Burp!

I was recently invited to my CAT tuition teacher's brother's wedding at Byculla. It was a Muslim wedding, probably the first I have ever been to. I was looking forward to this 'Gastronomical experience' since a long time. Our teacher had already made our mouths water just by describing the awesome food at a Bori wedding, now I just couldn't miss out on the real thing.

After finally finding the place (after traveling beyond our legal ticket limit on the train) and greeting our teacher and all that formal stuff, we finally sat down to eat. We had arrived too late and missed out on the buffet and now had to dine in the traditional Muslim way - at a thaal. No regrets on missing the buffet, we learnt later it was rather 'unexciting'. Back to the thaal - a thaal is a humongous steel plate, about 3 to 4 feet in diameter, around which 7-8 people can sit and have a meal. As our teacher later told us, it can get rather messy if you are seated with jungli people, but luckily we sat with our teacher's sister and brother in law. 4 of us sat down knowing not what to expect. We were all new to this concept. My teacher's relatives were rather helpful and considerate. They gave us the whole low-down on all the food as it came and went, telling us a lot about the whole tradition.

Well we were all set to go and first we started with each of us taking a pinch of salt. This salt was apparently supposed to assist digestion, but I really doubt anything less than 4 tablets of hajmola can help in digesting so much non veg food! Salt out of the way, there was this small oval rasgulla type sweet which we all shared, it's supposed to be consumed at the start of at all good occasions.

What followed after these small formalities (you can call it that) just teased our taste buds.

Appetizers came out first - Sukha Bhel and Dahi-Idli. Now I myself do not touch dahi unless it's flavored (don't ask me why) so I dug into the sukha bhel without hesitation. Don’t know why, but this sukha bhel with big chunks of potato really appealed to me! After we were fairly through with the bhel and idli, the brother in law took out a big bowl of ice cream from under the thaal. It had two flavours - Orange and what I think was coconut. I didn't pay much heed to the coconut flavour, but I totally feasted on the orange ice cream! Seems everyone preferred the orange cause it was the first to disappear. Coconut though not as popular, also finished shortly after. Now these guys have a tradition with their thaal, they alternate the sweet and the spicy; don't ask me why, I was totally enjoying the experience. What came next really left me breathless. An almost whole roasted chicken covered with an attractive red sauce. It looked beautiful (hehehe)! I swear it was over in 3 blinks of the eye. But then who had the time to blink while digging into this amazing dish! The red sauce was just amazing, we were having just the sauce with our spoons once the chicken was over.

The chicken was followed by another sweet dish. Litchi soufflé embedded with small green mini khus rasgullas. It was really orgasmic! All four of us were staring at each other with our mouths wide open in amazement after tasting that soufflé. It was simply amazing. It was the softest bit of food I have ever had! It had these bits of litchi flesh in between and when the soufflé, flesh and rasgulla pieces were combined in a single spoon, you got a real killer combo! I don't even need to tell you how long it must have lasted.

The soufflé was followed by an assorted kabab platter of sorts (although I wish it was followed by a second round). The plate had chicken lollypop, fried chicken and seekh kababs. Nice! These dry starters were really good! Especially the chicken seekh kababs.

All along the sukha bhel and dahi idli were present to give us company while the dishes were brought to the thaal.

All good things have to come to an end. This thaal experience ended with mutton biryani. I didn't really like the biryani too much, it was sort of too dry and also mutton which isn't boneless is really not that great! You hardly get any meat! Well none the less, it was a new kind of biryani to taste, and taste it we did! 3 rounds of biryani made it to our thaal!

At the end of it all, we were all quite satisfied!! Tummies all bulging, we tried our best to get up and get back into our senses and went to wash up. It was end to our thaal feast. One that we will definitely not forget easily.

Now where’s that bottle of hajmola?


Check out Amol's post on the same topic. Click HERE.