Like an alliance between a homely, fair, slender, God-fearing maiden and a Doctor, it’s ON!

TONIGHT, at 9pm EST we’ll start the live-blogging party (like we did for the Slumdog-sweepin’ Oscars) for the newest season of Top Chef.

Like last season, there is a brown girl in the ring— San Francisco’s Preeti Mistry. She’s 33, a graduate of the Cordon Bleu, a locavore and the executive Chef at God’s own empire, I mean, teh Google. More:

Here in Philly, we’re obsessed with our food carts. Don’t let anyone fool you. The best Philly cheesesteak is found on any corner of any Philadelphia street where the humble food cart proprietor (who’s usually an immigrant) makes a feast fit for the gods. Almost everyone here has a favorite food cart, be it Greek, Indian or Italian. Food cart offerings constitute a supplemental staple of almost every Philadephian’s diet. (Okay, fine. Perhaps mostly mine.I’m what you’d call a food cart veteran.)

It seems that Burger King decided that Carl’s Jr had a good thing going using (Padma) Lakshmi to advertise hamburgers, so they ran an ad in Spain using Padma Lakshmi to advertise … Ham Burgers with the tag line “The Snack is Sacred.”

I don’t know about you, but even as a non-Hindu I found this pretty offensive. Lakshmi is the Goddess of wealth and learning, and they’re using her image in an ignorant way to promote a pretty cheap foodstuff. I mean, if you’re going to be offensive and use a Hindu Goddess to sell a meat product, why not go all the way and get your forbidden foodstuffs right? Hindus are most offended by beef and Muslims are most offended by pork. It’s like they couldn’t even be bothered to tell their non-Christian religions apart, even though Spain was ruled by Muslims for hundreds of years.

Of course, when news got out, a holy ruckus was raised, and BK issued a rare apology:

“We are apologising because it wasn’t our intent to offend anyone,” said spokeswoman Denise T Wilson. “Burger King Corporation values and respects all of its guests as well as the communities we serve. This in-store advertisement was running to support only local promotion for three restaurants in Spain and was not intended to offend anyone. “Out of respect for the Hindu community, the limited-time advertisement has been removed from the restaurants,” she added. [link]

At BK, we offend you our way.

I was intrigued, but slightly skeptical when I signed up for a cooking class at the newly-opened Indian Culinary Center a few weeks ago. What could I, a vegetarian who has been cooking desi food pretty regularly for the past couple of years, learn that was new and interesting in an Indian Vegetarian Delights Class? A lot, it turns out.

The ICC is run by Geetika Khanna, a former psychologist and graduate of the French Culinary Institute who has been charting a path in the food industry for the past 10+ years. I really felt like I was walking into another world when I rang the buzzer of 131 W. 23rd St., which turned out to be the Chelsea Inn, a cosy bed and breakfast whose ground floor industrial kitchen turned out to be the cooking school of the now-defunct culinary arts program of The New School, where it turns out, Khanna used to be an instructor.

On this particular Tuesday night, nine of us had signed up to spend the evening learning how to cook with Khanna, a tall, relaxed, and skilled instructor who weaves anecdotes about her family in with technique tips and practical approaches on how to make Indian cooking a part of your culinary repertoire, instead of something exotic and inaccessible. For those like me, who generally cook at least one or two Indian meals a week, it was the practical tips like how to clean your spice grinder — run a piece of bread through it — and the ease and humor with which Khanna made cooking a six-course meal seem doable (from scratch, using mostly fresh ingredients) that was the tipping point. Plus, I enjoyed her running commentary on colonialism, the evolution of the Indian “curry,” and the Food Network —and she gave me the courage to fry my first pooris, a big deal for a gal who has always had a fear of deep frying. There were also a few surprises along the way, like the fact that she uses cayenne pepper in her masala dhaba. [Click on the narrated slideshow above for a walk-through of the class and a look at our full menu.]

The three and a half hour class cost $55, and was followed by a delicious six-course meal. A pretty good deal for an evening out in NYC where you’re learning, eating, and meeting a bunch of interesting people. (Other NYC cooking classes range from $100 to $200 per person).

At present, Khanna offers classes every month, and has plans to invite other chefs of Indian cuisine to teach at the ICC. With all the regional variations of Indian food (Indian Chinese, West Indian, and Indo-French, as well as the wealth of Indian chefs in the New York area, I’m sure there are many more yummy lessons and treats to return to at the ICC. I’ll definitely be going back.

Oh, and if anyone is interested in interning with Khanna, she’s looking. Drop her a line.

One of the first things I noticed while visiting my parents in NYC this weekend an ad (sitting in the junk mail pile) just like the one below:

McD’s is microtargetting tri-state desis with mailers that say “Taste ki baat hai!” While I like to be seen and recognized, I’m afraid the coffee flavored milkshake they call iced coffee really isn’t my cup of tea.

More to my liking would have been the Indian Mysore Coffee (“full bodied and nutty”) being offered at the local gourmet independent coffee place down the street, listed next to Ethiopian Sidamo Coffee and Hawaian Kona Extra Fancy as a Sunday special. That’s very good company to be in for a coffee that gets its flavor by being drenched by the monsoon! While they were out by the time I came by, I’m looking forward to trying an Indian beverage which doesn’t have “masala” in the name.

[Note: these are not my photos and therefore this is not my name on the ad. The pics are from Slice of Lemon, and linked back to the original post.]

For wine makers and distributors, India is virgin terrain ripe for the plucking (to mix metaphors). Although wine arrived with the Persians around two millenia ago, wine drinking was never popular or widespread. What little wine production there was got crushed by the phylloxera epidemic of the late 1800s, and hit further hurdles at Independence when many states went dry. The constitution of India itself used to state that “one of the government’s aims was the total prohibition of alcohol” [wiki]

Fast forward to the present, when wine drinking is being pitched heavily to the urban intelligencia, especially younger women:

Bhagwat is single and lives in Bangalore. On a recent trip to her parents’ home in the conservative Chhattisgarh in central India, she sipped wine while her father drank scotch and soda. Her mother, she recounts, looked on silently. “Wine is the only drink I can have without offending the family elders,” she said. [link]

Wine drinking is still at fairly low levels compared to Europe or the US, with average consumption under a bottle a year and large areas of the country where wine isn’t drunk at all [link], although it is increasing at around 20% a year.

Right now there are around 40 wineries in India with around 3,000 acres under cultivation. My advice to them? Invest more in marketing and less in “quality”: wine drinkers are highly suggestible and the “wine experience” is all hype. Why should they listen to a non-drinker? Because I have science on my side:

Via the “web clips” which perch above my 5,090 unread GMail messages, news that Google’s email is now down with some brown languages:

Until now, there hasn’t been a good way to send email to friends and family in Hindi, my native language and their language of choice. That’s why I’m happy to announce a new feature for Gmail that lets you type email in Indian languages. If you’re in India, this feature is enabled by default. If not, you’ll need to turn it on in the “Language” section under Settings. Once enabled, just click the Indian languages icon and type words in the way they sound in English — Gmail will automatically convert them to their Indian language equivalent. [link]

Oh, if only there were some way for me to type Malayalam words the way they sound in English to me…and have GMail (or anything else, for that matter) automatically convert them to the correct Malayalam-in-English spelling equivalent.

For example, sometimes while I’m writing, blogging, tweeting or commenting on your Facebook crap, I feel the compulsive need to refer to the side dish I loved most as a small child: a fried, potato-y concoction which I’d spell “oorelkarunga merehkwerty or in a similarly butchered fashion.

Do you know how that shiz is actually spelled?

urulakizhangu mezhukkupuratti

You know, I have watched every episode of every season of Top Chef. I love food and I love to cook which keeps me tuned in. I have always thought that Padma Lakshmi was miscast as the host. Don’t get me wrong, Lakshmi is not bad to look at, but she isn’t a very noticeable host, she just lacks a stage presence. She gets overshadowed by all regular judges and even some of the shy guest judges. Perhaps that is why she agreed to have sex with a hamburger on camera. At some point in every TV personality’s life you just got to shake things up a bit so people can imagine you in a different light:

India’s religious right has been taking a public relations beating this past week. The newly formed Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women (which, by the way, is the greatest name for a group since the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice) has organized the Pink Chaddis Campaign to oppose the Sri Ram Sena’s despicable actions last month and their impending Valentine’s Day protests:

The group says it will give the pink underwear to Sri Ram Sena (Army of Lord Ram) on Valentine’s Day on Saturday.

[SRS] was blamed for the bar attack in the southern city of Mangalore last month.

Pramod Mutalik, who heads the little known Ram Sena and is now on bail after he was held following the attack, has said it is “not acceptable” for women to go to bars in India.

He has also said his men will protest against Valentine’s Day on Saturday. [Link]

Let’s just hope that the SRS leaders don’t have a fetish for women’s underwear or this campaign will not have its intended effect.

In other news (perhaps not entirely unrelated) the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), India’s Hindu nationalist group, has decided to start marketing a soft drink that contains cow urine. They see it as a refreshing alternative to Coke or Pepsi. I am sure they would rather young women kick back with a six pack of these instead of be loose at a bar with a beer:

Om Prakash, the head of the department, said the drink - called “gau jal”, or “cow water” - in Sanskrit was undergoing laboratory tests and would be launched “very soon, maybe by the end of this year”.

“Don’t worry, it won’t smell like urine and will be tasty too,” he told The Times from his headquarters in Hardwar, one of four holy cities on the River Ganges. “Its USP will be that it’s going to be very healthy. It won’t be like carbonated drinks and would be devoid of any toxins.”

The drink is the latest attempt by the RSS - which was founded in 1925 and now claims eight million members - to cleanse India of foreign influence and promote its ideology of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness. [Link]

I am curious, does anyone know how the cow urine aftershave splash has been doing in sales?

With mishthi fresh on my mind, my ears particularly perked up this week when I heard on NPR a story about how a couple of food scientists played with making the classic birthday cake better.

An electrified, edible birthday cake with LED light bulbs instead of candles is just one of the concoctions that Patrick Buckley and Lily Binns have dreamed up for The Hungry Scientist Handbook. The wiring is edible, but Buckley says figuring out how to make it wasn’t easy.

“We went through filtering gold out of Goldschlager and trying to lay traces of gold leaf on top of the frosting, which just wasn’t quite robust enough,” he says.[npr]

Have you guessed the desi angle yet?

Eventually they settled on Twizzler Pull-n-Peel licorice rolled in varak, a silver foil used as a garnish in Indian cooking. The foil is edible, Binns says, but only in small amounts.

These wires are essentially the inverse of a traditional wire, Buckley says. “The electricity’s getting conducted on the outside.”[npr]

The perfect desi-American fusion mishthi. For nerds.

…for as long as the brown girl is in the ring. :) I’m here in DC, on the Hill, at Chef Spike’s (Season 4 badboy) Good Stuff Eatery, where he hosts a Top Chef viewing party. If you are on my home coast, are DVR-ing it or otherwise don’t want spoilers, do not go past the jump!

::

Time for the quick-fire challenge! The contestants have to recreate an iconic NY dish. Before they announce what that dish is, people here are screaming pizza, cheesecake…nope, wrong. They will need to make a HOT DOG, for Chef Donatella Arpaio.

Okay, I’m a life-long vegetarian who finds hot dogs repulsive and even I know that rice paper is probably a bad idea for a casing.

Brown girl’s strategery: Indian-inspired kebab dog w/caramelized onions and other gunk, from RAD-icka.

Poor Padma! There was a bone in her meat! Er…that didn’t come out right, even though it’s practically a quote from the offending chef.

…and zomg, there’s a brown girl among this season’s contestants! Squeee!

Yes, you read right, someone Desi is competing on one of the most addictive reality shows out there. Her name is Radhika Desai and I’m twitching with excitement, because as of last season, I love that show—despite the number of faux-hawks its contestants sport. Ms. Desai, thankfully, does not have a faux-hawk. Yet. (Stay strong, gf!)

Radhika, a 28-year old Execuitve Chef (at the Between Boutique Café & Lounge) from Chicago, loves the show as much as I do:

Known to friends as “Rad”, Desai is the first Indian-American chef to compete on the show. She’s a hardcore fan of “TC”: “I’ve seen every episode at least three times, if not more,” Desai told Chicago Magazine in October. [metromix]

Bravo makes it easy to be that dedicated. They seem to have all of four shows on at a time, so each episode of that meager roster of programs gets trotted out repeatedly. Por ejemplo, if you miss tonight’s season premier, don’t fret, because it’s on again at 11:15pm…and 1:30am…2:45am…9pm on Thursday…etc. But back to why you should DVR one of those offerings:

Radhika currently works as the Executive Chef at Between Boutique Café & Lounge in Chicago. A first generation Indian American, Radhika was born in Ohio and raised in an eclectic Indian-tradition home. Trained in classic French and Indian cuisine, she has worked alongside notable chef Vikas Khanna and has staged at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai. She has traveled the world over learning new techniques and flavor profiles and brings spice and bold flavors to the table combined with grace and restraint. Her favorite dish to prepare is spicy chicken and potato curry with cumin scented rice with clarified butter and mint. She describes her cooking style as globally eclectic with a huge spoonful of love. [BravoTV]

Born in Ohio? I’d call her second-generation, not first, but potato, urulai kizhangu. I’ve often muttered to myself about how a Desi contestant might respond to certain quick-fire challenges or TC assignments, since other chefs have drawn on their respective ethnic backgrounds to create dishes. I cannot WAIT to see if Radhika might get down with some brown. Judging from the menu at tonight’s viewing party at her restaurant, I think we’re in for an interesting season:

Riffing off of Sugi’s post concerning Naan Fromage in France, and I just learned [via Camille] that the Italian dairy industry in Lombardy that produces Parmigian cheese relies on desis for 90% of their work force. That’s right, we can do more than just paneer. No more Amul for you, baby, from now on it’s only the finest Italian cheeses. We are milkmen to the world!

The first immigrants came 20 years ago to (according to the documentary clip) work as animal handlers in the circus, now the town of Novellara has 600 Sikh immigrants and the second largest Gurdwara in Europe. The Po Valley has 60,000 desis working there and couldn’t function without them. Here’s the news clip:

My favorite part is when the guy explains that he likes to hire Indians because they are patient, methodical, and extremely reliable, with a natural gift for working with animals. Clearly he’s never been to India.

p.s. can I use the fact that Sikhs run the dairies of Parma as credentials for a government sinecure?

Related news: African Lumberjacks in Canada

It’s been pretty serious around the bunker these past couple of weeks, and since I’m finally allowed to change the television channel from convention coverage, to “anything I want.” I’m changing the channel to The Food Network since I like to eat and because The Food Network has been down with the brown, as of late.

A few months ago, Minnesotan and Indian Cook, Nipa Bhatt was a contender on the Next Food Network Star. Nipa made it to the fourth episode, but was eliminated after a poor showing in the fish challenge. I think her bad attitude and limited knowledge of food had something to do with it, as well. I don’t want to undermine her effort though, she did make it through a few rounds, and was the first desi contestant on the show. On top of that, Nipa represented for cooking not often sampled by mainstream America: Gujarati food. I know it was the first time I had seen someone make Sukhi Bhaji (seasoned potatoes) or Rasa Valu Battaka Nu Shak (potato curry in gravy) on American television, and more importantly further promote regional Indian cooking to mainstream America.

As long as I’ve been on here, I’ve blogged about food. And I love hotttttt food. I always thought Amma’s cooking was spicy enough. Apparently not!

A restaurant in London is out to set the record for the world’s hottest curry.

The Bollywood Burner contains the hottest chili pepper in the world: the Naga. From the story:

[It’s] a lamb-based dish with a fierce kick.

The curry is so hot that diners are asked to sign a disclaimer confirming they are aware of the risks involved before daring to eat it.

The Bollywood Burner is being submitted to Guinness World Records for verification of its status as the planet’s hottest curry.

As a shameless carnivore, I’m not a likely PETA supporter. The campaigns are needlessly provocative, silly, and substance-free. This is of course, my opinion only, and a lackluster one at that. Let those kooky morally righteous beautiful people have their fun, cavorting naked in advertisements. My shoulders barely cared enough to shrug.

But this incident is really so vile, I’m speechless:

Ashley Byrne, a Washington, D.C.-based campaign coordinator with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), talks with Memphis police officers during a recent demonstration outside City Hall that coincided with World Vegetarian Week. When officers inquired about the well-being of intern Shawn Herbold (bottom) and volunteer Thomas Olsen, a sweat-soaked Herbold replied that she was in pain and feeling nauseated from the heat after being wrapped in cellophane for 30 minutes, and also asked how much longer she needed to stay there. Byrne let her know it wouldn’t be much longer and left her under the hot afternoon sun for 30 minutes more while debating with the officers. link

Yeah, this holier-than-thou hag wrapped two kids in plastic and left then in the blazing sun for over an hour. To demonstrate (against? for? can you tell?) World Vegetarian Week. And by the way? The East Coast is experiencing a heat wave of unbearable magnitude right now. I can only image what PETA would say if someone wrapped cute kittens and puppies in plastic and let ‘em bake in 100 degree heat. Hypocrite, much?

Larger version of this image (warning: close up is disturbing) and more on PETA’s activities in India, after the jump.

On May 2, George W. Bush explained that the current spike in food prices worldwide is primarily a consequence of rising demand from China and India: “when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.” The quote was widely seen in the English-language Indian media as “blaming” Chindia for the problem, and was met with outrage.

Some of that outrage is collected in a recent IHT article on the President’s controversial statement. Some of the best, most snarky comments are by Pradeep Mehta, who works for a private economic research organization in India:

The food problem has “clearly” been created by Americans, who are eating 50 percent more calories than the average person in India, said Pradeep Mehta, the secretary general of CUTS Center for International Trade, Economics and Environment, a private economic research organization based in India with offices in Kenya, Zambia, Vietnam and Britain.

If Americans were to slim down to even the middle-class weight in India, “many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates,” Mehta said. The money Americans spend on liposuction to get rid of their excess fat could be funneled to famine victims instead, he added. (link)

And somewhat more measured comments, along with some more statistics on caloric consumption, are here:

Americans eat an average of 3,770 calories per capita a day, the highest amount in the world, according to data from the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, compared to 2,440 calories in India. They are also the largest per capita consumers in any major economy of beef, the most energy-intensive common food source, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The United States and Canada top the world in oil consumption per person, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“George Bush has never been known for his knowledge of economics,” Jairam Ramesh, the minister of state for commerce, told The Press Trust of India after Bush’s remarks, which he said proved again how “comprehensively wrong” Bush is.

“To say that demand for food in India is causing increase in global food prices is completely wrong,” Ramesh said.

Politicians and academics in India cite various other reasons: diversion of arable land in the United States and Europe into ethanol production; trade subsidies by the United States and Europe; and the dollar’s decline. (link)

Those latter factors (ethanol production, trade subsidies, dollar’s decline) have also been cited by a number of economists in the west. Still, the President and Condoleezza Rice (who made a similar statement a couple of weeks ago) are presumably right when they say that there has been a rise in global demand, though I have a strong feeling that that demand started to rise more than a decade ago. It’s those other factors that, as I understand it, have really converged this year to drive up prices. (Does anyone really know? Is this an economics problem that can be solved?)

Consumption-wise, I admittedly look like an ordinary American: my own caloric intake is probably closer to 3000 than 2000 (though I’ve admittedly never been able to count it out… how many calories in roti? rajma-chaval? chicken biryani?). Still, on this issue, I can’t help but see things from the Indian point of view: “Why do Americans think they deserve to eat more than Indians?”

In a rather surprising move, British Airways announced this week that it will no longer be serving beef aboard its (often Hindu-filled) flights in economy (a.k.a. “cattle”) class:

What will become of me now? What will they pay me in if not in beef?

British Airways has ditched beef for economy class passengers this summer in an attempt to appeal to a more international passenger base.

The familiar cabin crew inquiry of “chicken or beef?” will not be heard in economy after the airline ditched the national dish in favour of what it calls a lighter, healthier option.

Critics will suspect that the relentless pressure to cut costs that all airlines are facing is behind the move, although BA said cost was not a factor…

“We can only serve two options and beef and pork obviously have religious restrictions,” the spokesman added. BA’s second-biggest long-haul market, after transatlantic routes, is to India. [Link]

As might be expected, many Brits were not happy about this. For one thing, what the hell are all the Beefeaters going to do?

The decision to scrap the nation’s favourite fare was described as a “great shame” by the English Beef and Lamb Executive, formerly part of the Meat and Livestock Commission.

A spokesman said: “It is regrettable that Britain’s flag carrier is not proposing to serve Britain’s national dish.

“It is a meal we are rightly proud of. Roast beef and beefeaters are symbols or Britain used to promote tourism.

“Our beef is also much in demand overseas. It is predominately grass fed and highly praised for its flavour. [Link]

A few weeks ago we were in North Jersey, and went with friends to a new restaurant called “Hot Breads,” in Parsippany. I thought the idea of a cafe style restaurant along these lines was great, and I immediately thought, “hey, someone should open one of these down in Philadelphia!” When I got home, I hit Google, and discovered there are already two within 20 miles of my house, not to mention numerous franchises in California, Georgia, Maryland, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Virginia. [UPDATE: Abhi also gave his own take on this place two years ago, in this SM post]

Hot Breads specializes in stuffed croissants (tandoori chicken, paneer, etc.), but also offers a menu of other light foods (wraps, chaat, desi-style pizza) as well as dessert pastries. (See a typical menu here [PDF].) The format itself is a nice change from a typical Indian restaurant — with the year-round Christmas lights and sometimes shoddy service.

After the Parsippany experience, we went to the one in Lansdale/North Wales, and liked it even better. I particularly liked the Dabeli, a kind of Gujarati version of Vada Pav. I also found my Chicken Tikka wrap quite satisfying, and the chutney free version of the “Bombay Sandwich” we got for Puran was also good. We got stuffed Croissants to go, though perhaps they suffered a bit by being not quite as fresh when we actually ate them the next day. Next time, I’ll be curious to try the “Alu Chilli Pizza” — or perhaps the “Pav Bhaji Pizza.”

Oh, and everything tastes better with Limca!

Can you imagine a world without any boys named Abhishek or girls named Puja? I simply can’t! It is too horrible and sad to even contemplate (unless it raises the worth of existing Abhisheks and Pujas). A generation from now, that’s where we might be headed if these crazy food prices don’t start to come down and these rituals become obsolete. The Washington Post on Wednesday described the growing problem in sad detail:

Every morning, Hindu devotees haul buckets of fresh, creamy milk into this neighborhood temple, then close their eyes and bow in prayer as the milk is used to bathe a Hindu deity. At the foot of the statue, they leave small baskets of bananas, coconuts, incense sticks and marigolds… But recently, Ram Gopal Atrey, the head priest at Prachin Hanuman Mandir, noticed donations thinning for the morning prayers. He knew exactly why: inflation.

With prices soaring for staples such as cooking oils, wheat, lentils, milk and rice across the globe, priests like Atrey say they are seeing the consequences in their neighborhood temples, where even the poorest of the poor have long made donations to honor their faith.

“But today the common man is tortured by the increases in prices,” Atrey lamented during one early morning prayer, or puja, adding that donations of milk were down by as much as 50 percent. [Link]

Without milk you cannot shower the Siva Lingam properly (hence, no Abhishek). Blame it on gas prices. The main reason that milk is becoming so expensive in India is because it costs more to ship that milk around by automobile. Dudhwallas no longer carry as much straight from the local cow.

In New Delhi, the price of rice rose by 20 percent and the price of lentils by 18 percent in the past year. Cooking oil prices have climbed by 40 percent over the same period. The price of milk, which is essential in both diets and religious rituals, rose more than 11 percent in the past year.

Milk is literally the nectar of gods in India. Most temples in the south use it at least twice a day to bathe Hindu statues, since it symbolizes the eternal goodness of human beings and is seen as a generous offering to the faith. [Link]

In rough times like this you can begin to see part of the origin of vegetarianism in Hinduism. If you ate cows then the precious milk which sustains so much of the malnourished population would become even more scarce. Better to “make” beef sacrilegious lest you fall up hard times like these and be without. Now if we could have a reformation where the use of gasoline was deemed by many religions as being sacrilegious as well.

