a high mathematical formula but they are just learnt as drawings and they are mostly drawn by women. Enjoy
Our breakfast of pongal, vadai, idli and south Indian coffee has arrived by SWIGGY
Last night we went for a walk down the high street and to buy hot chips aka crisps freshly cooked. At the time they were frying banana chips
Sunday afternoon and the paper man is out. I heard him shouting ‘paper’ and went out. He will collect all your papers of any sort, weigh and pay YOU by the kilo. The house diagonally opposite gave him a load of papers so he just pushed his bike-cart away to unload it I guess.
The flowers are cut with very short stocks so that they can be strung together. Can be used in the hair etc. When buying, they measure it up to the elbow and the price is per each length
Have to mention the chief wine taster who arrived from UK to decant and strain the wine. Only the clear wine at the top was used from each jar. I can’t believe we can still get those jars. Mum used to make wine for Christmas. When I was young (4.5 billion 😁) Madras was dry. That’s a story for another day…
BTW the large water bottles get delivered to the house and the empties get returned for refilling
Hope you are not bored with my videos. I love watching and listening to the hawkers. This man is selling apples mango and guava…
I miss most of the vendors either because I am asleep or too slow to run outside before they have cycled past. Ona lazy afternoon I caught the banana man. Lovely Kerala bananas on the back of his cart. I like the small sweet bananas and have been eating one every day after lunch
So I go down to check it out. They have fenugreek greens, spinach, arrai keerai, Siri keerai (don’t know English names) banana stem, flower and green banana. In the background you can hear my sister telling her neighbour that she paid R/s 25 a bunch as the man was charging the other lady more 😂
My sister goes down to buy
Yesterday’s wedding was an amazing traditional Anglo Indian wedding. But more later..
Today the man selling greens was passing and we asked him to stop. While he is waiting for us you can hear him shout “keerai” the generic word for all greens
