A cow says: Moo

This is where I pick up that small thread from the previous post where I mentioned that we bought milk in India. To say that it was milk is a stretch. I only wrote that because it was easier than going off on the tangent that am now going off on.

Here in NY, we usually eat our cereal with soy milk or my new favorite: Eden Blend--a mix of soy and rice milk that is creamy and kind of sweet (so you have to choose a cereal carefully) but so delicious. At Nilgiris, our local Indian supermarket, we maybe naively searched for the same. Oh! But maybe it wasn't so naive!! Aha! There next to the guava juice... we saw it. Soy milk. Flavored soy milk. Apple, Mango, Coffee, Strawberry, and Chocolate flavored soy milk. GROSS.

Chocolate actually is okay on it's own but for cereal? Actually, it can be okay for the right cereal. It just wasn't what we were looking for. You know that feeling of disappointment? That was what we felt.

We were going to settle and buy real milk but as it turns out, the cow's milk came packaged in plastic bags and was not refrigerated. It's as if Nestle (the makers) had all these preservatives left over from whenever the FDA decided it was not cool to make everything we consume radioactive and decided to just add them to the milk they sell in India. Nestle also makes a powdered version that doesn't actually say it is milk anywhere on the package. It is called "dairy whitener". WTF?

However, there was also a box of powdered (dehydrated?) soy milk. This is what we chose to purchase and then mix with bottled water to make "milk" for our cereal. The result was a kind of grainy whitish liquid with a faint taste of soy to it, but we were just so excited to have cereal at all that our biggest complaint was the temperature.

"Everything in this bowl is exactly room temperature."--observation by K

It turns out, that it makes a BIG difference. As time went on we did end up finding regular soy milk but only in juice-box-sized boxes.

TII as they say. This is India.

It's a Coconut, get it?

In honor of our return from India... Oh, did we not mention that? Yeah, we were backpacking in India and now we're back!

In honor of our return, I thought I'd bring up a NEW CEREAL discovery that we made there. For our first month we did not have cereal at all. We had prepared for this by eating a lot of cereal in LA before leaving and reminding ourselves of this inevitability with every appreciated bite. We did not expect to eat cereal there at all until one day we found ourselves with an apartment and a grocery store nearby with........ a cereal aisle. So we made the obvious decision to buy two kinds of cereal and milk. (more on the milk later) Muesli for the mornings was healthy and good. And for the evening times: Chocos.

Now, weirdly enough I have not been able to find a picture of a Chocos box via google. The ones coming up have a bear as a mascot but ours had a monkey. WTF kellogs? However, for added awesomeness here is a picture of a cat under an authentic Chocos box.
Chocos are chocolate flavored, like much cereal in India, and fall somewhere between a flake and a puff. A smooshed puff. They are all shaped the same and three of them together make a coconut shape!

The best way to eat chocos is dry, with a Mysore Mangler (Hercules rum + guava juice), on a movie night.
Perfection. I am Zac Efron, and I endorse this blog post.*





*Disclaimer: I am not Zac Efron, but I do endorse this blog post.