All humor aside, the food crisis is increasingly worrisome. Poor people spend a vastly greater portion of their earnings on food than people who are better off. If you squeeze them even more AND you take away their ability to pray in a traditional manner at the same time, that’s a powder keg of misery just waiting to go off, not just in India, but in many parts of this world.

Italy is waking up to the fact that some of its best chefs are not Italian which is seen by some as a national crisis. In a recent list of the best restaurants in Rome:

… second place was L’Arcangelo, a restaurant with a head chef from India. The winner: Antico Forno Roscioli, a bakery and innovative restaurant whose chef, Nabil Hadj Hassen, arrived from Tunisia at 17 [Link]

Foreign chefs are so widespread that even at one of the most traditional restaurants in the capital, 70% of the chefs are of non-Italian origin. Many Italians feel that food, like culture, has to be transmitted from Italian to Italian, and therefore see these changes as threatening.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, one of the hottest tickets for Saturday’s first Passover Seder is Floyd Cardoz’s (non-Kosher) version of the traditional Passover meal:

Floyd Cardoz’s Indian take on gefilte fish needs no help from horseradish. It is a Kerala-style striped bass patty steamed in a banana leaf with a nice dose of spice on its own; mellow roasted beet salad is served alongside, bottom center… The choices are: excellent herbed chicken soup with a fluffy matzo ball seasoned with fenugreek ($16), banana leaf fish patties ($28), beet salad ($16), chicken tikka ($24, top left) and brisket spiced with ginger and chilies ($34), all in portions to serve two. [Link]

This isn’t just passover food, the whole religious service will be held at the restaurant with all the guests to the seder eating family style.

Clearly the cosmopolitans get to eat much better than the nativists. Game, set match.

A friend of mine emailed me this photograph of a mini-dosa from a desi restaurant’s lunch buffet in Davis Square:

It’s not the size of the dosa that counts, it’s the flavour of the filling

From a restauranteur’s perspective, this innovation makes perfect sense. You can’t serve everybody a dosa, it’s too large. And you can’t serve dosa slices either. Enter the mini-dosa, everybody gets dosaed, the restaurant has less waste, everybody goes home happy right?

And while we’re on the topic of alternadosas, how about totally American fillings like “Grilled Chicken with Goat Cheese, Spinach and Roasted Tomatoes” or “Tuna with Cilantro Chutney Dressing, Avacado, Arugala & Tomato”?

Are these reasonable innovations or travesties wrought by American commerce on the fine traditions of Madrasi South Indian cooking? In other words, is it a shanda like the bagel stick with the cream cheese inside, AKA the bagel Twinkie?

Ever toast, spread cream cheese on, and eat a bagel, and be like, damn, this is taking too long? Kraft’s Bagelfuls, essentially, a bagel Twinkie, are for you. A “Bagelful” is a frozen bagel tube with cream cheese inside. They’re kept in the refrigerator and then toasted, microwaved, or even eaten straight from the box. [Link]

How do we tell when a departure from beloved tradition is actually progress?

First off, a belated thanks to the Mutiny for letting me stay a month longer. I’m excited to be here, and even more excited that my topics now know no bounds. Brace yourselves. Huddle in the bunker.

You all know I love to write about food. And I love Sri Lanka. So what would make me sadder than anything? (Subtract conflict in Sri Lanka from consideration.) This piece about a Sri Lankan restaurant, from the Village Voice.

My friend K sent me this. (Thanks, K!) There’s so much wrong with it that I hardly know where to begin. But what struck me most was something I’ve been seeing more and more in coverage of Sri Lanka: gratuitous inclusion or overemphasis on religion. There’s enough carnage in Sri Lanka that I suppose people feel compelled to cover or mention the country. At the same time, they feel that they ought to smush news or writing about it into the Religion v. Religion WWE format currently favored by those discussing 9/11 and its aftermath.

Through a post on the News Tab (thanks Bobby32), I came across an interesting “local food tourism” piece in the New York Times, featuring Krishnendu Ray, a Professor of Food Studies at NYU (can anyone think of a better discipline to be in? I can’t).

Professor Ray is the author of an intriguing-looking book called The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households.

The Times has the cerebral Prof. Ray go on a tour of a series of very different Desi restaurants around New York City, beginning with high-end fusion food in Manhattan (Angon), passing through Jackson Diner (a cross-over favorite), stopping by the Ganesh Temple Canteen in Flushing (intriguing choice), and ending at a working class place in Brooklyn called Pakiza.

Ray’s comments are really intriguing. First there is a general, theoretical comment about the function of the Desi restaurant as a space of cross-cultural interaction in American cities:

“The immigrant body is a displaced body — it reveals its habits much more than a body at home, because you can see the social friction,” Mr. Ray said. “The ethnic restaurant is one of the few places where the native and the immigrant interact substantively in our society.”

Interesting — and possibly true. (Thoughts?) I think what Ray is getting at here is the fact that how we eat is both more intimate and harder to conceal than other aspects of cultural difference. In many other spheres, adaptation and mimicry can be pretty straightforward: you buy a certain kind of suit and shoes, and fit in at a workplace or school, more or less. But eating is closer to home, and the Indian restaurant in particular is a space where “old habits” (like, say, eating with one’s hands) can come out safely. But, as Ray also points out, the rules are somewhat different when the Indian restaurant in question has a mix of Desi and non-Desi patrons.

On $6 for a tiny, pyramid-shaped mound of Bhel Puri at Devi, Ray says:

“We like this very clever insider joke,” Mr. Ray continued. “We are taking something cheap and from the street, and reducing the quantity, turning it into a pyramid, putting it on a big plate, and all these white guys are paying 20 bucks for it.” (link)

Heh. His bewilderment at the idea of veal at a restaurant named “Devi,” as well as at the ingenious preposterousness of “Masala Schnitzel” is also worth a look. I also agree with him about the greatness of Saravanaas, on Lexington Avenue, and on a few other things as well.

Preston says that I carry a teabag everywhere the way a teenage boy carries a condom. I disagree, as (I presume) teenage boys carry condoms with hope, and I don’t actually want to use the emergency teabag stowed in the change pocket of my wallet. Yes, there is such a thing as a tea emergency—the moment when only black Sri Lankan tea (with milk, one sugar) will make me happy. But I have had no such emergencies in Malaysia, as the tea here (teh tarik, as my preferred version of it is called) tastes like tea in a Sri Lankan home. (Teh tarik is “pulled tea,” according to one of our guidebooks. When I read what that meant, I realized that it’s what I know in Tamil as “athefining.” Pardon the poor transliteration.) Made with condensed milk and mixed by being poured from one vessel to another, it’s fantastically refreshing.

But before tea: food. And here Malaysia outdoes almost every other country I’ve visited. At the open-air food court nearest our hotel, Nasi Kandar Pelita, the cash registers feature a line-up of complimentary meal-enders: vitamin drops of various fruited flavors. The emptiest bin, however, is the one farthest to the left—antacids! The food is well worth the gastronomical price, and worth much more than its actual price.

A couple of diabolically ingenious (or phenomenally stupid) plans have been recently reported on in the media, both plans intended to ascertain where American Muslims be hanging out (so as to keep tabs on the potential terrorists hiding among them). The first was Los Angeles’ Muslim Mapping Project. At first I assumed that the LAPD intended to map the spread of Islam in the world since the birth of Muhammad…but then I realized that the department probably doesn’t employ many history or religion PhDs. “Muslim Mapping” must mean something else. Here is an excerpt from the LAPD officer who briefed the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (headed by Joe Lieberman):

“In order to give our officers increased awareness of our local Muslim communities, the LAPD recently launched an initiative with an academic institution to conduct an extensive “community mapping” project. We are also soliciting input of local Muslim groups, so the process can be transparent and inclusive. While this project will lay out the geographic locations of the many different Muslim population groups around Los Angeles, we also intend to take a deeper look at their history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socio-economic status, and social interactions. It is our hope to identify communities, within the larger Muslim community, which may be susceptible to violent ideologically-based extremism and then use a full-spectrum approach guided by an intelligence-led strategy…” [Link]

“We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities,” LAPD Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing was quoted by CBS news as saying Thursday. [Link]

This plan actually makes a lot of sense to me (and doesn’t Downing seem downright neighborly?). It would be much too difficult to move all the Muslims into ghettos with well-defined boundaries. I don’t think Homeland Security has that kind of budget (yet). Why not use GIS data and other high tech strategies to simply make a virtual map of Muslims? I mean, Google Map already has overlays for satellite imagery, traffic, and street view. It wouldn’t be hard for Google to simply add a “Muslim neighborhoods” overlay to their GoogleMaps would it?

We have learned that Muslim communities in the U.S. are mistrustful of the mainstream media. Therefore, they may turn to other sources of information for news and socialization, such as the Internet. Unfortunately, despite all of the positive aspects of the Internet, it allows those individuals and groups with ideological agendas to easily make contact with like-minded individuals and access potentially destructive information. [Link]

Holy crap. I know that Muslims read our site and socialize here with like-minded individuals through comments. Despite the fact that I like this plan I hope we aren’t getting mapped as well.

Think about it. Once a year a bunch of impressionable young children come to your door and give you their undivided attention. This presents the PERFECT opportunity to proselytise. It’s like a reverse Jehovah’s Witness-type situation. While many of the world’s other religions are clever enough to take advantage of this amazing opportunity, Hindus are left behind (mostly due to a lack of creativity it seems). Beliefnet has a great feature that gives us a tasty sampler of some of the divine candy out there, and also provides us insight into why Hinduism faces an uphill battle when it comes to creating converts of the young:

First up is the Christian “Scripture Candy:”

Once you pop, you can’t stop! These scripture-wrapped mints are downright addictive. Not too minty, yet soft enough to melt in your mouth. According to the maker, these mints were created to turn “a pagan holiday into something to glorify God…” [Link]

Why can’t someone make candy with Gita passages?

Next we have Star of David pops:

I’d eat a chocolate Hanuman pop if it existed. I’m just sayin’.

When it comes to “hot fields of scientific research”, obviously desis are at the forefront of discovery and innovation; that’s not chauvinism, that’s just logic. Millions of brown people exist and a solid chunk of them are in science, so the odds are just stacked in our favor. But I digress. And there’s exciting stuff regarding Proteome Research to get to, so let’s get back on topic! [Via MSNBC]:

A small study links the type of bacteria living in people’s digestive system to a desire for chocolate. Everyone has a vast community of microbes in their guts. But people who crave daily chocolate show signs of having different colonies of bacteria than people who are immune to chocolate’s allure.

That may be the case for other foods, too. The idea could eventually lead to treating some types of obesity by changing the composition of the trillions of bacteria occupying the intestines and stomach, said Sunil Kochhar, co-author of the study. It appears Friday in the peer-reviewed Journal of Proteome Research.

This study isn’t biased at all:

Kochhar is in charge of metabolism research at the Nestle Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. The food conglomerate Nestle SA paid for the study. But this isn’t part of an effort to convert a few to the dark (or even milk) side of cocoa, Kocchar said.

Here’s my favorite part of the study:

In fact, the study was delayed because it took a year for the researchers to find 11 men who don’t eat chocolate.

BWAH! In your face, people who think chocolate craving = pre-menstrual misery and weakness. MEN! They couldn’t find eleven MEN who don’t indulge.

Kochhar compared the blood and urine of those 11 men, who he jokingly called “weird” for their indifference to chocolate, to 11 similar men who ate chocolate daily. They were all healthy, not obese, and were fed the same food for five days.

The researchers examined the byproducts of metabolism in their blood and urine and found that a dozen substances were significantly different between the two groups. For example, the amino acid glycine was higher in chocolate lovers, while taurine (an active ingredient in energy drinks) was higher in people who didn’t eat chocolate. Also chocolate lovers had lower levels of the bad cholesterol, LDL.

That does it. I’m having red wine and Cadbury for dinner tonight. What to do? It’s the healthy choice.

The levels of several of the specific substances that were different in the two groups are known to be linked to different types of bacteria, Kochhar said.

They’re still not sure if it’s the bacteria that wants to be startin something, gots to be startin something or if diet affected the bacteria blah blah chicken egg.

How gut bacteria affect people is a hot field of scientific research.

I think my tummy is always warm, but that is based on highly unscientific rubbing of it, while attempting to pat my head simultaneously.

Wots this? A reference to my bellowed alma mater? GO AGS!

We subscribe to two ‘general interest’ magazines in my house — one is The New Yorker (my choice), and the other is Fortune (my wife’s choice). For awhile I used to boycott Fortune and stick to 10,000 word articles by Louis Menand, Adam Gopnik, and co. But over time I’ve started to flirt more with the other side — especially when I only have a few minutes to read. Over cereal this morning, I came across an article in the ‘other’ magazine about American Pizza chains competing in India, which contained the following paragraphs:

It’s not all that surprising that pizza is big business in India. The product itself is similar to India’s native cuisine. Unlike Chinese and Japanese, Indians eat leavened bread (naan), and a popular traditional version slathers it in butter and garlic - not unlike garlic bread, the most often ordered side dish at both Domino’s and Pizza Hut franchises in India.

Cheese (paneer) is ubiquitous in India’s northern cuisine. Tomatoes and all kinds of sauces are prevalent everywhere. Combine these ingredients into one gooey, oily, tasty dish that you can eat with your hands - as Indians traditionally do - and you have a hit.

It’s estimated that 80% of Indians are vegetarians, so pizza suits that Indian cultural aspect too. Both chains are scrupulous about keeping “veg” from “non-veg” in their kitchens and invite people in to see the separate prep areas. There are even pizza options for India’s 5.2 million Jains, followers of a religion that prohibits eating onions or garlic. And stores in heavily Muslim areas don’t offer pepperoni. (link)

First of all, I don’t think 80% of Indians are vegetarians in the absolute sense (i.e., no fish), probably not even close. (I remember seeing someone pose 50-60% and falling in a comment thread some time ago).

Secondly, mozzarella cheese is like paneer? And: “A gooey, oily, tasty dish” that Indians like, because they eat with their hands? The author is on thin ice with some of this stuff. Instead of coming up with these questionable sociological stereotypes, she could just as easily speculate that pizza is popular in India because it’s new, and different from what people are used to/bored with.

(Anyone hungry for pizza now? I am. I think I might get a slice, and eat it while reading The New Yorker.)

With hazaar apologies to Information Society, Spock and everyone else who remembers 1988 (which is when I graduated from Junior High— I throw that in because one of you recently lamented that you were like, the oldest person? On, like, Sepia Mutiny? So put that in your Bengali and smoke it). Behold, an unforgivably mangled version of that unforgettable dance classic with the Star Trek sample (you know you had the 12”…don’t lie): What’s on Your Mind (Pure Energy)

Here I am in silence,
Looking round without a clue.
I find myself alone again
without input from you.
I see 89 comments
but there are things that I don’t know.
If you hide your thoughts from me,
How can our meetups grow?

I want to know
What you’re thinking.
There are some things we can’t hide.
I want to know
What you’re feeling.
Tell me what’s on your mind.

Every year, at Ramadan, Hawk draws comics showing how his alter-ego is dealing with the challenges of fasting. These trippy comics are some of my favorites:

If you click on it, it’s the first in a sequence of Ramadan fasting themed strips.

Related posts: ‘Applegeeks’

When my worlds align, you know I’m going to blog it:

SUNI WILLIAMS DAY AT JSC

Help celebrate a major spaceflight milestone as Expedition 15 Flight Engineer and STS-117 crew member Sunita Williams sets a new female long duration spaceflight record. She will surpass Shannon Lucid’s long-held record of 188 days, 4 hours this Saturday, June 16 at 12:47 a.m CDT.

So how do we help celebrate this kick-ass achievement?

To show your support for Suni, wear something red this Friday, June 15 (In honor of her love of the Red Sox). Also on Friday, the Starport cafés will feature 2 eggs “Suni”-side up on Texas Toast for $.99 and Chicken Indian Spiced Malai Murgh for $ 3.49 ala cart and $5.99 Combo. The Chicken breast is coated with a mixture of spices (cumin, garlic, pepper, lemon juice, chopped jalapenos, paprika, and sour cream) then roasted and served with rice.

Oh yeah! Curry in the cafeteria. Have any of you had government institutional food before? This intrepid blogger’s passion for venturing places where no man has gone before compels him to try the chicken on Friday. If I’m ever lucky enough to go in to space someday I am going to make them serve dosas with sour cream and ketchup in the cafeteria when I come down. Let’s pray our girl makes it down ok:

NASA engineers and astronauts are working on innovative ways to fix a tear in the heat shield of the shuttle Atlantis which had taken off last Friday.

One of the methods that could be used to fix the tear would be using a stainless steel wire serving as thread and an instrument with a rounded end resembling a small needle.

This is usually used to repair tears in astronaut suits but may work here as well. [Link]

By the way, Suni’s dog, the terrier she had to leave behind on Earth and who goes by the name of “Flat Gorby,” is becoming kind of famous. You know how people sometimes take pictures of gnomes at different locations around the world? Just type in Flat Gorby in Google and see all the hits the dude has and where he has “visited” while she has been up in space.

Rani woke up one morning in Singapore with an idea - why not make paneer from the left over breast milk that was sitting in her freezer? [via BoingBoing] No, I’m not kidding:

Basically this is human cheese. Why would I do that?

Well, basically, there are about twenty bags (each 150ml) of frozen breastmilk in the fridge, and they have passed their three months drinkability period, which means I would not be able to donate the milk like I did before. But the milk is still less than six month old, which is the actual expiry date.

So what do I do with it? I could make cream soup like I did several months ago. But I really wanted to try something different, and making Breast Milk Paneer sounds really exciting. [Link]

I was a bit weirded out when I started reading this. Human milk is clearly a bodily fluid, it can even transmit HIV. Emotionally, it feels very different from cows milk, even though both come from teats so that mammals can feed their young.

I mean, when you’re eating brie you don’t say “I’m having moldy bovine bodily secretions” because you don’t deconstruct cheese. Human breast milk cheese, on the other hand, lays the process bare.

I also was uneasy at the idea that she was wasting something that precious, but interestingly enough, her motive for making the paneer was to avoid wasting any of the precious fluids. Given that she had frozen breast milk that she couldn’t use and couldn’t donate, wouldn’t it be less wasteful to eat it than throw it out? My curiousity overpowered my discomfort and I kept reading.

After much kvetching about it, I will cave and put up a post so you aren’t tormented by South Indian perfection everytime you hit F5.

I find it wickedly hilarious that the only thing I had “ready-made” was also about…food. :) Don’t worry— these Naan looked a lot better than they tasted, which was not very good. How do you cook something with ghee in a tandoor and STILL have it taste like a pita?

::

I keep it fobulous, y’all.

No, really. I’m going to. By my conservative estimate, we have people from twelve different countries working on my project; several of them bring food from home every day, which they nuke in the microwave, which means the fragrance/reeking odor permeates the entire office suite.

When my Pakistani colleague heats something up, it smells vaguely familiar. Same for the Turkish food. But everything else…seriously, someone needs to pass a law which prohibits the reheating of SEAFOOD in microwaves. Vomitacious. That’s what that is. So, I am no longer going to be considerate to the point of paranoia about eating brown food at work, especially not when the Pakistani food comes here in big plastic dabas to facilitate multiple servings— people love desi food, so the man sweetly brings extra. That’s how I got some unexpected halwa a week or so ago. He was walking around the same way my Mom does at home, at the end of lunch, looking for someone to finish the last portion (whether they want to or not), so he could wash the dish. I was already full and in no mood for sooji halwa, but I got a big ass serving of it and you best believe I cleaned my plate in time to pass his inspection 20 mins later. :)

So. This is naan I found at Whole Paycheck on Sunday. I had absolutely no hope of it being good, especially since it has “BEST New Food Product in America” stickered upon it. I mean, it’s at Whole Foods. How authentic could it be? Still, stupidity springs eternal, innit?

Well, it is not the real deal or even remotely close, despite the fact that it is made (allegedly) in a tandoor, with ghee no less. But after the first two disappointing bites, I found myself going back for more. It tastes like really soft pita bread. Or a cross between pita and naan. As long as it doesn’t taste like Bisquick (I’m looking at you, lazy desi restaurants!!!), I’m open to destroying something pickled with it. I’m surprised to report that the “regular/white” type tasted much better than the whole-grain-loaded version pictured above left. Too bad, too. The wheatish ones looked somewhat like my mom’s puris…but they taste even more like pita bread than the “white” naan do.

Since I was already in an experimental mood, I tried a DIFFERENT brand of Kaduku Manga pickle: “Nirapara”. Verdict? Not bad at all. Tastes more home-made than my belowed Grandma’s brand, but that is because it has an edge I can’t quite determine the origin of— and imperfection feels homely. No matter. It’s my “work” kaduku manga. I’ve got half a case of the real deal safely squirreled away at home, where it belongs.

Growing up, I never understood why some people found it necessary to use a bagel guillotine. It’s easy enough to cut a bagel with a sharp knife, and it avoids squishing the bagel the way a slicer does. Part of my rejection of the tool is probably New York Jewish snobbishness (coupled with fear that if I ever embraced such a shanda, I’d be required to return my virtual circumcision and fountain pen). But it also comes from a sense that using such tools makes the whole process of bagel eating less sensual and more antiseptic.

As such, I’m agnostic about the Oxo mango slicer until I actually get a chance to try one out for myself. On the one hand, if you watch the video below, you’ll see that it makes very quick work of a mango, turning it into two halves and the seed in no time flat. And honestly, I’m better at and more interested in mango eating than mango cutting.

On the other, I wonder if the tool exists because of the big deal that non-desis make about how messy mango eating is. I remember once somebody on the radio solemnly intoned “mangos should only be eaten naked and in the ocean.” My mother scoffed and replied “White people don’t know how to eat mangos, otherwise they wouldn’t make such a mess.” Sometimes I lose the fruit under all of the “exotic” subtext going on and I don’t know how much of this machine’s appeal lies in this myth of the messy, untamable mango.

Will any of you admit to having used a tool to (ahem) split the mango? If so, did it increase or decrease your pleasure?

Related Posts: Mmmmmmmangoes!, Flesh for Fantasy

Some paragraphs were accidentally omitted from Somini Sengupta’s recent article on Chaat and other Delhi street foods in the New York Times. Because I am a super-devoted-Somini Sengupta groupie (a “Sengroupie,” you could call me), I was sent the missing paragraphs as a gift, under strict order not to reveal my sources:

The reporter visits a lost alleyway in Mastinagar, a suburb of Delhi. In the alley are an endless variety of special chaat stalls unknown to western taste-buds and unimagined by western food tourists. This is as “street” as it gets; if pressed, the people of this alley all state that they have never been near an air-conditioner or even a piece of plastic. Indeed, it is highly unclear whether the residents of Mastinagar have ever been outside Mastinagar, or even know that their “Shehr” is in the city and state of Delhi (indeed, one resident referred to the city, rather anachronistically, as “Tughlakabad”). In the lost alley, one finds an almost infinite variety of Chaats, some of which were tasted by a reporter. A short list of the highlights follows:

Orientalist Chaat: This type of chaat will fulfill all your desires for mystical knowledge and understanding, and set your brain on fire. If this chaat is eaten, it is said, the eater will learn a thousand yoga poses (a DVD is included), a thousand Sanskrit chants that will lead to Enlightenment, and perpetual unity of mind and body in pure relaxation bliss. After eating, you will have reached the other side of the moon, tasted the stars, found the ergonomically perfect chair, and finally know the answer to the question, Why Did the Bodhi-Dharma Leave For the East? (NOTE: Insiders report that Orientalist Chaat is exactly the same as regular Chaat, only 10,000 times more expensive.)

Erotic Chaat: This chaat is an aphrodisiac composed entirely of garlic and crushed Viagra powder. Not especially tasty, but surprisingly “potent,” as a reporter subsequently discovered.

Chaat Feng Shui: This Chaat, which is composed entirely of wind, water, and garam masala, is not meant to be eaten, but rather dispersed around a room in need of redecoration. Pirated Chaat Feng Shui originates from China, which continues to flood the Indian market with inexpensive rip-offs of actual Feng Shui.

I had heard about, made a mental note to blog about and then promptly forgotten Tanqueray’s newest offering— Tanqueray Rangpur Distilled Gin —until one of you alkies Sena X thoughtfully reminded me of it via our News Tab. Sena X posted a link to YouTube, where a mini-movie starring Tony Sinclair (who always reminds me more of Austin Powers than a “highly-esteemed socialite”) had been deposited in what I’m guessing is a bit of viral marketing (though the YTer’s other videos seem to have nothing to do with Tanqueray, liquor or other products, in general).

