Taj India (Food Culture Blog)

I ate Indian food from Taj India on Saturday (4/24); I had planned to go to the restaurant to eat with friends but everyone canceled because the weather was so bad, so I ended up ordering food from there and going to pick it up and eating it at home. I got a vegetarian dish called Sag Paneer that was made of spinach and cottage cheese, and I think it had onions in it also, and Nann bread. Everything was really good! The dish was not too spicy but had tons of flavor and did not taste like I expected it to at all; the bread was the perfect thing to eat after a bite of the Sag Paneer to cool down your mouth and was also delicious eaten along with the Sag Paneer. I was dissappoined that I was not able to experience having a meal in the restaurant but this being my first time to have Indian food, the different tastes were an adventure in themselves. The food was completely different from American cuisine; the entree was simple in terms of the main ingredients but complex in the many spices it had, as where with many American dishes there may be many different ingredients but the primary spices are salt and pepper. This could come out of traditional Indian culture needing to make a few main ingredients go far and taste good instead of making a dish and needing to have butter, cheese, milk, meat, ect. as it is with many American dishes. I learned that Indian food is spicy and that bread is a major factor in Indian meals. The only preconceived notion I had before having this food was that it was going to be really spicy, which it was; but it was delicious, as expected. I am using an etic view to describe this event.