Soup and "Singhara"

It's a three day weekend that got off to a horrible start thanks to three crazy girls and I don't mean "crazy" in any positive sense. Anyway, apparently my body decided to join the fun and I had myself a nice upset stomach by Sunday. So I decided to keep off the solid foods and just have soup instead.

The problem is that my #1 option for my regular meals around here had decided to switch to a "winter menu" and is therefore offering lots of hot soup for public consumption. And their idea of "lots of soup" is diluting their regular soup with water! Disgusting! The last time I went there I even offered to pay more for the good soup but they just denied that they were even diluting the soup in the first place. So now I was forced to try the #2 and #3 restaurants here. I walked into the first one and prepared myself for the weird look I knew I would get when I ordered just soup. The soup itself was horrible. It tasted too synthetic and I desperately had to resort to adding the ubiquitous ketchup to make it tolerable. After getting that into my stomach, I walked over to the other restaurant hoping they'd have a better soup. Unfortunately while this soup tasted a little less of chemicals, they had added some other junk to the soup and it wasn't any easier to swallow. This really sucks because now I have no options here for getting good tomato soup in this area.

This being a Sunday, I went to the weekly fruit bazaar nearby to see if they had any good fruit. (The last three weeks I bought fruit I flat out forgot to eat the fruits and they just rotted away.) My eyes fell on this one stall. This stall was selling what looked like small animals hearts. I had seen these once before and then I was so unsure of what these were that I didn't even ask the vendor what these were for fear of having it be something that would make me throw up. This time I decided to be a little braver. The guy told me they were called "Singhara" and quoted a price of Rs. 30 a kilo. That wasn't so bad, but I still had no idea what these were. He then told me a little more about these. Apparently they grow in water, and you can eat them after skinning them and eating what was inside or just eating them raw. He even gave me a sample to try. At this point another lady walked up and asked what the price was, he said Rs. 20 a kilo and sold them for Rs. 15. My eyes popped out of my head!! I'm all for the guy making a buck but here he was flat out trying to rob me. After the lady left I told the guy I refused to pay any more than she did and he reluctantly agreed. I bought Rs. 10 worth of the stuff and went home.

At home, after some googling I found that these were nothing other than Water Chestnuts. So that's a cool new discovery. Apparently these guys still stay crunchy after being boiled and I hope to try that out sometime soon.