mongo_jones

yes, and southern sun is much larger, and is not on the pearl street mall so no huge waits. i haven't paid attention to how much variation there is in what's on tap.

wow. let no one say that vegetarians can't outdo carnivores when it comes to such things. hopefully this won't lead to the closure of the restaurants.

i'll await the detailed info. i'm guessing the land in question is the u.s? i don't drink porter outside of microbreweries. have had a couple of stunners here in boulder, co.

somehow vomitting has never prevented me from drinking the offending liquor again--perhaps because it is not the liquor but my own over-indulgence that has been to blame (related question: does anything taste worse on the way back up than cheap gin?). as for southern comfort, i don't drink it for other reasons. mostly to do with taste.

wasn't there a thread recently on one of the forums about frozen, dead crab being okay? the huge korean store we go to near us (boulder, colorado--the store itself is in aurora) often has this in their frozen section, along with many other goodies like frozen mackerel, pomfret, black-cod, skate etc. i've always been too chicken to buy any though.

not your fault. it is my aversion to smilies that is to blame.

i think once you've thrown a particular food up violently it is difficult to re-establish a relationship with it--even if it wasn't what caused you to throw up. i once caught the stomach flu from a friend and had it hit me hard right after i ate some milk chocolate. i haven't been able to eat milk chocolate since--this was 5 years ago. not a biggie since i am a fan of dark chocolate anyway. but katie what would you do if you were invited to dinner to a chinese family's home, and they'd prepared whole shrimp, with the head on and the works (not de-veined)?

can everyone who responds please take a minute to look at their box of whatever so that they can tell us if the tea in question is darjeeling, assam, a blend, ctc etc.

i guess this is beer terminology education night for me. i like a lot of pale ales but have rarely thought to ask why some of them are called india pale ales--anyone know the etymology?

i love beer and think i have a very good beer palate, but i am not by any means an authority on it; hence this question: what exactly makes a porter a porter? how does it differ from stout? and what is everyone's favorite porter?

is this book related to the restaurant? and is it an indian publication?

pat, do let me know how it turns out as and when you do make it. especially if you do make it with non-ground meat. given the blender-izing involved i'm hesitant about the texture of the sauce without keema but practice trumps theoretical hesitancy every time.

green label is not the best darjeeling tea available, true but it is not bad at all. much better (and cheaper) than twinings' darjeeling tea certainly. yellow label, it seems, may well be ctc as well, perhaps a better grade or red tea in yellow boxes. what other branded teas out there do people like? i like me a good estate darjeeling every once in a while (a local establishment in boulder--the unlikely dushanbe tea house--serves makaibari) but i certainly can't afford to drink a cup of estate darjeeling twice a day. let's face it the morning cup is largely for waking me up, dipping biscuits and lubricating certain passages.

further in this vein: what happens if someone who is revolted by un-deveined shrimp/fish with the head on/pork uterus/bombay-duck/durian/insert-food-that-puts-you-off here at someone else's home. say the food has been cooked really well but is just not something that is definitionally palatable to you. fake it? not eat it? discover religion/dysentery? (see above)

If a food exists, a certain percentage of the population, however small, enjoys it. Saying "I don't like shrikhand" is one thing. Saying "shrikhand is vile", is an insult to those that do. Is it your intention to insult these people by insulting their food? it is my intention to make a joke. cue laughter.

behemoth, that's the last time we're having you over for dinner.

i am glad to see, however, that we are all agreed that shrikhand is vile.

yellow label is MUCH better than red label. yellow label is an export brand i believe, and isn't available in india--or at least it didn't used to be. the upscale lipton brand there used to be green label. i drink green label myself, though i am approaching crisis point as i am about to run out and the local indian grocery doesn't have any in stock. red label is cheaper and has more ctc in it, i think; whereas green label purports to be darjeeling. not sure about yellow--it may just be green in a yellow box.

an interesting article vikram and i'll comment more extensively once i've had a chance to read it again carefully. but an initial thought: it seems to me that sanghvi (at least early on) is setting up an opposition between gujarati home food and punjabi "catering" food. it may well be that punjabi home-cooking has all these elements of texture etc. that he bemoans in the wedding reception cuisine. certainly almost everything he says to this effect about gujarati food is true about bengali food (doesn't make sense to distinguish much between bengali home and restaurant food). texture, light cooking, a balance of sweet, spicy and sour flavors--all these things obtain in bengali food, and i suspect other indian cuisines might make the same claim. and while i am a carnivore's carnivore i don't agree that a vegetarian cuisine is limited because it is vegetarian. and what's wrong with behala? calcutta snobbery about these suburbs is not unrelated to the fact that they often had large populations of east-bengali refugees. i'm not sure where sanghvi comes by his.

this may or may not be off-topic but i'll say only that my substantive problems with the film may be with residues of material in the original novels: i'm not quite as enamored of the "little england of the ship" aristo-philia as the film seems to be. if the doctor's character is meant to be the corrective to this tendency it is very muted in the film (not sure how it works in the books). also, i'm generally less gung-ho about european naval adventures given what else those navies had been doing for the last couple of hundred years. thus, much of what may be the series' or the film's romantic appeal to many audiences was lost on me. plus, i found the battle scenes to be mostly interchangeable, hard-to-follow and uninvolving (and i like action films). i was struck though by how much the guy who played aubrey's dyspeptic cook/orderly looked like a particularly insane eric idle.

Yup, it was. But look - I found it! Lately I've begun to wonder (I think I mentioned this on the Yogurt-Making thread) whether "Balmagowry" might not turn out to be some intricate corruption of "creme bulgare." Reaching, I know. ah. all i know of the series is the recent movie--which i found to be fairly tedious.

when confronted with bad food at other people's homes you may consider the following stratagems: 1. a sudden attack of dysentery--of course, to be completely convincing you'll need to take up residence in the toilet and produce many authentic, agonized sounds and aromas; an added bonus: this can also be used to go home early if the conversation sucks too. 2. a sudden attack of religion--unlike dysentery religion will not require the production of agonizing sounds and aromas (unless you claim catholicism) but it will only work with people who don't know you well and who you don't expect to see again. this works best in the homes of wealthy liberals: "i'm sorry but my religion prohibits me from eating anything from a kitchen that's had blood/oatmeal present in it". 3. incredible clumsiness--easiest if there is an elaborate frilly table-cloth, in which case you can slide everything to the floor in one go. or if you'd rather be remembered as a fool than a klutz feign drunkenness and claim you can pull the table-cloth off without disturbing any off the food on it. if no table-cloth you can also take a swan-dive over it and fall short.

i haven't yet gone through this whole blog but has the balmagowry name been explained yet? i have discovered your "real" name, and while it wasn't on par with finding out that cary grant began life as archibald leach i feel that much of the romance has gone out of my life.

i've only just begun to explore the microbrewery scene here. i had a great porter at mountain sun last fall en route to a movie--two colleagues and i went to southern sun this past week and had quite a bit of an amber ale--i'll probably go back there a few more times and try a few more before moving on to some place else--thanks for the recommendations though and i hope more will trickle in. i'm actually going to update my boulder beer bulletins on the beer forum if anyone is interested.

black velvets are lip-smackingly delicious--a waste of neither champagne nor guiness. quite apart from everything else, the lava lamp effect as you drink is very cool.