I watched the 9:53 extended commercial, which is a bit of a parody of one of my favorite shows, Globe Trekker, except in this spoof, it’s “Globe Probe”. When it was finished, I experienced a cocktail of mixed emotions, none of which I shall list, lest I somehow dilute the experience of watching it for yourselves, like one too many ice cubes in my Gold and coke. How many cliches can you spot? The winner gets…something. ;)

Seriously though— are any of you offended by this video? Amused? Indifferent? Is it as disrespectful as deities on knickers or nowhere close? I am sincerely curious as to what the Mutiny’s take on this is, considering the video’s plethora of orientalist stereotypes which got my eyes-rolling…do y’all think it is zimbly cute or utterly obnoxious?

p.s. For a ten-minute alcohol ad/movie that gets the job done so well, it ends up on our banners, get nostalgic with Mulit, here.

A few years ago, erstwhile mutineer Manish posted here about an enterprising Tiffinwalla in New York who would deliver healthy, vegetarian lunches (“2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney”) for all of $5.

I was living in California at the time and lazy ingrate that I am, I was green with longing, even as I was eating fresh Mallu food daily at home.

It just seemed like such a fantastic concept; New Yorkers got EVERYTHING, I wistfully thought. Couldn’t the left coast have had similar, especially during that arid, empty time that my Mother was abroad for two months? ;) I mean, protein shakes get old, y’all.

Apparently, my whining has been answered, according to a story in the grey lady which many of you were blowing up our tipline/news tab with (Thanks, Derick):

In Mumbai, formerly Bombay, the tiffin, or lunch, is prepared by the wife, mother or servant of the intended. In the United States, because of little time (and a lack of a domestic staff), many of these lunches are prepared by outsiders, but the underlying principle is the same…

Annadaata, which began as a homespun operation in 2002, has morphed into a business with several delivery people distributing meals each weekday across San Francisco. Kavita Srivathsan, 29, the chief executive of Annadaata, got her start by cooking meals for her new husband and his friends.

Srivathsan stumbled in to a market which was just waiting for someone like her to hook them up with comfort food:

She did not have a job at the time, so she spent her time learning how to cook Indian foods. Using recipes from her mother in south India, she experimented in the kitchen for a few hours each day. On a whim, she advertised $5 box meals on justindia.com, a Web site based in the San Francisco area that no longer exists. “That was the only time I ever did any advertising,” she said. “The very next day I got a few phone calls from people ordering the boxes, and from then on the word spread like wildfire.”

…wherein Whose God is it Anyways? inspires a second cricket post in a row!

The education of my cricket-ignorant kundi continues; I shall torment you with my progress, much like a toddler rushes back to a parent to exclaim, “I did it in the potty!” Like aforementioned kid, I, too would like a cookie and a pat on the head. Thanks, you’re the best.

So. WGiiA left a comment on my last World Cup post which piqued my kitten-like curiosity:

ok. just got very emotional seeing inzi get out and leave the field for the last time in an ODI. he deserved better circumstances under which to leave. [link]

I immediately assaulted consulted one of my cricket tutors, the one who kindly told me a bedtime story via speakerphone last night which starred Sachin Tendulkar— look, when one runs out of Ambien, one reaches for desperate alternatives— and expressively typed “?” in his GChat window. I didn’t expect to like or care about what I’d learn, but I wanted to find out more nonetheless, if only because I’m a sentimental wench and anyone’s last __ always makes me a bit verklempt.

Siddhartha’s post on lovely lime pickle got me thinking about my favorite. Behold: The Amazing Ambarella!

Before

After

Other names for this fruit and close relatives are Otaheite apple, Tahitian quince, Jamaica plum, golden apple and wi…The tree grows tall, reaching almost 20 m (60 ft). The fruit, which is popular in Asia, is plum shaped, sweet-sour and eaten at all stages of ripeness. Its distinguishing feature is a spiny seed. The spines toughen as the fruit matures, so that when eating conserve made from the almost-ripe fruit, the sweet flesh should be carefully sucked from the seed to avoid an unsolicited lip-piercing or a tough fibre stuck between the teeth. In the unripe stages the green skin is peeled with a knife and slices of the firm, pale flesh dipped in chilli powder and salt before being relished by street-side snackers or school children. Unripe fruit is also cooked in chutneys. As the fruit ripens it becomes yellow to orange in colour and more fragrant and sweet, though still with a good percentage of acidity. It has been described as having a flavour like pineapple.link

I don’t think it tastes like a pineapple at all, but the rest of it is pretty accurate. I’ve never seen ambarellas for sale anywhere in the U.S. and the web didn’t have much except for these odd little facts:

• The word”Ambarella” is Sinhalese, ultimately from Sanskrit
• The Dutch seem to be remarkably interested in it
• The bark of the tree can be used to cure diarrhoea
• Some hi-def tech company apparently decided to one-up Apple in the fruity brand identity sweepstakes

In Sri Lanka, ambarellas are made into chutneys, curries, and pickles of all kinds. Cut a raw one up, sprinkle a little salt, sugar, vinegar and chili powder…oooh, heaven. My grandmother had a gigantic tree growing right over her house, and we’d visit her carrying buckets during the fruiting season. I’ve got strangely happy memories of eating peeled, uncut ambarella while reading a book, only noticing my bleeding gums (those spines are shaarrp) when my mother grimaced.

So does anyone else have memories of eating an ambarella? Maybe you call it by another name? Or (and this would be fabulous) you know where I could buy some?!

Behold: The lime pickle. Not the chili pickle, the mango pickle, the garlic pickle, the eggplant pickle, or any other kind of pickle. And certainly not that abomination, the “mixed pickle.” This here is lime pickle, the greatest and more exalted of all the pickles.

Man, me and lime pickle go back a long, long way. You see, in all my mixed-up, tri-continental, ruthlessly secular upbringing, desi food always held its rightful place. Now we lived in France, not a major center of desi culture either then or now, and this was before the globalization of so-called ethnic gourmet cuisine made the basic spices and ingredients available in all the world’s major cities. But we made do, and the key to our survival, desi food-wise, was the one line of prepared foods, spice mixes and achars on the market, which was inevitably Patak’s. So there was always a bottle of curry paste around — not to serve as the sole ingredient, of course, but to accelerate the process. And whether the curry was prepared from a paste or from scratch, there was always lime pickle on hand to give it the necessary je ne sais quoi.

To this day lime pickle is one of the essential condiments in my refrigerator — that and Dijon mustard (the proper smooth kind, not the grainy stuff), a combination that I guess pretty much encapsulates the flavors of my childhood. I find uses for lime pickle that other people don’t have — or so I think. Except I know that now, as I confess to you that I add lime pickle to my tuna fish salad, a whole bunch of you are going to reveal that you do the same.

When my wife and I were trying to decide on new pots and pans last year, it was kind of hard to pick the right set. Not only were we confused by the all-clad versus the myriad types of calphalon sets, we wanted to get some nice “crockery” that would be good for cooking Indian food. Outside of the handy prestige pressure-cooker that I am slowly learning how to use, we couldn’t find any real options for fancy-shmancy cooking pots-and-pans specifically for Indian food. So imagine my surprise when I was perusing the most recent Williams-Sonoma catalog and found a whole section dedicated to Indian spices, Indian food-specific pots and pans, and Williams-Sonoma Kitchen recipes for a variety of different indian food items, including, samosas, chapatis, and even kheer (Indian rice pudding). Sure, my mom would kill me if she knew I entertained the notion of buying a 9 ounce, $39 set of spices, or a $13 dollar simmer sauce, but I appreciate that Le Creuset is selling a tava griddle, and that Cuisinart is uping the ante in the pressure cooker game. I must admit though, I am a bit confused by the Calphalon One Indian Wok (Wok, India?). My initial thought was that maybe it would be perfect for cooking tasty Indian-Chinese food like my favorite gobi manchurian, but the description in the catalog cleared it up:

“Based on the karahi, the traditional Indian wok commonly used for simmering curries and stews, stir-frying and deep-frying, this infused-anodized wok is ideal for recreating the favorite dishes you enjoy at Indian restaurants. Its interior sears and browns perfectly and develops the rich caramelized flavor essential for creating delicious pan sauces. Adapted from the karahi’s customary round bottom, this wok’s flat bottom makes it easy to use on Western stoves. Two beautifully shaped loop handles - inspired by graceful scrollwork on Indian architecture - allow you to carry the oven-safe pan to the table for serving in authentic Indian style.” (link)

I received an nice email from a childhood friend this morning. He said:

I was thinking of your mother yesterday. It was International Women’s Day, and an Indian colleague was telling a story about her mom’s traditional role in the household as non-partner, non-decision-maker, etc, who sat on the floor while the men sat in chairs. I thought of your apartment, which always smelled like tasty traditional Indian food. But I also knew your mom as a successful professional and strong head of household. It just got me thinking and reminiscing, and was a nice daydream to have.

In an odd way, what stuck out to me was his mention of smells. We grew up in the same apartment building, and played together a fair amount as young kids. So if he says that our apartment had pleasant aromas associated with cooking, I believe him.

Still, despite the strong association between smell and memory, for the life of me, I can’t remember what foods my friends’ apartments smelled like at all. I recall plenty of other aromas from my childhood, many of which are about food, but none of them are about residences smelling like the foods people ate there. Go figure.

It’s a conversation we’ve had here often. We’ve talked about that curry smell and how meat smells create vegetarian self-segregation. It repeats elsewhere too. One of our (non-desi) readers remarked, on her own blog, that she was puzzled as to where the persistent pleasant smell of Indian food was coming from, only to realize that it was her.

Still, a story from a week ago will, I think, elevate this debate. Sunita Williams, the hadesi astronaut, has desi food in her “bonus container”:

Williams … has several Indian dishes in her bonus container, including Punjabi kadhi with pakora - vegetable fritters topped with yogurt and curry - and mutter paneer, a curry dish. The dishes are packaged to have a long shelf life in space. [Link]

I know that many SM readers like to partake in one particular cross-border skirmish we seem to have a lot here. You know the one of which I speak, right? It’s the herbivores vs. the carnivores (although technically we are all omnivores). Well, to throw a little fuel on to that fire I submit to you this book review over at Slate.com.. The book is titled “Bloodless Revolution” and is meant to be a sort of “history of European vegetarianism.” I haven’t read the book but the review was quite insightful. First the background on the book:

Here’s the story as he tells it in The Bloodless Revolution: In the 17th century, a fundamental question about the relationship between ourselves and the other creatures of the earth broke out into passionate debate, a debate that swooped over and around and through the culture, rattling long-held European assumptions about the very nature of life. There was no single word adequate to capture the ideas that were bursting forth, until the term vegetarian emerged in the middle of the 19th century. And with that, the battle was over—not because meat-eating came to an end but because European culture made a home for this challenge to dietary norms, giving it a local habitation and a name. Whether or not this constituted a victory for animal-lovers is hard to say. As Stuart points out early on, when the concept of vegetarianism became domesticated, it turned into “a distinct movement that could easily be pigeon-holed, and ignored.” But people did start thinking differently about animals, human responsibilities, and the rights of living creatures, albeit rarely to the extreme sought by such groups as PETA. Stuart sums it up well: Nowadays, he says, “negotiating compassion with the desire to eat is customary…” [Link]

The critic contends, however, that vegetarianism from a European perspective isn’t so much something they accept as a way of life but is rather a philosophy to be practiced off an on:

If vegetarianism has settled comfortably into Western culture by now, it’s because the term vegetarian has become so vast and shapeless that it describes just about everybody who isn’t on the Atkins diet. To be sure, there are vegetarians who avoid all animal food. But most are willing to eat eggs, and many eat fish. Chicken is fine with some because hey, it isn’t beef. Hamburgers? Absolutely not—or maybe just once in a while. And turkey because it’s Thanksgiving, ham because it’s Easter, pepperoni because it’s pizza—what on earth is a vegetarian, anyway? No wonder Stuart never tries to define the term. A huge, wonderfully entertaining cast of dietary rebels parades through his chapters, but all we really know about the eating habits of these pagans, scientists, doctors, scholars, theologians, writers, philosophers, and crackpots is that most of them ate meat. [Link]

I’m not sure what the hell is going on with the world these days. First there was a daal shortage. More recently, word has gotten out that the corn tortilla population is in decline and at serious risk:

MANY DEMOCRATS and some Republicans applauded President Bush’s State-of-the-Union proposal for a 20 percent reduction in gasoline use over the next 10 years, largely through greater reliance on ethanol.

Bush’s idea, however, is adding corn-based fuel to protests in Mexico City. Existing federal laws that mandate ethanol in U.S. gasoline have diverted trainloads of corn from America’s food supply-chain to ethanol factories. This boosted U.S. corn prices nearly 80 percent in 2006.

That’s bad enough if you buy corn on the cob for a weekend barbecue. But it’s much worse if you are a poor Mexican surviving on corn tortillas. A kilo (2.2 pounds) of tortillas recently has shot up 55 percent, from 5.5 to 8.5 pesos. Poor Mexicans are not taking this sitting down. [Link]

Look, I know that wheat tortillas are “healthier” for you and that flour tortillas are less soggy. But come on. Nothing but a hot corn tortilla smothered in enchilada sauce should be wrapped around spinach and cheese filling. Via BoingBoing we now learn that “famed” investor Vinod Khosla is going to build an ethanol plant in Georgia that will use waste wood instead of corn to produce the fuel:

We knew it was coming. Vinod Khosla has finally made a bold move to back up industry-wide speculation that cellulosic ethanol would soon emerge as the next phase in ethanol production. The surprise is that wood would be the feedstock of choice given the vast headstart of corn-based biorefineries in the country and the obvious synergy of basing corn stover conversion technologies near sugar fermentation plants.

However, the high energy potential of wood cellulose, the ready availability of cheap waste, and the search for a renaissance of forestry-based industries makes the announcement a welcome one to the “nation’s woodpile” in the southeastern states. [Link]

To put it more simply, why kill tortillas to make fuel for your car when instead you could use the scrap wood from all the post consumer waste you produce? I for one am glad that investors like Khosla have the foresight to pump money into alternative sources of fuel while big oil keeps reaping record profits from our pockets.

And before anyone accuses me of being a bad Indian, I like rotis too.

While growing up my mom would do ravivar, which translates into Sunday in Gujarati. This was a tradition passed down to her from her mother, and basically every Sunday my mom would only eat once during the day. When I was a kid, it sucked for Sunday lunch because it meant eating a full-on Gujarati feast, when all I really want to eat was a grilled cheese and some bugles. Things looked up for dinner though, when my sister and I were allowed to choose our poisons. This often led to a visit to Burger King for a Veggie Whopper and onion rings. The Veggie Whopper, for those of you that haven’t had the pleasure of having it is different than the BK Veggie which was only recently added to the menu, and is essentially Burger King’s signature Whopper without the meat patty. As ridiculous as it may sound, it was one of my favorite foods order. I know that for most vegetarians, a fast food burger joint doesn’t quite fit the bill as an ideal place to grab a bite, but my sister and I loved Burger King. And that Burger King presented some semblance of a vegetarian option set it apart from its competition. While I was always on the fence about allying myself strictly to Burger King or McDonalds - you never know when you will crave a McFlurry - when the news came out a few year’s back that McDonalds had been deceiving its vegetarian customers by incorporating that unnecessary beef tallow ingredient into its french fries, I moved completely into the Burger King camp.

So I was glad when I saw the news that fast food eaters in India would soon be getting a choice in where they can hang out and munch on American style burgers and fries. From this story in the Economic Times, it seems Burger King will soon be joining the burger wars in India as it begins to scout out locations and business partners with which to start its joint burger venture in India. And with its opening,

Burger King is likely to shake McDonald’s monopoly in India by launching its own brand of burger restaurants. The company, best known for its price war with Big Mac in the US, has mandated Kotak Mahindra to scout for a partner in what is a growth market for global fast food companies. Industry sources feel that even though McDonald’s is firmly established in metros like Delhi and Mumbai, Burger King’s entry is likely to start a burger war of sorts. Innovation in product offerings and location of outlets would play a crucial role in drawing customers in the long run. In the short term, McDonald’s would lose some customers to Burger King out of the sheer curiosity factor. However, this would happen only if both are located in the same catchment area,” said an industry source.

“Tasty curry might have a fringe benefit,” headlines USA Today… today. The article is more specifically about the reported health benefits of turmeric. It’s not exactly a scoop, as a scientific paper on the topic was published two years ago and picked up by Manish in this January 1, 2005 post. Still, given the attention span of the typical USA Today reader (and who is that reader, anyway, other than the nameless masses of khaki-panted, cellphone belt-clipped, laptop warriors waking up each morning in the Marriotts of the land?), I suppose it’s information worth recycling from time to time. Plus we get a heart warming story to go with it:

Then Jayne took an Indian cooking class that emphasized fresh vegetables and curry spices.

She began to whip up an Indian dinner once or twice a week — and soon she noticed she wasn’t always looking for a late-night snack. And the curry in the food offered her a bonus: It seemed to ease the pain and swelling in her joints.

“I have arthritis,” says Jayne, 55. “But I’m moving better now.”

Preliminary research suggests Jayne may be right. A study in the November issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism suggests turmeric, one component of curry spice, almost completely prevented joint swelling in rats with arthritis. Other studies have suggested that the spice could protect against diseases such as heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s…

Tipster Adi points us to the article as picked up on the news aggregator site RedOrbit.com, where we get the benefit of reader comments. Made-up Indian names, comparisons of desi food to the excrement of various animals, and discussions of desi body odor and penis size are all on the menu. I won’t reprint any of it here but those of you who think racism against desis is no big deal might find it instructive to take a look.

Meantime, pass the lime pickle.

I’ve long been fascinated by the demographics of vegetarianism. I’m an omnivore, but one who eats a lot less meat than my peers, so they confuse my insistence that we order a vegetable dish (when eating out family style) with an unwillingness to consume animal flesh.

In the UK, it seems that vegetarians are smarter:

… those who were vegetarian by [age] 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10. [Link]

Although this study is flawed by its overly broad definition of vegetarian:

Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian - although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken. [Link]

Unfortunately, they don’t report adjusted scores, so really what they’re talking about here is an unwillingness to eat beef, which makes them … well, like many Hindus I know.

With the definitional caveat, in general, this is what they find about veggies:

Vegetarians were more likely to be female, to be of higher occupational social class and to have higher academic or vocational qualifications than non-vegetarians. [Link]

Researchers find something similar in India, where vegetarians are more likely to be female and of higher social status.

Vegetarianism is declining in India, to the point where vegetarians are now a minority, with only 40% of the population. This is apparently a major shift from the recent past.

The older generation remains more vegetarian than the younger, women more so than men, Brahmins more than other castes, and religious Hindus more than non-religious Hindus, Muslims, or Christians.

This is a seismic cultural shift for India. While India will remain far more veg friendly than the US or UK for a long time to come, I’m wondering about the cultural ramifications that accompany the situation where vegetarianism is associated with a narrow minority. Once upon a time, you could not get meat on the streets of Ahmedabad, now the road by IIM is lined with little 3 wheelers selling chicken.

What happens to Indian society and culture when it undergoes a fundamental shift in its eating habits? How will it change?

I am quite sure many of you macacas have had some version of this experience, recounted by Mukta Tripathi of the Napa Valley Register:

During my first fall in the United States, someone asked me what Indians do for Thanksgiving.

Faced with this sort of inquiry, there are three basic approaches you can take.

1) A thorough, sensitive explanation that Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday unfamiliar to desis-from-desiland or any foreigners for that matter, augmented if you care to, by a description of meals consumed at holidays of the desi tradition of your choice, and if you need to, by a patient clarification that you are not one of those other Indians, you know, like that nice lady Pocahontas;

2) A petulant riposte that you are, by birth or longstanding residence, as American as the questioner, and how dare they suggest you would mark Thanksgiving any differently than they;

3) Simply invite the questioner to sit down with you and get your eat on.

My personal preference goes to option 3, as does Tripathi’s, who contributes in that spirit a menu of desified Thanksgiving delights:

I have put together a list of dishes using some traditional American Thanksgiving ingredients: green beans, pumpkin, turnips, potatoes and even cranberries. The sweet and sour pumpkin dish and the turnip, tomato and pea curry can be served with rice pilaf or rolled in a flour tortilla or flatbread as a wrap. I can guarantee that your vegetarian friends will be happy with these alternatives to turkey, and even the non-vegetarians may be inspired by these recipes.

They include Sweet and Sour Pumpkin with Indian Five Spices, Turnip Tomato and Peas Curry, Rice Pilaf; and Ginger and Cranberry Chutney with Five Spices.

You will have noticed that one key item is missing: the turkey. That’s fine if you’re vegetarian — you get to avoid the chore of preparing this fundamentally boring bird in a way that’s fit to eat — but if you or your guests are not, and unless you splurge for a partridge or goose, you need to deal with the problem. That’s where restaurateurs like Qudrat Syed of Chicago come in. He’ll desify your gobbler for a fee:

For $75, Syed took Motamen’s store-bought bird and gave him back a tandoori turkey with biryani, a vegetable-laden rice dish, and Motamen got to keep his own kitchen clean. “It was really different and really good,” said Motamen, who plans to do it again this year.

Lately I’ve come across a number of recipes where desi “fusionification” occurs by just adding garam masala. Is this the culinary equivalent of a “princess costume” for Halloween?

For example, one of the regional finalists in the Build a Better Burger competition was Daljeet Singh from Coral Springs, FL. His entry was “Masala Burgers with Tangy Tamarind Sauce and Red Onion-Mint Relish” [Link]. You saw that one coming, didn’t you?

Unfortunately, he lost not because his burgers were too hot, but because his buns were too cold (who ever heard of a Punjabi with cold buns?).

The NYT coverage of the event makes it seem like Singh had some sort of unfair secret weapon, writing that the “overpoweringly spicy scent now wafting across the lawn from the Masala Burgers” [Link] did not distract the eventual winner. (?!?!)

Similarly, there are a number of versions of (ahem) Punjabi haggis out there, all of which involve garam masala. I love how this one group markets their version as healthier than either traditional haggis or traditional punjabi food:

By using an exotic blend of fresh tomatoes, green chilli and garam masala, the women of an Edinburgh community group believe their dish will appeal to Scots looking for a healthy alternative this Burns Night… They hit upon the idea of curried haggis while trying to come up with ways of making the traditionally high-fat Sikh diet healthier. [Link]

Both the women who invented the Punjabi haggis believe they have lost more than two stone since switching to a healthier diet less than a year ago. [Link]

For those of you who aren’t familiar with haggis:

Haggis is a blood pudding, stuffed with minced sheep’s organs, onions, oatmeal and suet (beef fat), then sewn in a sheep’s stomach and boiled or baked. The blood from the meat soaks into the oatmeal, mixes with the beef fat and turns the inside a dark brown, richly grainy colour. [Link]

Lamb offal is healthier than dal/roti/sabzi? Riiiiiight ….

A little while ago, Taz mentioned Alpana Singh in a post on influential desi women under 30. I recently discovered that Alpana, in addition to being the youngest person ever to pass the Master Sommelier exam, hosts a show called Check, Please! on Chicago Public Television. AND she has a book out: Alpana Pours: About Being a Woman, Loving Wine, and Having Great Relationships. The general vibe she’s going for in the book might be described as “Shiraz and the City”; the idea for it came from watching couples order wines at upscale restaurants:

Singh cringes when she thinks about the drop-dead gorgeous woman who dined at Everest with an equally great-looking date. The guy proceeded to order a $490 bottle of Champagne — and the unsure woman asked for a Diet Coke. That’s when she knew it was time to birth Alpana Pours.

“I may not be a relationship expert, but I saw five years of relationships” by advising couples on wine. “It was like [having] ringside seats,” says the Monterey, Calif., native.(link)

To sum up (ladies, are you listening?), Alpana declares: “Looking super hot in a really expensive dress can be immediately undermined if you order a diet cola.” (The book also has chapters with titles like, “Pairings: Wine, Hooking Up, and Dating” and “What Wines Go With Bingeing?”) While I’m definitely not the demographic Alpana is, um, catering to, I guess I’m fine with it as long as no one is serving Tunatinis anywhere, ever.

