Chandigarh
This time it is not a restaurant, but a food shop with some tables.
I live in an area of Birmingham where there are quite a lot of Indian-Pakistani-Bangladeshi population, and there are many sweet centres cater for them.
Sweet centres are the Indian sweet shops that sell, apart from the sweets, also samosas, spring rolls (yes, you read well), and sometimes curries. There are about 10 of these in 1km radius from our house.
This time I tried this one in my neighbourhoood.
Chandigarh Sweet Centre
287, Bearwood Rd, Smethwick, West Midlands B66 4DR
Tel: 0121 429 9998
When I went inside, there was a Sikh turban guy and one young male customer. There were not many types of sweets as in other sweet centres, but there are some tables where people can eat in.
I bought these: samosas. They look exactly the same, but one is vegetable samosa and the other is meat samosa, the former costing 20p (yes, you read well), the latter 40p. They came with chili sauce, which is in the small white pot.
Brought them to home, I dissected samosas.
This is veggie samosa. It contains, apart from potato, mixed vegetable and spices. I expected the filling to be yellow, but it wasn't. This means it does not contain turmeric. It did have other spices and quite hot, too. Probably not from chili powder, but from fresh green chili.
Excellent.
This is meat samosa.
I expected the filling of potato and minced meat, but all I could see were, apart from mince, fried onion and peas.
This one was fine, too, but I prefer veggie variety.
In both cases, the filling was plenty and found it very good value for money.
This place sells vegetarian curries, too. I decided to sample one of them.
This is Tinda Curry. I don't know what tinda is. Mr. Sikh said it is turnip, but I think it is in the same family as courgette-squash-pumpkin-water melon, judging from the shape of the seeds.
This was also quite nice. Not that surprising, but it was delightful and enjoyable.
I need to investigate other sweet centres, as well as to return to Chandigarh.
Chandigarh Sweet Centre
287, Bearwood Rd, Smethwick, West Midlands B66 4DR
Tel: 0121 429 9998
On 3 November 2007 I returned Chandigarh to buy curries.
This time the sikh turban guy was not in sight, but I was greeted by a young woman, presumably his daughter.
From four or five types of curries I chose two. This is paneer and vegetable curry. As veggie there are onion, cabbage, carrot etc. Very tasty. Especially the paneer was the best one I have ever had.
This is mixed vegetable curry. When I order mixed vegetable curry in restaurants, I sometimes get frozen mix-veggie curry, but this one is made of fresh vegetable. I recognized deep-fried potatoes, onions, peppers, aubergines. This also tasted fine.
I weighed the packs at home, and both were about 500g. For £2.50, it was good value for money (smaller pack for £2 is also available).
These are home-made barfi. £1.35 for these.
The Barfi is Indian sweets made from milk and sugar. I am quite fond of it.
These also were tasty, but I cannot tell if they are better than those from elsewhere.
