Dinner Time!

If anyone is familiar with South Indian food, it is very different from North Indian food. And for the most part, American Indian restaurants are all north indian. I haven't seen many of these dishes on the menu ever! First off- restaurants and dining preferences are listed as "Veg" or "non-Veg". This is very refreshing compared to the US where the weird thing is to not eat meat. In fact, most restaurants are Veg because many castes of Hindus only eat veg and no Hindus eat beef and the 12% of the country that is muslim eats no pork...so Veg is the norm.
We eat veg at the staff house here, except for rare chicken and fish.
Dinner is served in metal serving dishes and passed around. We sit crosslegged on the floor, take food from the pots, and eat with our right hands.

Dinner always consists of a starch- iddly (a rice flour based steamed mashed potatoes consistency type thing) , Dosa (a rice and lentil flour thin fried pancake) , Chapati (a wheat flour tortilla type thing), or else rice- this is the most frequent.
On this, we eat usually a vegetable curry, some sambar (lentil and tomato based sauce), and a variety of pickles (relishes of beets, lemons, ginger etc- usually very sour or spicy).
Daily protein is usually egg for breakfast or boiled egg with dinner and often curd (like yoghurt homemade- with little chunks like cottage cheese) and then lentils.

what I"m not used to from home is taking rice with very wet sauce, and just sticking my hand right in it, mushing it all for a few minutes to mix well, and then shoveling bits into my mouth...it feels an aweful lot like playing with your food. It would be weird here though to pick up a clump of rice and dip in sauce- more appropriate and tastier (and easier to keep the rice together) to mush the sauce all in it first with the fingers!