Saturday marked the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, a month of daytime fasting for Muslims around the world. From sunrise to sunset Muslims abstain from eating or drinking, including chewing gum or cigarettes. It's a month of self-control and self-reflection as well as a month of 'being extra nice' and staying away from all things haraam. But the nicest thing I remember from the month of Ramadan, is of course, the food.

It's customary to break the fast together at sundown with a meal called iftaar. Tables are laden with dates, fruits, nuts; the hosts prepare their most elaborate dishes, such as biryani, homemade couscous or a leg of lamb...

My mother would vie to be one of the first to host the Saturday iftaar. She would say that there is great blessing in feeding a person who is fasting. She would toil singlehandedly in our kitchen for days to prepare a meal that would feed at least 100 people. For women like my mother, an immigrant from India, a potluck was unthinkable, counter to everything she had been taught about hospitality.

Most of the people from our center were from Hyderabad, India, and the weekly meals were remarkably similar. First, we would break our fast with appetizers: samosas, channa daal, dahi bades, fruit chaat, rosewater milk, and of course the requisite date (with pits). After the sunset prayer and with a sated stomach, we would dive into the biryani, curries and kebabs. We'd top off our meal with kheer, a rice pudding-like dish, and chai.[link]

Growing up in my parents house we had a similar spread with an additional spattering of pakoras, muri, juices, and fried eggplant. When we lived in Saudi Arabia, a country of scheduled nap times and stores open from 6pm to 4am during Ramadan, the food spread was even more spectacular at iftaar time -- the small shacks would fill the streets with aromas of fresh bread, sharmas and other savories. But now, since living on my own, making an iftar feast for myself always seemed rather pointless. Not to mention that I can't really cook. Iftar this week has been dates, water, and whatever cereal is in the cupboard.

Last night while grumpily eating my cereal, I vowed to break fast with at least one 'traditional' item for the rest of Ramadan -- I have even toyed with the idea of having an iftaar potluck for my friends. Luckily there are plenty of websites out there to help me out with recipes: Iranian Iftar, Arab Iftar, and of course, Desi Iftar. Drooling yet? I am and I'm heading to the kitchen with these recipes in hand for tonight's iftar. To all that are fasting, Ramadan Mubarak!

Imagine, if you will, that the following fictional conversation took place between myself (in my best Jon Lovitz voice) and a girl named “Preeti:”

Abhi: Hey Preeti.

Preeti: Whad up?

Abhi: You know we’ve been together for two whole months now. I just wanted you to know that I’m really excited about us. I think we make a good couple. You complete me. I think we are helping each other grow, both together and as individuals.

Preeti: Uh huh. That’s sweet.

Abhi: Well, since it is our two-month anniversary I thought I would get you something special.

Preeti: Cool, did you get me a brown Zune?

Abhi: No darling. Check this out though. I just had a star named after you. I wanted you to know that my love for you will shine brightly forever.

Preeti: Forever?

Abhi: Foreva-eva. Just think! Every time you look up there in the sky at the star formerly known as ZX56C92 you will think about how much I burn for you!

Okay, has anyone vomited yet? I am willing to bet that at least one reader out there has had a star named after them or named a star after someone. Admit it! We’ve all done things we are ashamed of. This is definitely not how I’d go about declaring my feelings for someone. Then again, I’m not sure I have ever developed a really good method for showing someone I care. The fictional conversation above leads me to a real conversation that took place over this past weekend.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. If you’re a CEO of an iconic brand, do you modernize the branding of your product if it is associated with a country’s racist history? If so, how do you do this without either losing brand recognition or whitewashing the past?

The original label

To ensure Victorian consumers got the message that they were drinking the same treacly caffeine concentrate designed to fortify soldiers subduing the colonies, the kilted Gordon Highlander was shown being brought his drink by a Sikh manservant. [Link]

Of course, times change. The sun went down on the British empire, dusky Britons moved in and took over the cornershops. They weren’t quite as fond of this label as Victorian customers were.

So, in the 1980s, a compromise was reached:

In the 1980s, the label was moved to the back and later the Sikh bearer’s tray was removed but he remained standing. [Link]

This new label was a bit bizarre. It had the Sikh servant with his fist up, like he was about to punch the Scottish officer in his face.

The newest label

Of course, this didn’t last either. Brown people being uppity like they are, they wanted yet more:

Recently, several Asian shopkeepers threatened to stop putting the liquid coffee and chicory concentrate on their shelves unless the label was changed. After such threats and pressure from race equality groups, the manufacturers have had the scene radically redrawn to show the two men sitting side by side. [Link]

So the label was finally changed to the anachronistic image of the officer and his batman sitting down for coffee together. While this might be a useful image for today’s multicultral UK, it’s absurd to imagine that it might have happened back in the day.

I was happily watching The Princess Bride for about the 1000th time on Bravo (“That’s right. When I was your age, television was called books.”), and I saw the name “Padma Lakshmi” flash across the screen. A little Googling later, and it appears that Padma Lakshmi, model, occasional actress, cookbook author, and oh yeah, Mrs. Salman Rushdie, has a new gig — possibly her most high-profile one yet.

She’s hosting the second season of Bravo’s Top Chef, a cooking reality show:

Known as the first Indian supermodel, actress and award-winning writer Padma Lakshmi joins the second season as host of “Top Chef,” introducing the challenges to the contestants and sitting at the judges’ table each week. Lakshmi is currently working on her second cookbook for Miramax Books due in Spring 2007, a culinary endeavor of over 150 recipes from around the world and intriguing personal memoirs. This is a follow up to her successful first cookbook, “Easy Exotic,” for which she won the International Versailles Event for best cookbook by a first time writer. Lakshmi hosted “Padma’s Passport” on The Food Network, cooking diverse and low-fat cuisine based on her best selling book, “Easy Exotic.” Lakshmi also hosted the documentary series “Planet Food” for The Food Network and worldwide Discovery Channel, in which she journeyed the world for exotic cuisine. (link)

Ok, she’s not really the first Indian supermodel — though maybe she’s the best-known in the American TV landscape. (But who was the “first” Indian supermodel?) I suppose one could make a comment about the phrase, “easy exotic,” but we’ll try and rise above that. Between “Planet Food” and “Padma’s Passport,” I prefer the latter title, though I think what she really needs to do is start her own video podcast: the Podmacast.

I can’t begin a food post without sharing an experience from a few nights ago. A group of us had dinner at Indus Valley, a reasonably well-regarded desi restaurant at 100th and Broadway in New York. At some point the composer Philip Glass walked in, and one of our group, a big fan, went into a state of beatific darshan that threatened to destabilize our meal. It got worse when Glass and his companion sat at the table next to ours. My fellow diner was finally able to compose himself, give Glass props, and return to getting our eat on.

Suddenly another of my companions let out a piercing yell and pushed back from the table with great speed. Yes, there was a big old cockroach crawling up the tablecloth — not the short dark ones you often see in NYC kitchens, but a tropical-quality beast, two or three inches long (though not the flying kind). A minor tamasha ensued, during which Philip Glass turned to me and said, with an air of wisdom, “Don’t worry, they have very small appetites.”

Cockroaches happen; celebrity sightings happen too. But what was truly shocking was that the macacas brothers running the restaurant did not comp us even a round of drinks or dessert, let alone a meal, in recognition of the disgusting insect experience. I guess it shouldn’t have surprised us, seeing that they were already trying to seat a couple at a nearby two-top while the cockroach hunt was still on, but come on, what the hell kind of restaurant management is that? So, folks, if you go to Indus Valley at 100th and Broadway, watch out for big-ass cockroaches and don’t expect a discount.

Which brings me to the subject at hand. Perhaps in response to a desi dining landscape that, except in a few fortunate neighborhoods and towns, consists of the same old slop doled out from the same buffets, plus a few “nice” places that look fancy but aren’t necessarily up to snuff in the hygiene department, the idea of desi fast food — cheap, standardized and franchised — becomes a more and more compelling alternative.

Who told the clock to spin away time so quickly? One minute I’m grabbing Nina Paley’s kundi in Central Park while grinning shamelessly for the Parsirazzi, the next thing I know, we’re less than three days from the SECOND chocolate city meetup, ever!

We haven’t solidified exactly when we will meet at Amma’s wegetarian or if we will do so pre- or post-debauchery, but that’s what this post’s comment section is for, so hop to it, my little brown bunnies. ;) I can’t remember which of you I’ve spoken to about this, but so far most conversations include the words: drinking, Sequoia, afternoon, waterfront, summer, drinking and “great lighting”. We can all meet at 6pm, toast the mutiny, take pictures and then stroll up to Amma’s by 8pm, where we will eat like panthis and take even more pictures.

So, RSVP below if you are up to joining me, our favorite Barmaid, duologist Sriram and his sister (I think Saturday is her birthday!), Mayur, Kenyandesi and yes, potentially YO DAD in Georgetown for some vada, masala dosa and peppery rasam. Mmmm, South Indian food (that picture is of the actual receipt from the first DC meetup!): you, too, can have plenty but I need to know how many to reserve a table for, so holla. SOON. Last time, we had a mutinously good time— I think you’d regret it if you didn’t hang out with us on Saturday. No pressure, or anything. ;)

It’s not the Sepia Mutiny model to just post news items without comment, but sometimes the material doesn’t leave us with much to add. With that said, here are the latest developments in Bombay dining:

NAVI MUMBAI: A new restaurant at Kharghar has actually been named as Hitler’s Cross and it was inaugurated by the who’s who of Navi Mumbai on Friday evening.

A huge poster of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was put at the inauguration function of the restaurant in sector 4 of Kharghar, much to the surprise of the invitees.

Actor Murli Sharma, who has featured in films like Apharan and Teesri Ankh, was one of the guests present at the inauguration. “I found the huge posters of Hitler at the restaurant amusing. That’s all I can say,” he told TOI over phone.

When asked if he felt disturbed by the name of the restaurant, Sharma said: “I am not really agitated as I have not read much about the man (Hitler). However, from what I know about Hitler, I find this name rather amusing.”

Important dignitaries such as Navi Mumbai mayor Manisha Bhoir and former mayor Sanjeev Naik were also invited as chief guests to the restaurant by one Sablok Builders group, who are reportedly behind the management of Hitlers Cross.

A Reuters report picked up by DNA has more:

“We wanted to be different. This is one name that will stay in people’s minds,” owner Punit Shablok said.

“We are not promoting Hitler. But we want to tell people we are different in the way he was different.“…

“This place is not about wars or crimes, but where people come to relax and enjoy a meal,” said restaurant manager Fatima Kabani, adding that they were planning to turn the eatery’s name into a brand with more branches in Mumbai.”

Someone in Mumbai is going to have to do the investigating on this. A field report from Manish, perhaps?

I love that my roots are in Kerala. :D Via the Beeb:

The Indian state of Kerala has banned the production and sale of Coca Cola and Pepsi following a report that the drinks contain harmful pesticides.

It said it was taking the step because the drinks pose a health risk. Both soft drinks manufacturers have said their products are safe.

Though other states have decided to ban the soft drinks in schools, hospitals and the like, only a state which possesses that legendary literacy rate, enviable amounts of religious harmony and my marathon-runnin’ 80-year old Aunt could do something so hilarious draconian singular.

The move by the communist government in Kerala in southern India is the most severe reaction to a report released last week by an Indian non-government organisation, the Centre for Science and Environment.

It said tests carried on samples of the drinks across 12 Indian states revealed dangerously high levels of pesticides.

The Indian Soft Drinks Manufacturers Association is taking its sweet yindian standard time:

The Indian Soft Drinks Manufacturers Association issued a statement on Wednesday after the Kerala ban was announced.

“Our products manufactured in India are absolutely safe and meet every safety standard set by food health and regulatory bodies in India and all over the world,” it said.

It said it would only comment on the Kerala ban once it had been told about it by the authorities.

Three years ago, the Center for Science and Environment told the Indian parliament that Coke and Pepsi most certainly weren’t it, if by “it” we mean healthy and pesticide-free; they “recommended that India set purity standards for soft drinks”. Of course, the government is on IST for that, too.

In other news, three out of my 219 cousins have cancelled impending trips home, out of concern for a lack of mixers with which to garnish their Johnny Walker Black. Oh, Kerala…look what thou hast wrought!

It’s hot outside. So hot, these days, you want to curl up next to a fan with a cup full of ice water and allow your brain to regress to an almost womb-like state of slushee-induced, heat-transcending peace. The local papers here in Philly have had nothing very exciting to say about the curent heat wave, but the BBC has an amusing article on the rest of the British media’s penchant for “climate porn” (the BBC, of course, only participates in the phenomenon by discussing how everyone else participates in it). Still, “climate porn”: you might want to rethink how much time you spend at work checking the weather.

Speaking of returning to the womb, or something close to it, did you hear about the new, designer desi-themed baby food?

HappyBaby, which sells colorful cubes of frozen vegetable and fruit purées through FreshDirect and Gourmet Garage, flavors puréed peas with fresh mint, and potatoes and red lentils with coriander and cinnamon in their savory dahl, an Indian staple.

“This is how my parents fed me,” said Shazi Visram, co-founder of HappyBaby, which began on Mother’s Day and is expanding its line this month. “Why shouldn’t babies, of all people, get to eat delicious things?”(link)

No more vanilla, canned Gerber for today’s stylish babies. At HappyBabyFood, you get organic Baby Dhal. It comes in frozen, baby-sized cubes, and is sold at health food places in the New York City area. (Because it’s frozen, they can avoid having to put in preservatives.)

Not everyone is thrilled with the masalafication trend:

But some parents remain skeptical. “Moms ask me, ‘Can babies really have that?’ ” said Anni Daulter, co-founder of Bohemian Baby, which delivers meals like Vegetable Korma, made with coconut milk, for 12-month-olds, and purées of fruits like pomegranates and figs for infants. “And I say, of course! What do you think they feed babies in India?” (link)

Wait, you mean they feed babies in India something other than American baby food?

For more frozen organic baby food porn, click on this image, from New York Magazine. And a bit more on HappyBaby Food co-founder Shazi Visram, who has an MBA from Columbia and has worked in real estate in Brooklyn, can be found here.

There’s quite a controversy brewing (thanks, Scott Carney) over the pesticide content in Indian soft drinks. The vast majority of these are owned by the multinational Coke and Pepsi companies, and are of course manufactured and bottled locally in India using all local ingredients.

The controversy actually began three years ago, with a report from the Centre for Science and the Environment that alleged high concentrations of pesticides in soda samples. The government at the time attacked the findings aggressively, and questioned the credibility of the scientists who conducted it. But as a result of the study, strict standards for pesticide content were put in place for the water that is used in soft drinks, though standards for the sugar and other ingredients that go into the soda still haven’t been finalized.

Now the CSE has done another study, and published the findings in its magazine, Down to Earth. The actual numbers, and notes on methodology, are available on this PDF. (I haven’t found a more formal, “science journal” style article indicating the methodology of the study in detail anywhere.) The CSE says it is testing the soft drinks using methodology developed by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There are stories floating around of farmers using Coke and Pepsi drinks as low-budget pesticides, which would be a rather grim confirmation of this finding if substantiated. Of course, it’s unlikely that the amount of pesticide in these drinks is actually killing any bugs (the study finds pesticides in the drinks in the range of 11 parts per billion); it might well be the citric acid or the phosphoric acid (on the other hand, wouldn’t bugs be attracted to the sugar?). As a commentor on Scott Carney’s blog points out, it’s not clear whether this is a widespread practice, or a bit of an ‘urban legend’.

I’m sure we are all praying right now that humanitarian supplies including food and medicine are able to reach the civilian Lebanese population. Not to take away at all from that situation but since it is being thoroughly discussed elsewhere in the news and on the web, I thought I would divert the attention of SM readers for just a few minutes by speaking out about the looming crisis here in America and among other Diasporic desi communities. Folks, we have a daal shortage that hasn’t received nearly enough attention and it’s not going to be pretty when it all plays out. India West reports:

Soon to be more precious than gold?

Faced with an unexpected crunch in supply of dal and lentils, the staple item of the Indian meal, that’s the advice hapless store owners are giving to worried customers after an Indian ban on exports of lentils (I-W, June 30) has sent prices soaring and supplies dwindling. The Indian government has banned the export of dals and lentils until March 2007 to curb rising commodity prices.

”We advise customers to concentrate more on the vegetable than the dal,” Dinesh Kumar of India Cash and Carry, a busy Indian grocery store in Sunnyvale, Calif., told India-West.

No Indian meal is complete without dal, and it is a critical source of protein for vegetarians. Over the weekend, customers have been flocking to the aisle that stores dal, Kumar said. [Link]

The advice they are giving us is to “concentrate more on the vegetable than the dal?” That’s like asking someone to concentrate more on their job than on love, or to concentrate more on a blogger instead of the doctor or the finance guy. It just isn’t going to happen. As the article points out, daal is a CRITICAL source of protein for vegetarians. Is this some sort of bad karma for when all the vegetarians poked fun at the beef eaters for their mad-cow friendly ways? Now the chief protein source of vegetarian desis has come under threat.

“People are in a little panic for dals right now, even though we are requesting them to not take too many packets,” said Kumar, whose store has set a limit of a four-pound pack per household. People were cooperating, he said.

Prices have shot up. Toor dal, which retailed for less than a dollar a pound a couple of weeks ago, has shot up to almost two dollars a pound. [Link]

When I went to the Indian grocery store on my block last weekend I saw a little boy get trampled by three aunties who all reached for the same package of daal on the shelf. As the paramedics loaded him onto the ambulance he kept crying, “why Bhagwan, why?”

“Demands have gone up way high. Everybody is looking for dal and there is not enough in the market,” Parmar told India-West. “We have to supply each and every store; we have limited quantity to supply…” [Link]

Because of my blogging duties I knew about this looming crisis before most in the media and public. I have been steadily stocking up on daal by filling up one of the storage rooms here in our North Dakota bunker. Even my co-bloggers have remained in the dark about my grand designs. My power and influence in the blogosphere and the world in general will no doubt rise as knowledge of my new wealth spreads.

It’s hard to tell how this would play out, he said. “As of now, the market is in a period of uncertainty,” Soni said. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the course of the next month…” [Link]

In a post-apocalyptic world where daal is scarce I will have my choice of a beautiful desi bride in search of protein…or perhaps several brides.

Perhaps Uncle “all things desi are good for your health” was right. Turmeric may prevent Alzheimer’s. Mangosteens may combat bird flu. Ice in your soda may be bad for you. And now it turns out that pomegranate juice may reduce the risk of heart disease and even fight off prostate cancer.

Seeds of life?

Although Persephone’s consumption of pomegranate may have consigned her to the land of the dead, it looks like the fruit may have the opposite effect on us:

Scientists in Israel have shown that drinking a daily glass of the fruit’s juice can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. Pomegranate juice contains the highest antioxidant capacity compared to other juices, red wine and green tea,” said Professor Michael Aviram, who led the team. [Link]

Drinking a daily eight ounce glass of pomegranate juice can significantly slow the progress of prostate cancer, a study suggests. Researchers say the effect may be so large that it may help older men outlive the disease. Pomegranates contain a cocktail of chemicals which minimise cell damage, and potentially kill off cancer cells. [Link]

No word on whether cooking with anardana has a similar effect. Of course, you know where the best anardana in the world comes from, don’t you?

Pomegranate seeds are sometimes used as a spice, known as anardana … The seeds of the wild pomegranate daru from the Himalayas is considered the highest quality source for this spice. [Link]

Yet another in the everything comes from India (etymology) series. Have you ever noticed how desi college students all congregate around the punch bowl in the corner? It’s not because they’re alcoholics too cheap to buy their own brew and too goody-goody to get a fake ID (well, maybe it is), it’s really because punch comes from India. In fact, it’s not really punch, it’s paanch [Thanks Sameer]:

Originally, the word punch was a loanword from Hindi. The original drink was made from five different ingredients, namely arrack, sugar, lemon, water, and tea. Because of this it was named panch which is the Hindi for five. This name was adopted by the sailors of the British East India Company and brought back to England, from where it was introduced into other European countries. [Link]

In Germany, they call it ‘Punsch’ and it (of course) includes wine or liquor. And in Scandanavia the meaning has morphed yet further, losing the other ingredients to the point where it is just an arrack based booze. Surprisingly enough, the custom used to be to drink it with (what else?) daal:

The first ready-made punsch was sold in 1845 and initially the custom was to serve it warm, often together with yellow pea soup. [Link]

If the drink “punch” is an Indic loanword, then what about the action “punch”? Shouldn’t that be desi too? After all, it takes five fingers to make a fist in order to punch, and desis tend to throw punches after drinking too much of the same. And of course a “paunch” is what you get from drinking punch. Step aside, Noah Webster! We’re Indian givers and we want our loanwords back!

“Yo Dad” informs me that the local free paper in the D.C. suburb where he lives has been advertising a new beverage called Café Sepia.

Experience the finest in coffee with ITO EN’s new CAFÉ SEPIA (TM). Each ready-to-drink coffee delivers an artful balance of aroma, body and flavor. Our beans are specially selected for their unmistakable character…to create a truly exceptional coffee encounter. [Link]

I wish we had thought of this first. It would have solved our funding problems. My mom says we should sue them. The question is, “is it any good?” I hate the taste of coffee so I am going to rely on the blog Air Massive to give us a review:

We’re sad to report that Café Sepia tasted weak. It was too watery and diluted than we like. In fact, it lacked the coffee punch of even most established major brands of Japanese can coffee. (Personally, the Boss brand is our gold standard in this East Asian drinks sub-genre.) Café Sepia didn’t taste “bad,” mind you. It was actually pleasant to the tongue. But we expect more — much more — from anything that a drinks maker dares call coffee. [Link]

Many decades ago, in my grandfather’s generation, a branch of the family moved to Ahmedabad, Gujarat. My “grand-uncle” had a hard time getting a place for the family to stay because they were (correctly) presumed to be omnivores. Ahmedabad was Gandhi’s town, and nobody wanted meat eaters around. When the family ate chicken, they did so in secret, with my grand-uncle secreting out the bones in the newspaper to dispose elsewhere during his morning walk. If a carcass had been found in the trash, they would have been summarily ejected from their dwelling, with no bones made about it.

Fast forward to today, where in secular Sodom-and-Gomorrah Bombay the one thing you can’t do is eat meat:

Never mind pets, smokers or loud music at 2 a.m. House hunters in Bombay increasingly are being asked: “Do you eat meat?” If yes, the deal is off…

In constitutionally secular India, there’s no bar to forming a housing society and making an apartment block exclusively Catholic or Muslim, Hindu or Zoroastrian. Vegetarians say they too need segregation.

Rejected home-seekers have mounted a slew of court challenges to the power of housing societies to discriminate, but last year India’s highest tribunal ruled the practice legal. [Link]

I’m having trouble reconciling this news with the fact that 70%-80% of Hindus in India are non-veg (thanks Ponniyin) and even the streets of Ahmedabad are full of little three wheeled trucks that sell chicken in Ahmedabad there is a line of 10 or so three wheeled lunch trucks selling chicken outside of the IIM campus.

Maybe it’s because I’m an omnivore, but I honestly I don’t understand the deep emotional resonance of this issue. While I recognize the ethical implications of various diets, I’ve never tried to define my personal identity according to what I eat.

However, for others, this goes far beyond a lifestyle choice. I know atheists for whom this is a dogma, something that encapsulates who they are and where they stand in the world more than any other set of beliefs they hold.

Furthermore, not only do people care passionately about what they eat, they also feel strongly about what others eat as evidenced above. This is something I especially don’t understand. I’m missing something here, something about what meat eating means both personally and socially. What is it about food that leads people to be offended by the lifestyle choices of others?

For those of you who feel your food choices strongly - what does your diet mean to you? How do you feel about the diet of others? If we are what we eat, how does that matter?

Selected related posts: Food for Ogling, er, I mean, Thought, Ravi Chand, melon eater, That Silver Isn’t Vegetarian, Meat without murder?, Holy Cow: Yet another school textbook controversy

Oy, I almost don’t want to write this— but I took so many pages of notes during my disastrous dinner at Tandoori Nights in Clarendon, that all that information deserves to be used. I know you’ll appreciate reading some of it, since our threads on dining, fine or otherwise are consistently popular. So let’s get this over with.

I’ve recently become an addict of EMS. I know, I’m the only one who has ever entered the store in stiletto heels, but what can I say? You can only spend so much time underground with Abhi before he begins to influence you. While I work up my nerve to (gulp) actually go camping for the first time, I’m going to keep frequenting EMS; for some reason, it makes urban-me want to be outside. Powerfully magical, I know. So between my forays to gear mecca and the container store (and yet— my apartment is still disorganized), I noticed that a potentially brown restaurant had opened on the second floor of the ritzy Market Common at Clarendon, just outside of D.C.

Yesterday, I decided to give it a shot, even though I was a little put off by the restaurant’s font. Yup, I’m that kind of dork. Why wouldn’t I be? If words are my life, the shapes of the letters which create them matter, too. I looked down at my outfit, which I had worn earlier to the amazing lecture Sajit blogged about at the Smithsonian. It was casual, but to me, so was the font. So imagine my shock when I tentatively walked through the front doors and saw a lounge sleek enough to impress, a distinguished man in a well-cut suit who looked like the manager and a mural of brown women on the ceiling which made me want to faint because I spent so much time craning my neck back to memorize it. “WOW,” I thought to myself, “it’s GORGEOUS.”

I simultaneously regretted my clothes while planning a meetup or party that just had to take place in this space. Much like it jinxes the shit out of my crushes on boys to imagine my first name with their surname, all of my moony swooning, my counting parties before they were hatched…well, it virtually guaranteed doom. :(

My friend and I were seated in a beautiful, semi-private room and were asked if we wanted still or sparkling. I opted for the first and the busboy blurted out, “it’s bottled”. Um, okay. I wasn’t sure what to do with that so I asked him what brand. He didn’t know. When he came back, he said “Voss” and my pretentious-meter went off so hard it broke. How very glam. And everything on the menu was spelled properly! Well played.

In what can only be described as poetic injustice, the most priapic fruit in the world may go extinct within five to ten years for lack of sex. I feel for you, brutha. India’s glorious, 12” long banana fruit has been neutered by the cruel, cruel world (thanks, tipster):

The world’s most popular fruit… is in deep trouble. Its genetic base, the wild bananas and traditional varieties cultivated in India, has collapsed…

The main hope for survival of the Cavendish [variety] lies in developing new hybrids resistant to the [black sigatoka] fungus, but… the seedless modern fruit does not reproduce sexually and has to be bred from cuttings.

… wild banana species are rapidly going extinct as Indian forests are destroyed… In fact many of the genes that could save the Cavendish may already have been lost… One variety that contains genes that resist black sigatoka survives as a single plant in the botanical gardens of Calcutta… [Link]

The banana’s problem is that it is the seedless, infertile mutant cousin of a wild herb. The absence of seeds makes its fruit edible, but also genetically vulnerable… They have survived only because for some 10,000 years banana-lovers have propagated the fruit by taking shoots from the base of the plants…

The most widespread banana disease currently is a leaf fungus called black Sigatoka. It cuts yields by 50 percent or more on hundreds of millions of small farms across the tropics. Commercial banana plantations keep up production with weekly applications of fungicides - the most intensive application of chemicals on any major food crop. But now a new strain of an old disease, Panama disease, threatens to make even fungicides useless…

“In the 1970s we controlled Black Sigatoka by spraying 10 to 12 times a year…” That frequency has jumped to almost weekly… [Link]

For years I have been telling friends that what the U.S. needs more than ANYTHING right now is an Indian fast-food chain. If I am going to be convinced by advertisers to slowly poison myself with grease then I would much rather do so

Puff puff…give

The Hot Breads chain has had great success in India, but the company is really hoping to put the hot in Hot Breads as it begins franchising in the United States.

“We have great plans of opening up Hot Breads here,” said M. Mahadevan, who first launched the Hot Bread chain in Chennai, India, in 1988. “We have a plan here for nice growth.”

With over 20 locations in India in cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, New Delhi and Pondichery, two in Bangladesh, four in Nepal, one in Paris and about 40 in the Middle East, there is no reason to think Hot Breads won’t fly in the United States…

Hot Breads features bakery items such as croissants and pastries with an Indian twist. In India, Hot Breads is touted for its French baking traditions, but in the United States it is the connection with India, and its pastries filled with spicy vegetables and meat fillings, that have connected with the India American customers. [Link]

Now please don’t get me wrong. Looking at their menu you will see that this is just a baby step. The food they serve seems to be sort of an Indian-French hybrid. The Taj Mahal wasn’t built in a day however. If enough people eat this stuff then maybe an establishment like Kati Roll will decide to franchise as well. Just imagine a bouncer at every highway truck stop trying to fend off paneer lovers and keep the peace.

Mahadevan said that Hot Breads has scored as a brand that Indian Americans are familiar with from India. He added that it gives Indian Americans a sense of belonging here because they can visit a store, smell the curry and Desi coffee and be reminded of Hot Breads they have visited in India. [Link]

While I was sitting in the mandap during my wedding a couple of weeks ago now, I was a bit concerned about all of the Indian sweets I was consuming. It seemed that every two minutes another mithai was being prodded in my direction, and the thought of all the ghee, the sugar, the gor (molasses) etc that I must have inhaled was a bit frightening. It wasn’t until last week when I read these articles in India-West (Link 1 and Link 2), I realized that as a vegetarian, I should have been concerned with something else. According to the story,

Varak, that gossamer-thin silver sheet that covers Indian mitthai, is made by placing thin metal strips of silver between the steaming intestines of a slaughtered animal or its hide and hammered into a thin foil. A substantial number of cattle, sheep and goat are killed specifically for the industry, according to animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi.

I used to think it was real silver that was just wittled down, perhaps by a machine? Apparently, there is no such thing as machine-made varak, so chances are, if you are vegetarian and you eat mithai or anything else with that silver gossamer on it, you are unwittingly eating an animal by-product. It pains me to think that many unknowing vegetarians, who perhaps think Indian sweets are vegetarian-friendly, have been consuming an animal by-product all these years. What’s worse is followers of the Jain religion, a religion that holds the notion of ahimsa or nonviolence in high regard, and the strictest of whom will wear a face-mask so as to not kill any living thing by breathing, have been using varak to decorate their “religious idols and the tirthankaras in their temples.”

I was enraged following the McDonalds controversey a few years back in which it was found that McDonalds was wrongfully telling customers their french fries were vegetarian, when in reality, the fries were frozen with a beef tallow additive, and the news in this article doesn’t make me much happier. While we all know that gelatin is found in marshmallows and gummy bears, I was surprised to see that certain cereals like Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats, actually contain gelatin, as does a now-former favorite of mine Lucky Charms. With the increasing popularity of vegetarianism, one would think a vegetarian friendly substitute for gelatin would have been created by now.

I love Vik’s. Every time I go to the Bay area, I always make it a point to visit Vik’s. And as I go through my life here in Los Angeles, I pray for the day that Vik’s will show up in my neighborhood. Chances are if you are even minutely familiar with the Bay area, you know exactly where I’m talking about. The SF Chronicle just did a piece trying to figure out what makes Vik’s so great (thanks, maisnon).

Dhokla

From its beginnings in 1989 as a bare counter with just a few chairs at the front of the store, Vik’s Chaat Corner now fills an entire warehouse, and on a typical Saturday will serve more than 1,200 customers.”Our food is craving food for Indians,” says Amod Chopra, Vinod and Indira’s 35-year-old son, who helps run the business. “You don’t crave naan or tandoori chicken. You want to eat the zippy, zesty food.”

Chaat combine various textures and flavors — crunchy, crisp and soft, spicy, tangy, fresh and sour. Crackers and dumplings, made from lentils, chickpeas or potatoes, act as vessels for a stunning variety of chutneys — mint, cilantro, coconut and tamarind… Chaat means “to lick” in HindiChaat means “to lick” in Hindi, a result of the fact that chaat originally were served on banana leaves, leaving customers to lick each leaf clean. Nowadays in India, people go out for chaat like Americans do for coffee.[link]

I remember growing up what a sucker I was for the pani puri. When I was visiting Bangladesh, I was told that my sensitive stomach would not be able to withstand the water and spices of the chaat stand. Of course I would sneak out and have some anyways, and suffer through the tummy pains after. Now, you can buy all the chaat ingredients in bags and boxes at your local Indian grocery store. But let me tell you, eating pani puri at your kitchen table is simply not the same as eating it on a street corner with sticky fingers. Vik’s, though not a street corner, has the same chaat house style appeal.

As if thinking about how yummy chaat is doesn’t make your mouth water enough, check out Vik’s online menu. Dahi Papdi Chaar, Sev Puri, and Pav Bhaji, they have it all.

In the basement of our North Dakota headquarters we employ a small but elite team or researchers designated the “SMU.” Their sole job is to predict “the next big thing,” and they are rarely wrong. You see, our marketing department has indicated that based on focus group feedback, readers that visit our site will flock to other blogs the minute we fall behind on what’s happening in the world around us. They will leave us the minute we aren’t ahead of the curve on “what’s cool.” Therefore, whenever the SMU staff starts “rattling their cages,” they know they will have my full attention. I predict that the next big thing (and you are hearing it on our blog first) is…Camel Milk:

While slightly saltier than cow’s milk, camel milk is highly nutritious. Designed after all for animals that live in some of the roughest environments, it is three times as rich in Vitamin C as cow’s milk.

In Russia, Kazakhstan and India doctors often prescribe it to convalescing patients. Aside from Vitamin C, it is known to be rich in iron, unsaturated fatty acids and B vitamins.

Tapping the market for camel milk, however, involves resolving a series of humps in production, manufacturing and marketing. One problem lies in the milk itself, which has so far not proved to be compatible with the UHT (Ultra High Temperature) treatment needed to make it long lasting.

But the main challenge stems from the fact that the producers involved are, overwhelmingly, nomads.

Another problem, according to the FAO, is the nature of the animal itself. Camels can reputedly be pretty stubborn. And unlike cows, which store all their milk in their udders, camels keep theirs further up their bodies. [Link]

Now I know that some of you might not like milk of any kind. Some people just don’t. My mom for example never drinks milk. But what about chocolate? Everybody likes chocolate…

An easier sell would appear to be the low-fat, camel milk chocolate, which A Vienna-based chocolatier, Johann Georg Hochleitner intends to launch a low-fat, camel milk chocolate this autumn. With funding from the Abu Dhabi royal family, his company plans to make the chocolate in Austria from powdered camel milk produced at Al Ain in the United Arab Emirates, then ship 50 tons back to the Gulf each month. [Link]

A brand-new tea bar called Tavalon just opened by Union Square in Manhattan. It sells high-end loose leaf teas in a microscopic but slick storefront decked out like a lounge. The founders are young corporate law dropouts, a turbaned Sikh dude named Sonny Caberwal and his biz partner John-Paul Lee. Sonny is also a tabla-ista who rocked out on a Thievery Corporation album a couple of years ago. It’s the second gen version of the ‘I’ll open a little restaurant’ dream:

There’s a new wave of Indian restaurants as lifestyle businesses being started by young, desi Manhattan professionals. Indian Bread Company, Chinese Mirch, and their granddaddy, Kati Roll Co., remind me of the second wave of upscale restaurants in London’s Brick Lane; they’re slicker than the usual desi joint… As young restaurants, owners, friends and relatives still work behind the counter… educated urbanites… A lot of the initial marketing of these places goes through word of mouth, friends of friends in the high-speed desi network; it’s the ‘I’ll open a little restaurant’ dream made real. [Link]

The place is decorated with white tile in a fabric texture like Tamarind, white orchids, uplit shelves like a cosmetics counter and menus on 32” LCDs. It sells teas in tins and test tubes. My buddies DD Pesh spun in the DJ perch yesterday, and Sonny played stand-up tabla by the door.

The teas themselves mimic vitamin water with frou-frou, we’re-not-Lipton themes like anti-aging, energizing and balancing. The bar also carries some wicked-looking paraphernalia including a tea stick, a perforated, stainless steel cylinder which you fill with loose leaf tea; stainless steel honey spoons shaped like honeycombs; and sinuous, double-sided sugar spoons. It’s all very SoHo-boho chic (tongue-in-cheek).

They’ve got a blend called Ceylon King for the days you’re feeling Ravanous. Thankfully, they don’t carry any redundant-dundant ‘chai tea,’ but do stop by and give Sonny shit for his ‘secret Indian spices’

Kama Chai Sutra: … teas just don’t get any more flavorful than this organic chai, made with a secret blend of Indian spices.

This NYT essay is a 5fer: mangoes, mehndi, curries, spices and cooking all in one piece (thanks, WGIIA). Brilliant marketing, Ms. Jaffrey! It’s not only King of Fruit, it’s Queen of Clichés and Hermaphrodite Bastard Child of Book Marketing.

mangomehndimayhem — sorry, sari

This essay itself is interesting, not really exotica — it’s about the fruit literal, not a metaphor:

The aim in India had always been to get sweet, melt-in-the-mouth, juicy mangoes with as little stringy fiber as possible… When these same mangoes entered Florida in the 19th century, they were mainly dismissed as “yard” mangoes. Too soft for shipping, they were considered lacking in commercial qualities. So all the fiber that had been bred out of them over thousands of years was bred right back, giving America the hard, pale rocks we see in stores today…

What America will be getting is the King of Fruit, Indian masterpieces that are burnished like jewels, oozing sweet, complex flavors acquired after two millenniums of painstaking grafting… One generous tree in Chandigarh bore about 30,000 pounds of mangoes every year for 150 years until it was hit by lightning…

A customs inspector, possibly noting my shifty eyes, asked me quite directly, “Are you carrying any mangoes?” … The mangoes were confiscated. This would have been bearable had I not been able to peep through a slight crack in the customs office door…

The officers were cutting up the mangoes and eating them. That hurt. [Link]

No, friends, desis, countrymen, lend me your ears for the text ad at the end. This PR placement shills for a mango-spice-curry memoir by everyone’s favorite actor auntie, mother of Sakina:

Madhur Jaffrey is… the author of “From Curries to Kebabs: Recipes from the Indian Spice Trail” and the forthcoming memoir, “Climbing the Mango Trees.” [Link]

Related posts: Mmmmmmmangoes!, Anatomy of a genre, M-m-me so hungry, Buzzword bingo, Sick of spices, Indian enough, Sailing the Seas of Cheese

For me, the sweetest fruit of Bush’s bisit to India is that finally, after 17 years of trying, Indian mangoes will soon be available in the US. Thus far, desis in the US have had to settle for Mexican mangoes, which are neither as sweet nor as juicy as what one can get back in the sub-continent.

Perfection in a golden wrapper

While India is the largest producer of mangoes (41% of the world produce), and the US is the largest importer (29% of all imports), there was no convergence between the two. The gainer was Mexico which only produces 5 per cent of the world’s mangoes and has 25 per cent of the mango export market. [Link]

The cause of the decades long mango moratorium was a fear of alien invasion, a (legitimate) concern about nasty creepy crawlies that might infest America’s fecund farmlands. This concern has now been allayed via the miracle of modern science - Indian mangoes will be nuked, neutered and neutralized before they are allowed to immigrate:

Preventing Indian mangoes from entering US supermarkets was the strict Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) conditions imposed by the US. Pests like pulp weevil and fruit fly are alien to US conditions. And the US was never confident about India’s capability to make the harvest pest-free… Several meetings later, the clincher was irradiation, the method to be now adopted to make mangoes pest-free. Earlier, it was limited to vapour treatment and quarantine. [Link]

How sweet it is. M-day is roughly 18 months away and I can hardly wait!

Every desi Superbowl party you go to next year will feature these I’m sure. After all, they are both “spicy” and “curried.” What more could we ask for?

Oh yeah. Break me off some o’ that.

In an attempt to win the snack food dollars of Canada’s largest ethnic groups and address a desire for stronger flavours, Frito Lay Canada Inc. is launching a new line of Asian-inspired potato chips and snacks.

Bags of wasabi- and spicy-curry-flavoured potato chips will be hitting grocery store shelves in Toronto and Vancouver this month, supported by a targeted marketing campaign in Chinese-language newspapers and television stations…

“[In Asia] they have a plethora of different snacking options — nuts, meats, those kind of things are much bigger from an Asian perspective. So the challenge for us was to find the perfect intersection between the flavours and tastes they like and something Western, which is the potato chip…”

In the Greater Toronto Area alone, South Asians annually spend $12.6-billion on retail goods and services and Chinese consumers spend $12.2-billion, according to Prasad Rao, a partner at Rao Barrett and Welsh, a Toronto advertising firm that specializes in multicultural marketing.

“I think the communities will want a lot more,” said Mr. Rao, who added that the tastes of Asians and South Asians have been largely underserved by mainstream food companies. [Link]

Our liberal Canadian neighbors always get to have more fun than us. Will American markets also demand a curry Lays? With so many flavors to choose from why would one remain monogamous?

In April, Frito Lay will launch it’s own version of shrimp chips. The Styrofoam-like morsels, which are often served in Thai restaurants…

Mmmmmm. Styrofoam….

However, I wonder, how will these compare to the snacks from the local Patel Brothers store in Rockville, MD? That’s what my parents shove in front of me whenever I go home.

‘Try it, you’ll like it!’ my brother once told me before handing me a peanut butter, honey and banana sandwich. My brother was the king of weird food mashups. From my brother I learned that you can make a burrito out of leftover Thai, taco sauce on anything is tasty, and you can get away with Maggi spicy ketchup on fruit. Years later when I regularly dished lucre in the direction of Asia de Cuba and Sushi Samba, I thought back fondly. Bro, you should have patented.

On the advice of several Mutineers, I dragged the entire family to Avatar’s in Sausalito tonight. Sausalito clings to the Marin Headlands like an Italian fishing village, if only pescatores drove Ferraris. Avatar’s serves food which is a mashup of Punjabi, Mexican, Jamaican and California nouvelle. One of the owners charmed my parents into ceding control of the entire experience to the chef, his mother. The game was to try and guess the ingredients of each dish.

The pumpkin enchiladas were delish, the saag paneer enchiladas almost as good. The ravioli makhani reminded me of my favorite Indian food hack. We all swooned over the samosas with apple salsa sitting atop white and brown chutney drawn in patterns like cappuccino foam. The only dish which disappointed: the mixed veggies atop watery basmati with a mint chutney base.

The restaurant is simple and homey, but the menu is much more satisfying than at its chic Indo-fusion compadre, Tabla in NYC. A sister restaurant, Avatar’s Punjabi Burritos, sits just up the road in Mill Valley. This snack shack don’t lack — I’ll be back.

The late Avatar and his family and friends have created Marindian cuisine, which successfully blends Punjabi, Mexican and a bit of Jamaican flavors, ingredients and techniques…

Literally, if we find ourselves within 100 miles of the Bay Area, we are going to Avatar. [Link]

Related post: Indian food hacks

This anecdote about Google cofounder Sergey Brin is part of a startup PR launch, but it’s interesting. I wonder what the dare was. ‘I cook, you eat’ doesn’t sound like a very interesting bet:

The victim

[Anand] Rajaraman and Harinarayan were co-founders of Junglee, an early Web database company… In 1994, Rajaraman proudly told Brin he’d acquired a new computer with the latest version of Microsoft Windows. Brin… went over to Rajaraman’s apartment and installed Linux… on his computer…

Brin even took on Rajaraman’s practice of eating vegetarian, a family tradition. One evening, Brin went over to Rajaraman’s apartment, baked a fish in his oven, and served it to him with some lemon. Rajaraman ate it. [Link]

Tamarind once served me the lamb version of the paneer dish I ordered, two large, flat white squares. I downed the whole thing thinking it was the worst paneer I’d ever had and didn’t catch on until I saw the bill. Gross.

By the way, your bagels contain an extract from human hair and chicken feathers, your milk contains cattle hormones and pus, your beer was clarified with fish extract, your miso soup may contain fish broth and your Kiwi Strawberry Snapple is colored with a dye from ground beetles. Perfect recycling. I see some aren’t taking this meatitude lying down. Bon appetit!

The word curry is a topic sure to rankle desis; the debunking of this colonial category is the rare cause that can unite desis of all origins and persuasions in a chorus of righteous indignation. And rightly so: The reduction of the subcontinent’s rich foodways to this one invented label has caused any number of ills, not least the viscous glop known as tikka masala, and more than a few upset stomachs.

But just because curry isn’t authentically Indian doesn’t mean it isn’t authentically… something. Today’s New York Times has a review of a new book called “Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors,” by Lizzie Collingham — a book I’m excited to read, despite the kind of horrible cover art that has Manish breaking out in hives. It invites us to follow as curry spread around the world, picking up bits and pieces from each culture like some syncretistic religion. Curry may or may not be Indian, but it sure is global:

Samoans make a Polynesian curry using canned fish and corned beef. … Lots of diners would balk at curried chicken Kiev, but not Ms. Collingham. … One of her goals, in tracing the evolution of curry and the global spread of Indian cuisine, is to pull the rug out from under the idea that India, or any other nation, ever had a cuisine that was not constantly in the process of assimilation and revision.

A San Franciscan named Nalin helped his roommate and six friends snarf down 100 hamburgers at one sitting in Vegas last Halloween. The greasy exploit is photoblogged here (via Boing Boing):

Throughout the weekend, Andy kept on saying: “We should go get a 100x100 at In-N-Out”… [The fast-food workers] were shocked. They said the biggest order they had before this was the 24x24… It’s one set of buns and ONE HUNDRED meat patties and ONE HUNDRED pieces of sweaty-oily cheese in between the buns. Clearly, the worst part of this experience wasn’t the meat… it was the sweaty cheese…

I think I ate about 20. I think Nalin ate about 20 as well (including the raw ones)… Number of people who barfed: 1… In-N-Out use to be one of my favorite things in the world. Now the thought of it makes me sick… [Link]

Beelzebub is the dæmon responsible for the cardinal sin of gluttony. Let’s hope Nalin isn’t Xtian Bro, as a mass moo assassin, you ain’t coming back a Hindu in your next life. And that next life might begin any day now — deadly sin is right. The good news is, you may be Takeru Kobayashi’s competitive eating nemesis.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised by this story. There’s nothing unusual about one tasty pair of buns surrounded by a hundred sausages and sweaty seas of cheese. That about sums up the college desi scene.

Bukhara is a tandoori place in New York popular with many, including Bill Clinton. I’ve had one amazing meal there and one passable.

Samsas stuck to the sides of a tandoor

Reflecting the influence of silk and spice trades, there are tastes of China and India everywhere. Every Bukharian menu offers a garlicky, chili-spiked Korean carrot salad, morkovcha koreyska, that is a legacy of Stalin’s mass deportations of ethnic Koreans from the far eastern Soviet Union to its western frontiers. At Tandoori Bukharian Bakery in Rego Park, a samsa - one of Asia’s many cousins of the Indian samosa - is deliciously spiked with cumin and baked against the walls of a clay-lined oven that Bukharians, like Indians, call a tandoor. [Link]

It probably got the samosa directly from Iran when the Persian empire absorbed the city. The restaurants sound a whole lot like hill stations in India:

A traditional Central Asian restaurant is little more than a stop for merchants and shepherds traveling the difficult road over the Pamir peaks; the ancient Persians called the region the roof of the world. These restaurants, called chai khanas, or tea houses, provided travelers in the most remote settlements with a place to warm themselves with pots of green tea… [Link]

There are Chinese influences on Bukharian food as well:

Farther north, bread and flour take over - especially lagman, hand-pulled noodles whose name evolved from the Chinese lo mein. Very popular among the Bukharians, lagman have been mastered by another Central Asian group, the Uighurs, who have a small community in New York… Uighurs are Muslim, and speak a language derived from Turkish… [Link]

This is so cute — a non-desi journalist tries paan for the first time, with all the variness of a wegetarian trying a Chicken McNugget.

A rush of unfamiliar flavors flooded my tongue. After a few moments, I got nervous and spit it into my napkin. While I hoped that I wouldn’t later be punished by days in my hotel bathroom, part of me regretted the fact that I hadn’t had the full paan experience…

“What’s its appeal?” I asked. He looked at me as if I were crazy, like I was asking him why people liked chocolate. “It’s good. Everybody likes it…”

The first taste was one of overwhelming sweetness—from the rose syrup—and then I got a tang of menthol. The contents were crunchy, and the rose petal scent was strong. As I continued to chew and as the sweetness subsided, I began to taste the licorice flavor of the fennel and the warm spiciness of the cardamom…

It was strange and jarring, kind of how I remember very dark chocolate or Marmite tasting when I was a kid. But it wasn’t just the taste, it was also the mix of unusual textures—the feeling of chewing some mulch, twigs and gooey gel wrapped up in a leaf… [Link]

You can’t really use a clichéd food metaphor when you’re already reviewing food, but you just know this tai-pan has a plan B:

… it woke up my tired nose and jaded taste buds, like a walk through a crowded market in India… [Link]

The subtitle is ‘The new hot treat from India.’ This paandemic is new, didn’tcha know?

Related posts: Boing Boing discovers paan, Candy Cain

Here at the Mutiny, we’re reduced to excerpting former guest bloggers on slow news days Because, y’know, they’re good. Spake Saheli on Snarkmarket about those who dislike Indian food:

It just reminds me too much of schoolchildren pointing and going, “eww, smelly Indian food.” It’s one thing if you don’t like the taste of cumin—you aren’t going to like Indian food. It’s another thing if you insist that it’s foul and anyone who likes it has issues. It’s not the idea that “Wow I really didn’t like this,” that I object to. It’s the implication that, therefore, neither will you, dear reader…

I hated fried bitter melon when I was a child, for instance, and now it’s one of my favorite foods. But I’d be insane to just dump a bowlful on your plate, you’d probably gag. I ate one at time, very slowly, over the course of many years until I liked it. And it’s a bad idea to force things on small children, b/c their sense of smell isn’t that well developed and is much more geared towards rejecting things. (Makes sense—keeps them from eating random stuff they don’t yet have the knowledge to reject.) [Link]

One of the bloggers adds that he dislikes Indo-Caribbean tamarind balls:

Tamarind balls were a particular sticking point. Our rejection of our parents’ delicacies was always taken as a full-on betrayal of our culturesMy Guyanese parents, aunts, and uncles all insisted they were an unparalleled taste treat; elder siblings and cousins sympathized with my disappointment. Our rejection of our parents’ delicacies was always taken as a full-on betrayal of our cultures, and met with sad diatribes about how Americanized we’d become.

Whenever we disdained one of her many Guyanese or British comfort foods, my mom would launch into wonderful stories about her childhood, how she loved tamarind balls, how she used to cry when her mother told her she couldn’t have any more of the sticky, spicy, sweet, sour snacks. And here we were, fêted with tamarind balls to our hearts’ content, and we refuse?! What could be wrong with us?… [Link]

I failed to realize until only a couple of weeks ago that there exists an entire underground sub-culture of curry lovers. These people often hold normal 9 to 5 jobs only to come home to start a nightly party in their mouths. Many of them aren't even [gasp] desi. Take for example the girls of Naughty Curry:

We at the Naughty Curry Kitchen do three (3) main things:

• We apply Indian spices and spicing techniques to 'ordinary' (for us) food, with an emphasis on being (mostly) simple, fast, and healthy or all of the above.
• We simplify or adapt traditional Indian recipes to fit our very special needs and our busy lifestyles.
• We experiment, ask lots of 'what if' questions, and tend to have lots of fun. And when something doesn't quite turn out, we laugh.

Be bold. Come play with us.

Hell, they had me at "be bold." Cooking of this nature is usually not talked about in mixed company. Old temple walls in India show people doing these kinds of things, but it is now taboo. The dishes they reveal are often downright subversive. Where else are you going to go to be taught how to prepare "G-spot mushrooms," or "Dirty Masala Rice?" But...what makes someone turn to this type of lifestyle? It's not natural. You don't just fall into it. There is usually a moment of truth that leads someone down this path of liberation:

As for me [Courtney Knettel], I grew up in the Midwest U.S. of A. with a standard Oscar Meyer-Hamburger Helper childhood. Want to step up the flavor of those green beans? We've got three primary options: butter, salt, and cheese (and for those folks with a dash of flair: garlic salt and Lawry's). Fortunately, my own imagination was expanded in my formative years under the influence of my Indian babysitter, who introduced me to what I called 'magic sprinkles.' Once I was 'spiced', I became isolated in my tastes. My family thought I was weird. (Actually, they still do.)...

By the time I finished my five-year college stint, I found most 'ordinary American' food to be, um, hard to swallow. Yet because I knew how to manifest my own spice-magic, I could quickly, easily and cheaply whip up my own sensational Indian-esque spin to my food. What's more, I was increasingly attuned to a healthy way of eating, and spices, I quickly discovered, could transform vegetables into memorable experiences. At some point, I evolved into partaking of junk food, cheese and even meat only on occasion, and I don't even miss it. Ergo, the spicing fixation that had once branded me a weirdo now infuses my life in ways that even I hadn't imagined. [Link]

What might have happened if Columbus got it right…

This next post is going to be difficult for people to believe. It was difficult for me. The very fact that I am writing this post may put my life in danger. Many things that I do for our readers puts me in danger though, so that is okay. Somewhere in the heart of Oregon lies a secret society restaurant. Witness:

Anyone who is familiar with secret societies such as the Freemasons, Priory of Scion, Knights Templar or has read Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code will be familiar with the concept of sub rosa. What goes on here, stays here.

The Sub Rosa restaurant began in a cottage on our property that was once the caretakers quarters for a 90 acre orchard here in Dundee. It remains primarily a workshop for Talisman Stoneworks, a stone carving studio though we do whip up some tasty meals from time to time.

During the day when the workshop is humming, you can drop in from noon on for a bowl of spicy soup; an onion tart; some tasty dessert; a beer or a stiff shot of grappa. Dust flies. Music pulses. Food smells waft into the air creating a exotic blend of workshop meets hole-in-the wall cafe meets underground radio station and WiFi hotspot.

At night - well, the ‘restaurant’ is rarely open. This is an invitation only gig. If you know us or know someone who knows us - you’re in. Otherwise you just get to read about us on this web site.

I just got the shivers. It is actually kind of sadistic what these people do. They prepare virtual menus that will bring tears to your eyes, and perhaps affect your nether regions with the skills of the Merovingian. Your tongue is not allowed to taste however:

You can download recipes and music and order a t-shirt but that’s about it. We’re more a state-of-mind than an actual place to eat.

Then why, dear God why, did they send the following menu/recipes into my inbox? This is beyond even my considerable culinary skills.

Thanksgiving Dinner:
Appetizer: Curried Nuts
Greens: Gujarat Green Beans
Starch: Horseradish Mashed Potatoes
Curried Yams with coconut milk
Turkey: Cumin and Coriander spice rub
Condiments: Cranberry Chutney
Cucumber Raita
Stuffing: With raisins, cinnamon, almonds, celery and of course, bread
Dessert: Chiffon Pumpkin Pie with crystallized ginger galore
Garam Masala - Classic Indian spice mixture

It is getting out of hand. Not that I am complaining of course, but I think the Western media has finally caught on to Diwali mania. And in perfect IST fashion, the New York Times chimes in with their addition to the Diwali-themed articles, focusing on one of the most important facets of the Diwali holiday: mithai (Indian sweets). Yeah, many first and second geners claim to not like them, complaining of their over-sweetness or their unnatural colors. And then what is the deal with that silver stuff that covers so many of them (FYI it is actually real silver). The article, aptly titled “Festival of Lights, Parade of Sweets,” does a good job of getting into the nitty gritty of the role of mithai in Diwali and Eid and in South Asian society in general.

This week, in a coincidence of calendars, Hindus and Muslims from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are celebrating the most joyous holidays of the year. Hindus observe the festival of lights, Diwali, or Deepavali, which ushers in the new year; Muslims finish the holy month of Ramadan with Id al-Fitr, which signals the end of the monthlong daytime fast and a return to the sweetness of daily life. The two holidays, Hindus and Muslims here say, are utterly soaked in sugar. “You cannot go to anyone’s house at this time of year without a quarter-pound of something sweet,” says Padma Dasgupta, a writer in Jericho, N.Y.

Related post: Diwali Updates: Diwali Parking, India 2.0, Congressional Legislation, Sparklers, and Diwali Schlock Contest!

The verdict was unanimous;’twas the best meetup EVER. Photographic evidence of that here.

October 30th, 2005, San Francisco: four current SM bloggers and six Bay Area mutineers met at North Beach’s yummy, caffeinated, iconic, no-worries-no-matter-HOW-long-we-stayed Caffe Greco and didn’t leave for six hours. Well, it was SEVEN for a certain guest blogger who forgot that daylight savings time commenced at 2, on Sunday. ;) Hey—that’s what she gets for being so unbrown, i.e. on time. Had she been the standard I.S.T.-mandated hour late, she still would’ve been on time, except this time, with the rest of us. ;)

I attempted to live-blog the merriment, like I did the last time it was held in San Francisco; sadly, an unexpected lack of wireless prevented that. Forgive me for making you wait 48 hours? :)

Unpolished transcript, after the jump…

Even as some people are finding more and more tasks to outsource to the subcontinent, a few wily Brits are bucking the trend:

Beyond the four-mile-long driveway, and the shaded path named “Lady’s Walk” and the soft fields of purple rhododendron and grazing Holstein cows, Jonathan Jones walked among waist-high rows of rich green plants. With loving precision, he plucked off two perfect green leaves and a bud and held them proudly in his hand.

“English tea should be grown on English soil,” he said, running his fingers over what he called a victory for horticulture and also for British culture: the first commercial crop of tea ever grown in this tea-mad nation.  [link]

Did you miss Blog Quake Day? Don’t feel bad— the fiercely righteous Samia Khan has come to your rescue, with an EASY way to give. She lovingly spammed ;) my GMail with the following invite, which I was initially thrilled, then jealous to get:

Please join us for an evening of Dining and Giving
Tuesday, November 8, 2005 at dinner time
Heritage India
1337 Connecticut Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20009
202-331-1414

You see, I am taking the red-eye on Tuesday, which means I will arrive in D.C. about 12 hours after this starts. I know I’m a rusted cynic, but I think dinner will be over by then. So yes, I’m envious of all of you who have the opportunity to eat at the BEST Indian restaurant in the city, for a cause that is dear to my heart.

Mimi’s American Bistro and Heritage India have graciously agreed to donate 15 % of your tab towards the South Asia Earthquake Relief Effort. The money will go to the Association of Pakistani Physicians of North America (APPNA). While APPNA has already contributed to ground efforts, the need for financial contribution continues to grow as winter approaches and logistics become more difficult. Thousands of Pakistanis are still without shelter and the threat of disease is on the rise. Show your generosity and compassion for the survivors of this devastating natural disaster by dining at one of these charitable Dupont Circle restaurants.

When you dine, please mention the cause when you make the reservation or at the very beginning of your meal.

Sheesh, I’ll eat at Heritage India with no reason or excuse, but to think that my blissing out over their legendary, just-like-Bukhara-at-the-Maurya-in-Delhi’s Ma ki Dal might benefit a human who suffered a quake in the very area most of the menu was inspired by? It’s like my passionate heart and delighted stomach would be picking out Linens ‘N Things. ;)

Seriously, if you are in town, go. Eat yummy food. It counts as giving (what an easy way to do so!). And then thank the Mutiny for being your social planner. :D

p.s. I know I only posted info about Heritage India, even though Mimi’s American Bistro at 21st and P st is generous enough to also participate, but Heritage India just felt more apposite. Of course, I’m not biased. :D

I seem to be the Mutiny’s resident “protest publicist”, so why should today be any different? Join the BJP tomorrow (today?) in Delhi as they take to the streets to express their outrage over the latest issue to grip India (Thanks, Usamidalla):

Harsh Vardhan, a leader of the opposition Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) in New Delhi, accused traders of limiting onion sales to profit from Dussehra and Deepawali festivals. Onion are an important ingredient in almost everything eaten during both festivals. “An artificial scarcity of onion has been created by traders in connivance with the governing Congress party government,” the Press Trust of India quoted Mr Vardhan as saying.

I wish I could be more sympathetic, but as long-time HERstorians are aware, I HATE ONIONS. I pick them out of my food, no matter how microscopically my mother thinks she’s chopping them; this is usually a futile endeavor though, since they inevitably leave their odious taste among the innocent vendaka and pavaka (read: bhindi and karela) who surely deserve better than such a slimy compatriot. So yeah. I won’t be at the protest. ;)

Apparently, I should take the many-layered vegetable more seriously. Not only can it make you cry if you’re chopping it, it can make you cry as it gives YOU the chop:

Onion shortages in India were responsible for bringing down BJP governments in New Delhi and Rajasthan states in 1998.

Amazing.

In several parts of India, onions were trading at double the price of the previous week.

Obviously, in solidarity with her erstwhile countrymen, my mother should refrain from using ooly in her legendary cooking when I go home for almost two weeks on Thursday. It’s the right thing to do, no? ;)

If you had spent  yesterday afternoon strolling through sunsoaked downtown Sonoma, a nerve center of California wine country, you might have had your Mediterranean reverie broken by an extremely conspicuous member of desi America: one blue-silk-clad, bejewelled and beflowered Bharat Natyam dancer, desperately trying to find the stage of the Kathmandu Fall Festival.  I can assure you I did not blend in. This is a good thing, because the woman who finally helped us had never heard of Depot Park by name, but took one look at me and remembered that “there’s some kind of colorful festival in that park behind us? That must be what you’re looking for.” 

After the set, I looked around the stage for the usual cooler full of water bottles, and was instead greeted by a vision of wine. The usual festival array of Tibetan flags and bells  mixed with bottles and glasses  everywhere, the regular sound of corks popping interlacing with the flute and mrdangam music. Despite booths of frying samosas, the smell of vintage was stronger. Since my family doesn’t drink, we decided to complete the evening with a visit to the video store, and got ourselves the documentary Mondovino. If you’re at all interested in trade, globalization, agriculture, mercantile tradition, France, Italy, Northern California, or, of course, wine, I highly recommend it, though it is a bit long. It’s a film squarely set in Europe and the Americas, featuring titans like the Mondavi family, the ancient Florentine clans Frescobaldi and Antonieri, and a charming elderly Bordeaux gentleman named Hubert de Montille who can’t stand “monolithic thinking.”

It prominently features a travelling consultant, “the flying winemaker,” who, along with Maryland critic Robert Parker, makes and breaks wines. Michel Rolland caught my attention with a throwaway line when he was pointing out the spread of his clientele on a map,

 “Hungary, Italy, France, Argentinia, Chile, Mexico, The United States, and oh—I forgot one over here—India!”

India?! That’s right, India. The October 17 issue of India Today has a three page spread that, at first glance,  doesn’t bode well for desi oenophilic journalism—even I know that “Brewing the Indian Dream,” is a headline directed at the wrong beverage. But what growth the article reveals within!

Meetup reminder: Come by Arzan’s place for a home-cooked Parsi lunch. Arzan lives in the Clinton Hill ‘hood in Brooklyn by the Manhattan Bridge. We’re meeting Sunday, Oct. 16 at 12:30 pm.

Sunday afternoon is traditionally the time when every Parsi household in the world has dhansak. It’s a dal and rice dish. Brown rice with a masala daal which has a lot of different ingredients. It’s accompanied by mutton kebabs and chilled beer.

Please RSVP [disabled] for directions, because his living room space is finite. First come, first served. Let him know whether you’re vegetarian.

Previous post here.

In 1810, Sake Dean Mahomed opened the Hindoostane Coffee House in central London. This was the UK’s first curry house, and it was an idea ahead of its time.

In 1810 he opened the Hindoostane Coffee House serving Hookha with real Chilm tobacco and Indian-style dishes. The premises is now a building called Carlton House.

Mr Mahomed’s plan had been to serve “Indianised” British food which would appeal to the Indian aristocracy in London as well as British people who had returned from India, he said.

“The Indian aristocracy however would not come out to eat in the restaurant because they had chefs at home cooking more authentic food - it was just not a big enough draw to come out.” [Link]

Unable to draw either brown or white diners, he was forced to declare bankruptcy two years later in 1812.

While his restaurant was a bust, Sake Dean Mohamed recovered and went on to further success. He opened up a “health resort” (or sorts) in Brighton, specializing in “shampooing” — steam room massage.

He received the ultimate accolade by being appointed Shampooing Surgeon to both George IV and William IV. [Link]

Mohamed seems to have been quite a colorful character. He joined the East India Company Army at 11, and rose all the way to the rank of captain. He served as a “trainee surgeon” although other accounts also indicate that he fought in a series of campaigns.

He emigrated to Ireland in 1786, when he was 25. There he wrote his first book, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, making him the first Indian to have a book published in English. He also “ran away with” an Irish woman who became his wife, Jane Mahomet.

His second book, published in 1820, was called “Shampooing; or benefits resulting from the use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath” and went into 3 editions. “He even had poems written in his honour.”

Last week’s first ever British Curry Awards ceremony took place in a typically desi fashion - over dinner, with the food served late. Curry is big business in the UK, with restaurants serving 2.5 million customers a week and grossing £3.2 billion a year. The British invaded India in the 19th century with gunpowder, now we have … transformed whole swathes of British society with curry powder

The event was similarly a big deal, with 1,200 people in attendance in the Ballroom of London’s swanky Grosvenor House Hotel. It was televised to 126 countries around the world and no less a personage than Tony Blair sent a message of support.

The industry refers to itself as “Curry” or “Spice” and not as “Indian food” because 95% of the restaurants are owned by Bangladeshis. In fact, the awards ceremony was organized by the “Guild of Bangladeshi Restaurateurs.”

In a swaggering speech, Sir Gulam Noon (a leader in the ready made meals industry) said:

“The British invaded India in the 19th century with gunpowder, now we have come back and a century later landed in the UK and transformed whole swathes of British society with curry powder. Without the success of the curry restaurant I could not have built my business to what it is today. I have ridden on the back of your achievements.” In a slight exaggeration, Noon urged his audience to celebrate the vibrancy of their business tonight but not to forget to open for business tomorrow evening on time otherwise, as he claimed, half the British population would be starving. [Link]

So, what do you serve over a thousand chefs and food entrepreneurs for dinner? Madhu’s of Southall “brought out a series of dishes many in the room have established as British culinary favourites:”

chicken tikka; masala fried tilapia flown in from Lake Victoria in Kenya, that other bastion of the British Empire; chicken tikka masala; rogan josh; delicious aloo ravia, small aubergines stewed with new potatoes; vegetable biriani and terrific tandoori naan bread. [Link]

The awards for the night went to:

Upcoming Sepia meetups:

Toronto, Sunday, Oct. 2, 6 pm. I’ll be in Toronto this weekend — let’s do a meetup at Bombay Bhel (1411 Gerrard St. E.) I’d also appreciate hearing about desi arts events, great food and creative ‘hoods to check out. You can comment or email me here. Toronto represent!

Brooklyn, Sunday, Oct. 16, 12:30 pm. Mutineer / architect Arzan has generously offered to introduce y’all to the pleasures of Parsi food. Please RSVP via email [disabled] (mandatory, since only ~20 people fit in his living room):

A crowd of 10-12 people would be ideal… Sunday afternoon is traditionally the time when every Parsi household in the world has dhansak. It’s a dal and rice dish. Brown rice with a masala daal which has a lot of different ingredients. It’s accompanied by mutton kebabs and chilled beer. In fact this is one of the few Parsi traditions followed religiously anywhere and everywhere in the world…

Dhansak can be both veg and non-veg. I generally always make both…..I put the meat in last, thus I can have a veg dal and a non veg daal. Same with the kebabs…..will have the veg variety.

Thanks, Arzan!

The 3HO group of Sikh converts in the U.S. has made a small fortune on health food (thanks, commenters). Now, with real corn!

So the ginger asked the almond, “Could you make me a snack?” and the almond said, “Kazam! You’re a snack.”

What did the peanut say to the cashew? Gesundheit! [Link]

Waheguru ji ka khalsa, waheguru ji ki granola bar? I gotta say, their sense of humor is authentically desi. Let’s not forget Yogi Tea, which tells us you don’t have to work your way into exotique, you can just drink it (via Tilo). On camelback in front of the Taj, apparently.

Exotic Teas: Savor the enchanting flavor and sweet aroma of spices from around the world… [Link]

Peace Cereal, a million dollar biz, pitches nirvana via breakfast cereal. It’s a Ben & Jerinder’s business model:

Peace Cereal has promoted the transformative power of peace by donating 10% of our profits to peace building organizations, resulting in more than $1 million in donations. [Link]

They even have a warm and fuzzy founder story like the one on every package of Mrs. Fields. When Yogi Bhajan baked his first batch of authentic guru cookies…

In 1969 Yogi Bhajan began teaching Kundalini Yoga in America, sharing the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda and healthy living that he had mastered in India. After each class he would serve his students a special spice tea based upon this healing science, which they affectionately named Yogi Tea… Golden Temple (bulk granolas), Peace Cereal (packaged cereals), Wha Guru Chew (candy bars), Herbal Gems (capsulated herb formulas), Sunshine (body care products) and Soothing Touch (professional massage products), were some of the companies… [Link]

Other parts of their empire: Ancient Healing Ways, Yogi Botanicals.

The whole thing strikes me as a cross between the friars who support themselves with wine, fruitcake and Web design and the same consumer couture which gags my bullshit sensor on Solano Ave. I’m more impressed with their business savvy. At least they have a sense of humor about it.

Related posts: one, two, three

I believe I lead a call for more sexy sepia men on the Mutiny, but now that a reader sent in some pics, (thanks Ananya) I’m not sure what to think. (mental note: research loopholes and plausible deniability)

Over on the right, we have John Abraham, the 6’1”, half-Keralite/half-Parsi, 1999 winner of Gladrags Manhunt India. Let me hasten to add that he’s now fast becoming an established Ahctor with roles in Dhoom, Water, Viruddh and the soon-to-be released Baabul, among others. The last two with none other than the Daddy-O of Hindi cinema, his excellency Amitabh Bachchan.

As an avowed vegetarian, Abraham recently posed for a PETA India campaign to release caged birds, (see the sexy results below), but it’s this latest poster promoting vegetarianism that caught our tipster’s eye. “Abraham appears dressed in green onions, chilies and what looks like green peas,” s/he succinctly writes. Am I the only one rather turned off by this pic? I dunno, but a scallion grass skirt covering a man’s tender parts entirely makes me lose my appetite. For anything. And what’s with that highly ridiculous crown of chilies? Is this a pun on hotness?

“I’m against cruelty of any kind. That’s why I’m associated with PETA and work against cruelty to animals. Though I’m not the moral police, I’d like people to be considerate to other living beings,” he says. [link]

Sure, sure, but what about cruelty to men, eh? I think forcing a man to wear vegetables surely counts in that category.

I feel like typing “Happy Ganesh Utsav”, but I’m 99.9% certain that’s incorrect, inapposite and just plain inane. Surely I will suffer a beat-down for my cheekiness; I implore you to bear in mind (while you are paddling me) that I’m just a simple Christian girl from Coconut land/God’s own country who has no idea what this snack even IS. ;)

It’s well-established that I’m reading whenever I’m on the metro and half the time I’m doing that, I’m actually scanning the articles for sepia-tinted stories which I can bring you here. :) Normally, I find brown down ‘round the front page; yesterday, I was slightly surprised to see that my “local” paper’s Food section was where the mutiny was at. Et voila, an article by Priya Phadke to coincide with a certain deity’s partay. I’ve seen hundreds of recipes in WaPo, but this is the first desi one that I’ve noticed.

Priya is the assistant art director for The Post’s Sunday Source, a.k.a. the section I love most and thus save for Georgetown, Dean and Deluca and cappuccino-soaked Sunday afternoons. Here’s what our dear artiste had to say about what you guys are going to be making (and then sending to North Dakota, please. Thanks!):

In the three years since I moved to the United States from Mumbai, as Bombay is now called, I get most homesick during festive seasons. My maternal grandmother nani would make comfort food, and her karanjees are what I miss most.

Karenjees are dough stuffed with soft, shredded coconut that is flavored with cardamom, saffron, sugar and Gulkand, a rose petal jam that lends a distinctive flavor and fragrance and sets my nani’s karanjees apart from all others.

I must have something to read near me at all times. On those rare occasions when I have “free time”, before I leave the house, I make sure I have at least a magazine (and my moleskine, and my camera and…) with me, so that I’ll be able to read. Life insists on making us pause unexpectedly when we’d rather be achieving, mischief-making or just crossing another item off of our to-do lists; the only reason hyperactive me doesn’t mind this immutable fact is because it means I get to read.

When I was a child, if I couldn’t find the newspaper, I’d read the back (or side) of the cereal box while crunching away on Rice Krispies. I still do this. I’ll read anything, if I’m desperate enough. When I found a job in a building that sits on top of a metro stop, I was overjoyed. The Washington Post got a phone call and I got a subscription to read during my 16-minute commute, each way. Sometimes, I can’t help myself, I start reading the minute I’m out my front door, on the block-and-a-half walk to the subway (yes, I am aware of how lucky I am to live next to and work on top of public transportation…if you want to gnash your teeth even harder out of envy, know this: home and work are on the SAME metro line. No transferring for me, no siree Babu).

Speaking of having to pause when I’d rather be “achieving”, Wednesdays are for staff meetings. Over the last few weeks, it’s become a tradition to get overpriced yuppie beverages in preparation for such events. Unfortunately for indie-coffee shop lovin’ me, there are no less than four Starbucks within a half-mile radius, combined with three Cosi and not one damned other choice in sight. While I go out of my way to avoid the mer-mascotted former, the latter (RIP: x and o) isn’t even worth that effort, since their coffee tastes like punishment for wasting money.

Truthfully, some of the best coffee I’ve had on the right coast came from my old bodega in midtown, on 8th avenue in the theater district. I’d be tickled to the point of swooning right now if I could still hand the smiling, wordless Korean guy who owned the place (and whom I adored) a single dollar for a cup that would magically never spill though it was placed in a humble little paper bag vs in one of those fancy, carefully molded egg-carton-y drink holders. That freshly brewed, unpretentious elixir was brightened with my choice of parmalat milks (which were nestled in the ice of the salad bar) and sweetened with an open pot of sugar (which offered a communal spoon); there were no sleek nissan flasks or individual packets of white dust which give lab rats cancer, nor were there little shakers for cinnamon, nutmeg and pixiedust. THAT coffee tasted like love, and it was served in an iconic container which became even more famous when SJP caressed it during every other ep of SATC. I’m 225 miles from THAT perfection, hours away from a city that doesn’t frown at me when I insist on ordering with quaint adjectives like small, medium, large. Sigh.

The only thing of interest that I learned in the comments of this entry is that SM comment leaver DesiDancer likes food.  Well so do I.  The Village Voice reports on a fruit that I am ashamed to admit I have never tried.  It is the “Queen of fruits,” the Mangosteen:

Last month, after a long discussion with his father, my friend gave up on his latest business idea: Importing mangosteens into America. The plan was to petition the government, build a greenhouse, and then get rich off of this rare South Asian fruit, which apparently tastes like ice cream and causes perfectly normal people to burst into tears. R.W. Apple wrote in The New York Times: “I can no more describe mangosteens than explain why I love my wife and children.”

Good God.  What hole have I been living in?  I must have this fruit, I simply must.

Recently, I went to Chinatown to find this dark, purple treat, but the few people who had heard of it told me to stop looking. Mangosteen—widely considered the “queen of all fruit”—carries too many flies to be permitted in the U.S. Because durian, the so-called “king,” was hanging from nearly every fruit stand on East Broadway, I bought one instead. It was $8 and about the size of my head—plus spikes. While mangosteens are said to chill the body, durians are 900-calories a piece and so creamy that last year when a man in Thailand ate four in a row, he passed out and died. The Thai Ministry of Public Health then issued a warning against excessive durian consumption.

Durian looks totally freakish to me.  It’s not surprising that it has been described as such:

We cracked open the skin with a steak knife. Inside there were five red seeds, surrounded by doughy goo. I thought it resembled a dead chicken, but my friends had other ideas: “porcelain fetus,” “alien baby,” “dinosaur egg,” “anonymous shit on sidewalk.” The pulp tasted burnt, warm and sweet, like onion custard, and got more syrupy the closer it was to the seeds. One friend loved it: “Durian is sublime,” she wrote me in an email later that night, “I want to inflict it on people.”

May’s issue of the journal Tissue Engineering featured a report (paid subscription required) that could potentially change the lives of Hindus, Jains, and Vegetarians everywhere.  The report titled, “Commentary: In Vitro-Cultured Meat Production,” by  Edelman et. al. looks at artificially produced, real meat:

Most edible animal meat is made of skeletal muscle tissue. The idea that skeletal muscle tissue-engineering techniques could be applied to produce edible meat dates back at least 70 years, but has been seriously pursued by only three groups of researchers. Their efforts can be divided roughly into scaffold-based and self-organizing techniques. 

In scaffold-based techniques, embryonic myoblasts or adult skeletal muscle satellite cells are proliferated, attached to a scaffold or carrier such as a collagen meshwork meshwork or microcarrier beads, and then perfused with a culture medium in a stationary or rotating bioreactor. By introducing a variety of environmental cues, these cells fuse into myotubes, which can then differentiate into myofibers. The resulting myofibers may then be harvested, cooked, and consumed as meat. van Eelen, van Kooten, and Westerhof hold a Dutch patent for this general approach to producing cultured meat. However, Catts and Zurr appear to have been the first to have actually produced meat by this method.

A scaffold-based technique may be appropriate for producing processed (ground, boneless) meats, such as hamburger or sausage. But it is not suitable for producing highly structured meats such as steaks. To produce these, one would need a more ambitious approach, creating structured muscle tissue as self-organizing constructs or proliferating existing muscle tissue in vitro.

Wicked!  It’s like Franken-food.  Oh come on.  You guys are curious to see what it tastes like too.  The Guardian has more:

According to researchers, meat grown in laboratories would be more environmentally friendly and could be tailored to be healthier than farm-reared meat by controlling its nutrient content and screening it for food-borne diseases.

Vegetarians might also be tempted because the cells needed to grow chunks of meat can be taken without harming the donor animal.

Experiments for NASA, the US space agency, have already shown that morsels of edible fish can be grown in petri dishes, though no one has yet eaten the food.

Mr Matheny [of the University of Maryland] and his colleagues have taken the prospect of “cultured meat” a step further by working out how to produce it on an industrial scale. They envisage muscle cells growing on huge sheets that would be regularly stretched to exercise the cells as they grow. Once enough cells had grown, they would be scraped off and shaped into processed meat products such as chicken nuggets.

The first thing I’ve always noticed is how she feels to my touch.  Even if left out all day, there is some warmth left at her core that rises up through my fingertips.  A person’s true beauty is on the inside and despite the fact that I always take time to admire the texture and taste of her outer shell, every crease and fold and hard bit, it is what’s inside that I think about with the greatest anticipation.  In there, a secret garden she hides.  And the way she smells…mmmm mmm mmmm.  It can make you hop right out of bed in the morning.  Is there any better way to break-fast?  Even in college I could always count on her at the end of the night when nothing else would fill me up, and the partying just wasn’t fun anymore.  I’m not the only one that lusts after her though.  True beauty is easily recognized and doggedly pursued.  The folks at The 92nd Street Y (thanks to the anonymous tipster) not only recognized her, but delved into her past to uncover the things even I didn’t know:

…we thought it might be time to pay tribute to the humble samosa.

The deep-fried, fist-sized triangular pastry is traditionally filled with either spicy potatoes or ground lamb and is India’s great contribution to the world of fast food. Traditional samosas come in all sorts of variations; in the Punjab they’re smaller and more akin to Western potato puffs, while in southern India wrappers are traditionally made from Lentil flour. There’s samosa chaat—where samosas are doused in chickpea curry or yogurts and chutneys to make for a quick, messy meal on the go—and regional variations like Bengali dessert samosas filled with rosewater or Myanmar’s samosas, which substitute wonton wrappers for the thicker shells used in India.

But the samosa is also the product of a thousand years of culinary heritage. Variants of this uniquely Indian food can be found everywhere from Cape Town to Singapore to Tashkent to Tel Aviv. A samosa/samoosa/samsa/sambusek/burek world tour (with recipes) after the jump.

Food historians have established, however, that the samosa originated not in India, but in Persia. The sanbusaj, originally a Persian term for any stuffed, savory pastry or dumpling, started showing up in Persian, Arab and Turkish literature starting in the 9th century, when poet Ishaq ibn Ibrahim-al-Mausili wrote verse praising sanbusaj.

Wow.  I am truly humbled to follow in the footsteps of the poet Ibrahim-al-Mausili.  I am a blue-collar samosa eater.  I don’t need the finest green and brown chutneys.  Just give me a little bit of ketchup and you’ll shut me right up.  That’s right, I like to go slumming.  I also refuse to see any movie at a theater longer than two hours unless there is an intermission with warm samosas in the lobby.  I LOVED Lord of the Rings, but it was so long that every time Gollum said “my precious,” I kept thinking about samosas.  My mom makes them the best.  Cashews and tofu sometimes.

The giant, shiny flying phallus of American cultural export parks its hairy business end in Bombay next year (via Desi Flavor):

The first Planet Hollywood will open in Mumbai in 2006 and muscular superstars Sly Stallone and Bruce Willis will be flying down for the occasion… Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Goa and Hyderabad [are] the destinations of choice. [Link]

Selling cowburgers and crappy food: it’s the ideal business plan for India  Actually, people are just as Hollystruck as Bollystruck, and you’ll notice they send out the action stars to overseas destinations — Rambo and Die Hard, with their limited dialogue, are amenable to cheap translation. Indian restaurants have decked themselves in Bollywood memorabilia for ages. And if there’s one culture that has an unironic affinity for kitsch…

The Grey Lady lets us know that desis have crossed a new frontier, with desi cooks infiltrating older ethnic food establishments in different parts of New York:

Exhibit A: the egg cream. For New Yorkers of a certain age, this was the nectar of a Jewish neighborhood, and Gem Spa was the drink’s sacred temple, certified as such by magazines and travel writers. Gem Spa is still there, still turning out egg creams at its narrow patch of a soda fountain in the East Village. But the person who owns the store and taught the staff to make this curious concoction of seltzer, milk and chocolate syrup is Ray Patel, a 62-year-old immigrant from Gujarat state in India.

He learned the recipe, including the secret stirring motions that create a frothy head resembling beaten egg whites, from the previous owner (Italian), who learned it from the old owner (Jewish).

“People try to learn new things in a land of opportunity,” is Mr. Patel’s elegant explanation for how an Indian came to make a drink that is considered exotic west of the Hudson River, let alone in Gujarat.

I’ll bet they wrote the same article 30 years ago when the guy behind the counter was Italian. Gujarat is now as exotic as Sicily used to be, so the story becomes interesting enough to retell. What they miss is how little has changed. The owner may be a bit darker, but he’s still named Ray.*

However, don’t look to Ray to spice up the old standards. Ray’s probably a purist,  but somewhere there is a young Jewish foodie who’s hybridizing the old Egg Creams with desi flavors. Cultural appropriation goes both ways.

Did you ever daydream about starring in a movie as an archeologist who ferrets out exotic treasures, the origins of which have been lost in the mists of antiquity? Well, get over it. Hollywood still has no idea how to cast brown people as anything other than terrorists, doctors, and occasionally taxi drivers or eaters of monkey brains. They’re not yet ready to make an Indian ANNA Jones movie, “M.Night” notwithstanding.

Instead, I offer you a far geekier and more glorious pursuit! The BBC and OED have teamed up to find the earliest verifiable usage of words from the unimaginatively titled “BBC Wordhunt appeal list” for the next version of the OED. If you can beat their earliest recorded usage (you need some form of dated evidence) your contribution might be featured as part of a new BBC2 TV series. How’s that for 15 minutes of fame?

Two of the fifty words on their list (4%!) are words of BritAsian origin:

balti
Wanted: printed evidence before 1984; information on the word’s origin

Are you one of Britain’s original curry kings or queens? If so, did you cook or serve Britain or the world’s first balti — or do you know who did? Knocking around at the back of the kitchen drawer do you have an old takeaway menu with a balti on it from before 1984?

The winter issue of Curry Magazine (1984) contains the first printed evidence the OED has for ‘balti’. But where the term comes from (India, Pakistan — perhaps Baltistan) remains something of a mystery at present. They say it first appeared in the Birmingham area in the early 80s. But is there any printed evidence for the term earlier, and can the origin be confirmed?

See the OED entry for balti

tikka masala
Wanted: printed evidence before 1975

Restaurant menus and reviews start to show chicken tikka masala from 1975, according to the latest research from the OED. Despite the dish’s claim to be a great British national dish, the first recorded evidence comes from America. Something wrong here? Or not?

For years those silly Mentos commercials ruled the television airways as the most annoying and obnoxious commercials ever. They’d plant themselves in your head while some ad exec somewhere smiled diabolically. Recently that honor was emphatically stolen by Fanta softdrink and its stupid television commercials where a bunch of Fem-bot looking women ask you (or shout at you) “Don’t-cha Wanta Fanta, Don’t-cha Wanta Fanta…” until you break down and submit to their will, hoping that it hurts so good. Well SiliconIndia.com has this headline today: U.S. FDA rejects Indian consignment.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) has rejected consignments of MNCs Coca-Cola India, Hindustan Lever, Procter & Gamble and Britannia from India on the grounds that they are ‘unsafe’ or not conforming to U.S. laws.

According to information sourced from the USFDA, a shipment of Fanta sent by Coca-Cola India from Mumbai to the U.S. was rejected on May 19 on the grounds that it contained ‘unsafe color’. The regulator said the ‘article appears to be, or to bear or contain a color additive which is unsafe’. Coca-Cola and Pepsi have been under fire in India for allegedly allowing higher pesticide content than permitted internationally.

Hmmm. I wonder if that unsafe color was yellow#5. Seems like the Fantanas evil plot has been thwarted and I shall never taste Lol…errr, I mean “Pineapple” on my lips. There were other items rejected by the USFDA as well. This one REALLY caught my eye:

A shipment of “decongestant vaporizing ointment” sent by the Indian subsidiary of U.S. FMCG major Procter & Gamble was also rejected by the USFDA on May 25 on multiple grounds including the grounds that “the article appears to be a new drug without an approved new drug application” and “the article appears to be a non-prescription drug and fails to bear the established name of each inactive ingredient…”

Come on. By a show of hands now, how many of you got rubbed down with some sort of ointment from India when you were a kid, that was supposed to cure the area in question whether you had a cough or a broken leg? The USFDA doesn’t know what it is talking about.

As snarky desis, we use mirchi constantly, in both our writing and our food. However, there is a human face to all this heat:

In temperatures of over 45 degrees, 80 year-old Rajima sits under an asbestos roof preparing chillies for export to Britain.

For eight hours at a stretch her aching fingers pluck the stalks from the red chilli pods, releasing a pungent dust that fills her nose and throat making her cough and sneeze.

For this, she earns 30 rupees, the equivalent of 40 pence, or less than a third of the cost of a small jar of chilli powder in a British supermarket. Rajima and her 50 co-workers are the hidden face of India's spice trade. [BBC]

Think about the effects to Rajima's health from all of this exposure to pepper. Pepper farmers and processors go through alot and earn very little:

Watching his produce weighed at Warangal market, one farmer complains that the 800 rupees he's getting for each 40 kilo sack is too little to cover the growing costs.

"I took huge loans for agricultural investment - mostly pesticides," he says. "Now there will be no alternative for me but to commit suicide". [BBC]

Furthermore, demand for pepper is down, due to a recent food scare concerning a food coloring carcinogenic additive. Bad weather has spoiled much of the Indian pepper crop, causing desi farmers to lose business to those in other countries. It's a rough life for farmers from Andhra Pradesh.

According to state records, 4,500 farmers have killed themselves in the past seven years, driven to despair by poor harvests and financial worries, and that figure would be far higher if other family members were included.
The epidemic of suicide started with cotton farmers but it is now spread to spice growers. Ironically, most die by swallowing the pesticides that have helped get them into debt.[BBC]

The Los Angeles Times introduces chaat to the mainstream, and offers up some recipes. Give them a try, and then lament the fact that it’s still nowhere near as good as momma used to make:
• Bhel puri
• Pav bhaji
• Lamb frankie
• Tamarind and date chutney
• Green chutney

How two brothers from Delhi went from serving H-addled clubgoers to serving coke-addled agents:

The L.A. segment of their story began when the newly arrived Sean G, now a fit, head-shaven 34-year-old, was working as a parking attendant at Tower Video on Sunset. A regular customer often chatted with him. Sean G enjoyed the talks but was curious why this young man always drew a crowd. He soon realized he’d been talking to Johnny Depp, who got him a job in the cashier’s booth at the Viper Room, which Depp owned at the time. The idea of Sean G greeting habitues of the Viper Room has a certain Candide-like charm. He is hardly the image of perdition. He runs upwards of ten miles a day, has never been late for a job or called in sick. Even the way he came to work at Barney Greengrass is based on the desire for self-improvement that night workers occasionally flirt with. “I should do something with my days,” Sean G remembers thinking. “I should learn something.” A Viper Room barman brought him to the deli and showed him the ropes. “I never ate this food,” Sean G says. “I didn’t know what a bagel was, or nova, or cream cheese.” He got his brother a job there, too. [Los Angeles Magazine]

The last time I was subjected to the water-boarding called looking for a Manhattan apartment, I cast a covetous eye on a beautiful midtown loft. This place had a sunny balcony facing the art deco fantasy of the Chrysler Building, and a motormouth roommate who talked like she was on cocaine. I’d almost convinced myself I could handle the roommate, but one thing she said stuck sourly in my head.

She asked me whether I’d be cooking. ‘I can’t stand that curry smell,’ she said.

Let’s put that trope out of its British Raj-induced misery. Indian dishes as a whole are not called curry. They’re called sabzi or khana in Hindi, or just plain Indian food. In Punjabi cooking, curry is one specific dish: a thick yellow sauce made with yogurt and garbanzo flour, spiced with turmeric and eaten with rice. Some stir munchies like vadas, chicken or mutton into this base.

Calling all Indian food ‘curry’ is like calling all American food ‘Jello’: it’s nonsensical. If you tell me, ‘Let’s get some curry!’ and then order saag paneer, I’m going to laugh at you. Loudly.

Is this just semantic quibbling, when cheap Indian restaurants themselves perpetuate the corruption? Forget Curry in a Hurry, try ordering a Chinese dish by the wrong name. I did that at the tiny takeout place on the corner and got a stern lecture. ‘That not chow mein,’ the owner said. ‘I make you lo mein.’ Damned if it wasn’t better, just like he said.

What is a Freshizza? A Fresh-pizza of course. It has the type of hip, cool sounding name that will entice young people with a disposable income to eat it. Right? I mean Mentos were known as “the freshmaker” and they were cool. Will Smith was a nobody until he became the Fresh Prince. The Hindustan Times reports:

Pizza Hut, the world’s largest pizza chain, on Wednesday launched a new product, Freshizza. The launch was marked by an innovative cookery show hosted by the fresh face of Bollywood actor Zayed Khan and food critic Rashmi Uday Singh.

The highlight of the show included a special demonstration of the pizza dough being made fresh at the restaurant in Janpath, New Delhi. The new crust is neither too thick nor too thin. It has delightfully soft texture and uses a uniquely flavoured tomato sauce, Mozzarella cheese, combined with an exciting range of toppings and garnished with orange Cheddar cheese.

Wow. Janpath must have been rocking in an orgy of excitement as that dough was worked over. I can only imagine. Where can I get me some Freshizza? Apparently google.com hasn’t yet heard of it. Neither has the official Pizza Hut website. Folks, I think Delhi has finally arrived as a world-class city, a trend-setter.

It is the result of months of pioneering effort by the Indian and international research and development team. India is the first market to launch this product.”

Holy crap. This is like the Pizza equivalent of the Manhattan Project. I’m glad major Indian news media is covering this.

Coming soon, to the purse of an auntie near you, a hot sauce so hot it could literally kill you:

Ultra-concentrated “16 Million Reserve” is the hottest science can make. The sauce is 30 times hotter than the spiciest pepper and 8,000 times more fiery than Tabasco.

Diners must sign a disclaimer recommending “protective gloves and eye wear” — but even sweating testers in safety gear were blinded by tears for 30 minutes.

Medical experts fear it could kill asthmatics or hospitalise a user who touches a sensitive part of the body afterwards. It is made of pure capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers “hot”. [UK Sun, via BoingBoing]

Eyebrow-raising patents are also granted outside of the U.S.:

...a food plaza in Hyderabad has recently introduced 104 different varieties of Dosa. They have already patented 27 of them. The food plaza introduced this new concept in Hyderabad after a successful trial in Mumbai...“Focal point of the Dosa Plaza is we have created more than 104 varieties of Dosas out of which 27 are patented, nobody can copy it. The difference between other Dosas and these Dosas are the fillings. We have the international flavour like Mexican dishes are filled in the Dosas or there are American fillings,” said Jagdish Khorwal, Project Head, Dosa Plaza. [ANI/Yahoo!]

This far-out concept of wrapping a round piece of flattened bread around Mexican ingredients is going to be big. Picture, if you will, a whole chain of hacienda-like eateries with...bells...selling this truly groundbreaking product to all of India’s mostly non-obese citizens. So big, that it should spark unbridled franchising around the world, catering to those starved for affordable Mexican food prepared quickly. Billions upon billions of dollars will be generated. Luckily, Khorwal has patented this ingenious design, so he won’t have worry about unscrupulous businessmen stealing his idea. He will also finally collect the years of royalties owed to him by the citizens of entire continents, who have been enjoying for eons just such a delicacy without paying him his proper dues.

ANI/Yahoo!: 104 varieties of dosa to stir Hyderabadis’ taste buds!

This has to be what fish and lobsters in tanks at seafood restaurants dream of — a glass case in the ocean filled with juicy humans, fattening themselves up with rich resort food:

The world’s first all-glass undersea restaurant has opened at the Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa on the Island of Rangali. The restaurant, called Ithaa – meaning ‘pearl’ in the Maldives’ language of Dhivehi – is situated on the seabed, six metres beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. All the walls of the restaurant are transparent, offering 180 degree views of the surrounding marine life and coral reef. [World Leisure News & Jobs]

World Leisure News & Jobs: Underwater restaurant for Hilton

A non-desi former pastry chef has opened a restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves traditional dhaba food, lassi and paranthas (thanks, BridalBeer). The new place is called Lassi:

From delicate plate-dwarfing dosas at Hampton Chutney Co. and the N.Y. Dosa cart, to wraplike rolls at Roomali and the Kati Roll Co., to the colorful, crunchy chaat of Sukhadia’s Gokul, we’re undoubtedly having a Southeast Asian street-food moment…

I think they mean South Asian, but carry on:

Catchily named for the frothy yogurt drinks on offer in mango-flavored profusion all over town, Lassi is much more than an ethnic smoothie shop (though its premade featured beverages, in potent, refreshing flavors ranging from spice-flecked cardamom and vanilla to a complex and curdy lemon, can easily become an après-gym addiction).

… Lassi is bright and cheerful—like its owner, Heather Carlucci-Rodriguez, the former pastry chef of L’Impero and Veritas. A chance encounter with a Punjabi student in a pastry class she was teaching—and many stereotype-shattering home-cooked Indian meals— inspired Carlucci-Rodriguez to change culinary course. And even though she’s an unlikely Indian-restaurant owner, she’s a passionate one. Her food tastes unlike any other Indian in town—fresher, cleaner, but undiluted in its intricately spiced essence.

London's Restaurant magazine just released their annual list of the 50 best places to get fat-- and of course *I'd* be the Mutineer to post on this. ;)

I am slightly miffed that the list is not down with anything brown, unless New York's lauded, pan-Asian-street-food mecca Spice Market counts. Since I cannot partake of their "chicken samosas" with cilantro-yogurt, I'm inclined to say..."NO". :)

Now last year, the greatest place in the world for Dal Makhni made both the list AND the award for "Best Asian Restaurant"-- I'm talking about New Delhi's legendary Bukhara, mais oui. What a difference twelve months makes? Oh, well. I'm just amazed that a Brit magazine that listed no less than FOUR English restaurants in their top 10 couldn't find a decent curry. Whatevs.

As if desis could get any more passionate about their comida, food diversity in India is rising with income (thanks, Rohit):

The amount spent nationally on meals outside the home has more than doubled in the past decade, to about $5 billion a year, and is expected to double again in about half that time…

“In the 1970’s and 1980’s our international menu consisted of Russian salad, shrimp cocktail, French fries … oh, and something baked,” Mr. Desai said. “Recently, though, I had a conservative Hindu lady explain to me the specifics of a risotto she wants for her son’s wedding, and a traditional Bohri Muslim family requested Mongolian hot pots…”

“When I first opened Diva people would send back al dente risotto because they were used to very soft cooked basmati rice…”

While I’m complaining about not getting arbi, Bombayites were complaining about not getting Italian:

The legendary Crawford Market in Mumbai… sells broccoli, iceberg lettuce, thyme, basil, rosemary, bell peppers and other non-Indian vegetables. Pasta in bulk is available alongside basmati rice.

It’s all causing drama with the saas:

“Much to my mother’s chagrin I use store-bought yogurt,” said Rujuta Jog, 24, a recently married office worker. “And my mother-in-law was upset when she saw that I use Pillsbury flour to make rotis. She still prefers to buy wheat and grind it fresh…”

“In the old days, since only the men worked outside the home, they were served first,” said Sathya Saran, a senior executive at Worldwide Media, one of India’s largest publishing companies. “Now everyone eats together, and the entire family dynamic has begun to shift.”

Twenty years ago when everyone was sporting Hard Rock Café t-shirts, this would have allowed us to be culturally-appropriate posers:

...global cafecum-entertainment giant - the USD 426-million Hard Rock International - has made the move to enter India. Industry sources said Hard Rock International has signed an exclusive arrangement up with two Indian franchisee partners - Jai Singh and Sanjay Mehtani. The first Hard Rock Cafe is expected to come up in Mumbai, in September. [Times of India]

Times of India: Hard Rock to enter India

If you, like I, have never actually lived in Bombay, here’s a great primer on why office workers use the O.G. FedEx (via Kunjan):

A restaurant meal costs five to fifteen times more than home-food. To them, the dabbawalla brings the security of a cheap, clean, tasty and often still-warm, home-cooked meal… Bombay alone can sustain a dabbawalla network of this size and complexity because it alone, among Indian cities, has a quick, efficient and far-flung suburban railway service.

Not to mention that many have religion-based dietary restrictions. Density and train availability is also why some businesses only work in Manhattan and like cities; Bombay’s north-south orientation is strikingly familiar. Here’s how the routing system works — each packet is marked with hops, destination and recipient name, and handoffs are made at railway stations:

The outer case of Mohile’s dabba is marked with a black swastika, a red dot, a yellow stroke… Different marks on other dabbas tell the career at which stations en route he must pass them on to other waiting links in the crosscross network. At Victoria Terminus, the hub of commercial Bombay, Mohile’s dabba enters the last phase of its journey. Dabbawalla No. 4 waiting on the platform, picks it out together with other boxes marked with his symbol, the white cross. The black circle on Mohile’s case indicates its exact destination: the BMC Building. By 12.30 he has carried his crate up four flights of stairs and left Mohile’s lunch-box along with some 20 others in a corner of the canteen. Mohile, coming in at 1 p.m. will recognise his dabba from his name on an attached tag.

The dabbawallas’ perseverence puts the U.S. Postal Service to shame, and they charge only 35 rupees a month:

Some months ago, a dabbawalla waiting on his bicycle at a traffic light was hurled off the road by a lorry gone berserk and was smashed to death… The mukadam [dabba boss] got to hear of the accident within minutes and contracted the secretary of the Association… asked him to look after the police formalities, collected the dead man’s dabbas, and being familiar with the symbols, got them to their destination — just 30 minutes late…

Straight from your druggie aunties and uncles, here are some traditional recipes for Holi bhang. The Hindustan Times even tells you how to make pot laddoos and green halva!

Bhang, or cannabis, is freely associated with the splash of assorted Holi colours. During this season, bhang is prepared and served according to age-old traditions throughout the Himalayan foothills.

With a simple mortar and pestle, the buds and leaves of cannabis are squashed and ground into a green paste, to which milk, ghee and spices are added. This base can be mixed with the nutritious, refreshing drink, thandai… This can also be mixed with ghee and sugar to make a tasty green halvah, and into peppery, chewy little balls called [golis].

I’m cracking up just thinking of aunties hanging out around shady parks after midnight trying to score Shiva’s herb for their Holi parties. Mistress of Spices indeed. Like Bhang for Chocolate. Maybe desis’ popularity in stoner flicks is justified — I’ll never look at pista barfi the same way again.

The adult Holi is the desi Halloween, a day for masks, flirting and outrageous fun. Meanwhile, bhangra aficionados are busy denying that its name derives from bhang:

Cecil Beaton described the ‘concoction of milk of almonds, rosewater, carminum nuts and eight ingredients of which hashish, or Bhang, was the principal’. (‘One of the effects of Bhang,’ he further reported, ‘is that it makes everything appear humorous. Another is that strange things happen to one’s sense of time.’)

Brimful’s amphora runneth over as she tells a hilarious tale about an auntie, an airport and a dime bag:

… her brother-in-law, V mama, puts in his request, asks her to get him some of that stuff that goes into bhang. She puts it on the list, describes it exactly that way when she seeks it out in India.

So there she is, waiting in the customs line at Logan, carting along two rather young kids, bags filled to the point of bursting, and the customs inspector decides that her bags should be inspected…. The inspector does his thing, until he comes to a bag of dried leaves. “What’s this?” he asks.

Babu, a new restaurant in Greenwich Village which serves food from Calcutta, apparently made up its menu according to Black Sheep’s hip-hop classic, ‘The Choice Is Yours.’ The formerly price-list-free restaurant sits below Kati Roll Co. and is by the same owner (thanks, Turbanhead):

… the menu came without prices. Instead, guests were invited to eat, enjoy, and then, at the end of the meal, pay what they thought it was worth. “I’d rather work out the kinks in the kitchen first,” Payal Saha, the restaurant’s owner, explained the other day, sitting at a corner table of Babu, which was about a quarter full of couples quietly eating and mentally calculating the value of their experience…

Payments range from generous (foodies) to parsimonious (Midwesterners):

 “We had one couple who paid two hundred bucks for an eighty-dollar meal,” Saha said… “We talked to some people before sending them their check, asking if they would pay fifty dollars for this meal,” Jung said. “The people mostly said yes, except for one couple from Minneapolis. They were shocked at that price.”

In classic desi fashion, our fine young cannibals took advantage of the price-free policy:

A rowdy group of ten young Indians walked in one Friday evening and occupied the restaurant’s large central table. Their response to no prices was to leave no money; they didn’t even tip the wait staff.

But all good things must come to an end on the credit card slip, top copy:

A few weeks ago, prices were finally written into the menu: a three-course meal with wine comes to about fifty dollars a head.

The New Yorker also covered M.I.A. recently — is Eustace Tilly crushing on cumin?

The Gray Lady discovers chaat. Next, they’ll be telling their readers about this great new thing called roti :) But then the piece goes all sensual on you:

The contrasts are, as one fan said, “a steeplechase for your mouth,” with different sensations galloping by faster than you can track them… Chaats can be made with almost anything crispy: … fresh ginger, mung bean sprouts and spice-dusted toasted lentils. Chaat masala usually includes amchoor, a tangy powder made from green mangoes, mint, cumin and pomegranate, but it must always include kala namak, a black salt with a pleasant whiff of sulfur… “In India a guy might have a Mercedes and live in a house on a hill, but he still puts on his slippers and goes to eat chaat…”

A fine tribute to pani puri… by Ganghadar Gopal Gadgil… “In that state of beatitude the Maharashtrians stop being surly, the Marwaris look at the millions of stars without being reminded of their own millions, the Sindhis admire the horizon without any intention of selling it, the Gujaratis speculate on the moon instead of the scrips they should have sold, the North Indians dream of things other than Hindi as the official language of the United Nations, and even the Parsi ladies stop nagging their husbands.”

Be still my gurgling stomach. And, more importantly, the story tells you where to get your fix, though Dimple’s been open for years:

… two popular, top-quality chaat specialists have opened in Midtown Manhattan: Dimple Fast Food and Sukhadia’s Sweets. Manhattan has lately been seized by a craze for Indian snacks, with upscale new places like Spice Market, Bombay Talkie, Von Singh’s, Devi, Lassi and Babu all claiming Indian street food as an inspiration…

… Chowpatty Foods [of Iselin, NJ]… has just imported a chaat cart from India in the red-and-white color scheme of the Chowpatty chaat wallahs… a traditional chaat wallah sits surrounded by his mounds of dry ingredients… and his own mix of jal-jeera, the “firewater” that is used to fill the habit-forming pani puri.

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Just to round out your celebrity trivia for the day -

Former James Bond star Pierce Brosnan is reportedly so fed up with American food, that he is planning to open an Indian restaurant in Los Angeles.

According to femalefirst, the Irish actor is frantically searching in India for a chef worthy of cooking at the Indian restaurant he plans to open later this year.

We both love desi take-out. Of course, some of us hoof it over to Curry in a Hurry, while others use a whirligig:

Rapper Snoop Dogg paid $5,700 for Indian take-out to be flown to his
London after-show party via private helicopter. The rap star ordered the food from The Four Pillars Indian restaurant in Buckinghamshire, England for his Friday night gig at London's Hammersmith Carling Apollo.

Millionaire businessman Baljit Singh surprised staff at Kalam’s Raj Indian takeaway in Brook Road, Shirley,UK, by ordering 35 dishes over the internet and asking for it to be delivered to where he was staying – Ocean Five Hotel, Miami Beach.

Mr Singh placed his order and paid for it to be flown from Biggin Hill airport to Heathrow by helicopter and from Heathrow to Miami by plane, a journey costing almost £800.The food cost £589, but Mr Singh was given a 10 per cent discount for spending more than £10.

The food was specially prepared, packed and flown to Miami. Mr Malik accompanied the delivery and was on hand to reheat and serve it when it reached the hotel. Speaking after his return, he said: “He was very pleased with it and seemed a really normal man. He even gave us a £200 tip!”

And I thought it was bad enough that my aunties would fedex fresh sabzi and roti, packed in dry ice, to their kids. And doesn't anybody realize that there is good desi food in Canada? In the US even? Nah ...

To y’all 220 million vegetarian desis: Is your favorite Asian restaurant’s idea of vegetarian food ‘yes, it has veggies too’? Do you marvel at how many ways some insidious bastards work meat into veggie dishes (pepperoni in pasta salad, rice cooked in chicken stock)? Are you sick of throwing away soup you bought without parsing the ingredients like a copy editor? Bored of restaurant menus that read meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, sprig of parsley?

Soon, you may also have to check whether your PC is made from animal products. Researchers are turning chicken feathers into computer motherboards:

To turn feathers into a usable product, they are first plucked from the birds at chicken-processing plants and then the hot, wet feathers are immediately hauled to Emery’s plant. There the “undesirable parts” like chicken heads, feet, windpipes and fecal matter are sorted out from the truckload of feathers. “They’re not a nice sight, to put it mildly…”

… Emery converts the feather fiber into keratin mats that resemble paper towels. They are then placed into a mold, layered on top of one another and infused with a soybean resin that hardens and forms the composite. The material is then put through the circuit-printing process to become a circuit board.

This gives new meaning to the expression ‘my new machine really screams.’ Ironically, the same people who think Gandhi, Jim Morrison and John Lennon drinking their own urine is disgusting, think eating cows fed chicken poop is perfectly ok.

But things are looking up for those who steer clear of digestive recycling: instead of ordering mu shu, you can now order Moo Shoes.

You know how your desi mom totes around lal mirch in her purse because everything’s just too damn bland? And how embarrassing it is when she whips it out at restaurants, hunched over like it was a bottle of Night Train? This is just like that, but classier because, um, you’re epicurious: here’s my favorite Indian food hack from my bachelor kitchen.

At most grocery stores, you can buy tortelloni or ravioli stuffed with fillings such as sun-dried tomatoes and cheese. Try boiling the tortelloni for five minutes, ladling on spaghetti sauce and adding the secret topping: generous scoops of chutney powder, a.k.a. idli masala. It’s a yellow-orange spice mix that morphs the flavor of ravioli into something as delicious as dum aloo. It’s easier than fixing a sandwich, and it is absolutely sabroso. I’ve eaten it for six months and I’m still not sick of it.

And I’m not the only Marco Pulao running around. The desi pizza joints of Jersey City and Jackson Heights, and my own family, are famous for their Indian reimagining of hot pie. Dumpling Man, who makes fresh, thin-skinned Chinese dumplings, offers a spaghetti sauce option. I pitched him a chutney powder topping in a note scribbled on the back of a business card; when I left, I think he was laughing.

Here’s an older, non-Italian favorite which I eventually wore out: toasted onion rolls with spicy hummus, pepperjack cheese and the secret ingredient: mango achar. Please, for the love of Bacchus, share your own favorite food hack here in the comments.

Bombay Talkie, a new chaat-plus-entrees place that sounds like an upscale version of Kati Roll Co., opened recently in Chelsea. It shares its name with the novel by Ameena Meer. The NYT says:

The menu plays with the conceit of Indian street food, and so appetizers are listed as “street bites.” Entrees appear under the heading “from the roadside.” Side dishes are from, well, the “curbside…” Bombay Talkie is in many ways a neighborhood joint in an especially pretty dress, designed by Thomas Juul-Hansen…

… then of course there are the cocktails, which, I’m told, take their names from Bollywood movies… What are the temperature, tinge and taste of “unrequited love”? It is cold but not frigid, transparent but vaguely green, and extremely potent, thanks to modest measures of lime juice and saffron syrup in a sea of Bombay Sapphire gin.

The place has a dark sense of humor:

Brunch has a theme they’re calling The Return of the Raj: teas, tea sandwiches, pancakes, hams, fresh preserves….if not trickle pie.

Kati Roll Co., a tiny, long-time Greenwich Village favorite, has a rotating selection of classic Bollywood posters on the wall. And speaking of the designer, I haven’t figured out yet why the Dutch are so into desi kitsch. I’m not complaining.

The normally reliable cypherpunk cool-hunters at Boing Boing discover a strange new delicacy called ‘paan.’ They’ve linked to bloggers who, in typical geek fashion (I mean that as the highest compliment), have catalogued its production with step-by-step photos and reference objects for scale. Spitting contests with laser ranging can’t be far behind.

In related news, I’ve spotted an obscure Western dessert called ‘canoli.’ A mass spectrographic analysis will follow.

Here’s what I say: leave the paan, take the canoli.

Tyler Cowen reports that, in a step backwards, "Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons." [The step backwards is Tyler's interpretation, not mine. I've always been fond of Lasagna, and indifferent towards CTM]

Although Tyler is quoting the Beeb, he fails to quote the whole three sentences of the passage, which would explain their methodology for arriving at such a conclusion:

Lasagne has replaced chicken tikka massala as the favourite dish of Britons. Sainsbury's sold 13.9 million lasagne ready meals and just 7.4 million chicken tikka massalas last year. Tesco sold 9.8 million lasagnes and 6.3 million chicken tikka massalas.

If the best way to find a country's national dish is to look at their choice of frozen food entrées, then clearly we are losing ground to the Italians. Still, I doubt that curry will be easily dislodged from that special place in a Briton's heart: even racist yobs eat curry before going out to work it off with a spot of PakiBashing. I suspect that curry has simply become so British to most Brits, that to them Lasagne is a far more exotic food item, one with a bit more pizzazz. They'll be back. If not, we'll deploy our secret weapon: Gobi Aloo.

Speaking of frozen CTK, when I spent a few weeks living in London I conducted a taste test by trying different frozen versions from different supermarkets. What I found was that the higher end supermarkets (like Sainsbury's) had used superior ingredients (thus accounting for the higher cost of their entrée) but fewer spices, and that the best frozen CTK came from the lowest rent supermarket, a rather shady Safeway in a place I didn't want to be caught after dark.

p.s. anybody know how to get accents above my "e"s, I'm embarassed to say "entree" Thanks Andrea. And merci for letting my spelling error pass unremarked!
p.p.s. I have no idea what stat means, I've just always wanted to say it

A new, high-end French-Indian fusion restaurant, IndeBlue, just opened in Washington, D.C. with two tandoori ovens, a wine bar and a lounge. The chef, Vikram Garg, was formerly the head chef at the Leela Kempinski Palace in Bangalore.

The style sounds fusion rather than the Indo-French cooking of Pondicherry, as exemplified by London’s La Porte des Indes. Quick, we need a food scout from the lowland swamp. DCist went and made me even hungrier:

Coldren told us in October that Garg is a master at “controlling spices” and the menu marries the best of French and Indian cuisine. Some examples: Petite Provencal naan with sundried tomato chutney; wild mushroom dosa… with bleu cheese gratin with white truffle oil; scallops scented with cumin on a bed of braised chicory; and veal-stuffed gnocchi served with chanterelles and infused with a fenugreek-chardonnay sauce.

More from the WaPo’s Tom Sietsema (any relation to the Village Voice food critic?):

One quiet thrill follows a request for saffron-and-cardamom-flavored ice cream. A waiter shows up at the table with a potato ricer filled with the cold stuff; a powerful squeeze of the ricer’s handles pushes it through dozens of tiny holes, creating a plateful of creamy noodles.

It’s definitely not a traditional restaurant — beef samosas, anyone?

It was perhaps one of most lavish non-political parties Washington has seen in quite some time… at least one woman, painted as a forest nymph, walked about the place in A Midsummer Night’s Dream-esque fashion.

Of the dishes, the beef samosa was the most interesting. Since using beef is traditionally prohibited in Indian cuisine, the combination tasted rather novel… we only had a chance to sample the lychee and mango martinis. Both were worth the wait…

Mira Nair writes in the New York Times Magazine about the chaat-fueled filming of Hysterical Blindness. We apparently share a favorite snack, kachoris from Jersey City’s Little India:

As others tucked into Krispy Kremes, I’d pop the just-made almond kachori in my mouth, no cutlery needed, licking the sour-sweet taste of tamarind chutney off my fingers… Uma [Thurman] would sidle over to me in her ripped Joan Jett T-shirt and blue eye shadow to ask, “Is it samosa time yet?”… I would pop kachoris directly into Juliette Lewis’s rosebud mouth so not to disturb her lipstick. The gaffers and grips would holler across to me, “Did my Indian balls come in?” Soon the little box of snacks from Rajbhog grew into a stack, and kachoris conquered Krispy Kremes.

The White House hosted its second Diwali celebration Wednesday, which is very cool. It'll be interesting to see how that plays with the evangelicals who equate Hinduism with devil worship. Former ambassador to India Robert Blackwill hosted the party; it was his last day in government, he just resigned as head of Iraq policy due to a staffer abuse mini-scandal.

Dubya and Laura, Karl Rove (who attended last year), and Representative-elect Bobby Jindal were no-shows. One fundraiser said that for Indian-Americans, 'pay to play' is all pay, no play; he threw a hissy-fit when Bush attended a Ramadan dinner a few hours later:

Community activists were told that if the President and the First Lady attended the event of one community or nationals, there would be pressure from others. But a few hours after the Diwali event, Bush attended an Iftar dinner hosted by the White House to mark the end of Ramzaan... "We raised millions for the President and the GOP... and this is what we got in return," the activist, also a physician, fumed.

Many Republican desis attended, and the mithai and samosas were ordered from the same New York midtown restaurant, Bukhara Grill, which catered Salman Rushdie's wedding and is a favorite of Bill Clinton's. Great food is nonpartisan, time for a pilgrimage:

Dhandu Ram is the man behind the tandoor at Bukhara Grill in New York. He is a master tandoor who hails from Rajasthan, but got his training on the job at the famed Bukhara at the Maurya Sheraton in Delhi... As a tandoor chef, Ram is the star attraction at Bukhara Grill and agrees that more respect is given to chefs here... He points out that a tandoor chef generally gets a green card because this is a task that no one else can really do.

Update: Someone who once worked for the host of the party chimes in on Daniel Drezner's blog:

Blackwill is an incredibly brilliant thinker with absolutely no interpersonal skills... I never saw Blackwill touch an employee other than to shake hands. His manner is such that embassy staff wondered that he could have fathered three children... He sleeps four hours a night... By the time I'd arrive in my office at 0730... I would find between 20 and 30 e-mails from Blackwill, time-stamped from 0330 onward... he was always a decent human being. I think his major fault was that he simply lacked empathy toward other human beings...

Wacko Jacko is hiring a very special personal chef when he visits London in November; Kenyan-born Raj Bajwe is the talented man behind Cafe India, Britain’s best Indian restaurant.

Reports say that Raj, manager of Glasgow’s award-winning Cafe India, will prepare Jackson’s favourite vegetarian dishes including ‘Saag Paneer’, ‘Allo Golu’, ‘pakora’, fried rice dishes, ‘chapatis’ and ‘naan’ breads.

Raj told the media: “I know Michael is facing serious charges but I can only judge the man as I find him. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

“He loves his Indian food, particularly the way we do it in Scotland. Michael doesn’t drink and washes the meal down with iced water.

“His favourite Indian dish is ‘Saag Paneer’, which is spinach cooked through with cheese. He just loves that. He also likes ‘Allo Golu’, which is a spicy potato dish.

Bajwe has cooked for other bold-faced names, including the Governator of my home state:

Cafe India’s other celebrity customers include Sir Sean Connery, Hugh Grant, Keanu Reeves, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rod Stewart, Billy Connolly, Lionel Richie and Emma Thompson.

I’ve always hated korma; I’m not sure what that says about me, but the next time I order Aloo Vindaloo at Gaylord’s Ghirardelli, I’m going to smirk as I think of this survey from England:

One fifth of men questioned for Sky digital and Star Plus’ National Curry Week (October 17 - 24) survey said, they had eaten a vindaloo curry to impress a lady or their friends! When it comes to impressing friends or members of the opposite sex Lancashire has the toughest taste buds with over 20 per cent who have braved a vindaloo in the face of peer pressure. Whilst those in Newcastle seem to have the puniest palette and are least likely (7 per cent) to indulge in hot and spicy dishes to win over friends and lovers!

Women seem to be tongue-challenged when it comes to vindaloos. The findings show four in 10 men like their curries hot or extremely hot compared to only one in 10 women. Two-thirds (62 per cent) of women questioned admit they like mild curries, such as a korma.

Star Plus’ spokeswoman, Suruchi Sthalekar said: “The results are hilarious, I can just imagine the scenes in curry houses and homes across the UK. To think men measure their sexual prowess against the spiciness of their curry. And I would urge all woman to go out there and try vindaloo today to prove we can handle it.”

Handle it? I consummately require it. ;)

The mountain comes to Muhammad: You’ve probably heard of the FedEx-like reliability of tiffinwallas of Bombay. Five thousand tiffinwallas deliver 175,000 hot lunches from home to work every day, and empty tiffins back home, with only one error every 16 million deliveries. This six-sigma error rate puts Indian bureaucracy to shame. And, as Forbes reported, all for just 150 rupees/month:

Each tiffin carrier has, painted on its top, a number of symbols which identify where the carrier was picked up, the originating and destination stations and the address to which it is to be delivered.

Well, one tiffinwalla who cooks his own food is expanding into New York, via a friend:

My cousin just recommended this guy (Krishna) in NYC who delivers packed Indian vegetarian lunch or dinner boxes for $5 a meal. He only works Mon-Fri, so it’s $25 a week (this includes deliver). Apparently, each meal includes 2 chapatis, rice, dal, one vegetable, appetizer, dessert and pickle/chutney. My cousin is very health conscious and swears that Krishna’s meal is cooked with very little oil. Though I would share the number with you - 212 945 ####.

And let’s not forget the dosa guy at the southwest corner of Washington Square Park (weekdays at lunch):

[Designer Alpana] Bawa does admit a lunchtime weakness for dosas found at a cart in Washington Square Park (New York Dosa, 917-710-2092), made by Sri Lankan Dhiru Kumar. “I’m on my way,” she tells Kumar on her cell phone, not even identifying herself. “Can you have a Pondicherri dosa ready for me in a few minutes?” Bawa asks… When we arrive, Kumar hands Bawa a Styrofoam container with her dosa — spicy potatoes, carrots and peppers in a thin crepe made from rice and lentil flours.