mongo_jones

gautam, thanks for the recommendations and the good wishes. i will have to check with my sister and brother in law to see if these places still thrive. nizam's kathi kababs are of course a given. one can no more go to cal and not eat these than go to agra and not visit the taj. i think i have eaten at both waldorf and peping. in fact, i think my parents ate at peping in their college days. never heard of this anadi cabin--will give it a try. however, i doubt they make kosha mangsho as well as my aunts; moghlai porotha on the other hand is a tougher proposition for the home-cook. as for fish-fry, the reason we are going to be in cal is for a bou-bhaat (the bou in question being my own). rest assured there will be major fish-fry action, as well as the other staples of the bengali wedding/bou bhaat celebrations. are you from cal originally? my parents are both from there but my father being in the airforce we never actually lived there while i was growing up. my sister has been there since her wedding 12 years ago and almost my extended family is there. we used to visit cal once a year growing up and i still remember the thrill of eating certain things outside my grandmother's house almost every day--waiting for the kwality ice-cream man to come around as well as the jhal muri and puchka-wallas. man, i wish i could eat street puchka now, but i don't know if i would survive the experience. my system has been terribly weakend by 10 years in the first world. regards, mongo

well, i think we're forgetting that part of the impetus of the original question is to avoid the amount of sugar in commercial hoisins that screws with his health. i feel the same way sometimes with blackbean paste and salt. however, i am not as enterprising (masochistic?) and just use the store bought and damn the years off my life-span!

i leave for india in 10 days. my wife and i will be in cal for 4 days and in delhi for the next 17. most of our time will be spent with friends and family--a lot of great home cooks in the family and so a lot of eating. however, while in cal i do want to introduce my wife (it is her first trip to india) to a couple of things: calcutta chinese food, mutton rolls and kathi kababs. getting my uncles and cousins to agree on the best place to get these things is like trying to broker peace between cats and dogs. strangely everyone defers to my youngest uncle on the matter of sweets but everything else is up for debate. so cal-familiar egulleters: let me have it. where would you suggest we go?

i guess that post was a bit of a non-sequitur. i meant to ask: have people here had any experience with indian rums? old monk or otherwise? what is your estimation of them? serious rum drinking friends in india scoff at the caribbean rums i take back for them on trips. i can't tell if this is nationalist fervor working its way out (not unlikely for a couple of them) or if this high opinion of indian rums is shared by aficionados elsewhere as well. or is it the case, as with so much else, that indian rums aren't that well known outside india?

forgive me if this has been discussed before. rum is huge in india, especially with people in the armed forces (as we call the military). perhaps the biggest indian favorite: old monk

a big bowl of yook gae jiang at hodori at the corner of olympic and vermont in los angeles. or anywhere else for that matter that makes a good yook gae jiang. nothing like a big steaming bowl of battery acid and chilli oil with glass noodles, strips of beef and mushrooms floating in it to take the edge of the oncoming hangover. once you get the hangover the thing to do is a bowl of beef bone soup.

maybe you guys could start bathing with cilantro?

i was lucky enough to eat at michel richard's citrus in los angeles before he shut up shop. some years ago so i don't remember details but i do recall just how excellent the entire meal was each time. citrus had a similar glass wall separating the dining room from the kitchen and richard was in attendance on both occasions--i think this might have been when he started opening up citronelle in santa barbara so his presence wasn't a given. one nice touch on the first occasion: it was one of the group's birthday (this had been mentioned when we made the reservation): he gave her a signed recipe book and sent out a special birthday dessert. and no, none of us were in any way famous or even regulars. too bad he didn't stay in l.a.

well, if they're that busy it might be a good restaurant

a simple recipe with the blender handling almost all the prep work. results in a dish with a very nicely textured sauce and in very little clean-up: ingredients: blender- 1 tomato-1 medium onion, red-1 medium garlic cloves-6 ginger-1 1 inch peeled piece red chilli powder: 1 heaped tspn turmeric: 1 heaped tspn ground black pepper: 1 heaped tspn curry powder: 1 heaped tspn coriander powder: 1 tspn salt: to taste put all of this into the blender and pulse to a coarse paste heat some oil in a pan and add the following: 1 bay leaf 6 cloves 6 green cardamom pods 2 small pieces cinnamon 2 tablespns black peppercorns once everything starts crackling add the paste from the blender, reduce heat to medium and saute till all the water has evaporated. while this is happening peel a couple of small potatoes and dice. then add 1 lb or thereabouts ground turkey (not just white meat) mix with the paste and keep sauteeing over medium heat till the turkey has lost the reddish color and all the water has again evaporated. add the potatoes. add 1/2 cup of peas. mix. add 2 cups of water, bring to a boil, reduce heat to a simmer and cook, covered for about 20 minutes. check on the water every once in a while--if it dries up add some more. check for salt and add 1 tspn garam masala. return to a boil for a minute and serve hot with chapatis (ideal) or rice, with an accompany dal (ideally channa) and a green vegetable. enjoy!

thanks. the menu looks interesting. it would have to be a really special night for me to throw that much change at their tasting menu though. perhaps at some point those of us in the boulder/denver area should think about a food related gathering?

chef's knife went in dishwasher after such tears what fears could onions hold?

i'm in boulder. just to orient me: how would you characterize adega and what are the price points?

well, during the long nights near the arctic circle this could be a little confusing. especially if your watch stops.

i carved this out of one of elyse's posts on another forum (with her permission). all credit goes to her (http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=32707&st=0entry451772). the context is a discussion of potato skins but it sounds creepier without knowing that: my ex didn't eat the skins i gave him my middle and took his skin

i'd recommend shik do rak over chosun galbi; if only because it is much cheaper and also puts you a lot closer to other diners. the food itself is, i think, as good, and my wife (who is korean and from koreatown) concurs. shik do rak is also a little unusual among korean bbq places in l.a in that they give you the little rice wrappers in which to roll everything before you put it in your mouth. however, chosun galbi may be more non-korean friendly (in every sense). as it happens my wife and i, along with a lot of friends, will be at shik do rak on the 13th (we're passing through l.a on our way to india and it was our first nostalgic choice for bbq we can't get in boulder/denver). soot bull jeep is great too. (edited to fix grammar)

corn passes through us unchanged but the studded turds give me no pleasure

question of clarification: the classical haiku can be 15 or 17 syllables (as in the original basho haiku and my re-working of it). however, if the rule of the game is a strict 17 syllable count, i'd amend it to the following: my steak cooked past well done i own a darker view of my weber grill in case anyone's interested, the original gem by basho is as follows: my house burned down i own a clearer view of the rising moon

i fear the complete allusion is lost on all but a very few al_dente. but perhaps in order to make this food related, we should say: mongo but prawn in life's cocktail horseradish in sauce burns mongo's eyes

with apologies to basho: my house burned down i own a darker view of my weber grill

mmmmm cabbage and ass...

far be it from me to disagree with someone named mixmaster b. doubtless you are right about the larger number of fine dining options in nyc than l.a. i was reacting more to the generic "l.a is a culinary wasteland" kind of thing (not saying someone expressed it here). i guess i don't really care about the fine dining stuff too much anyway since i am moved more by l.a's other cuisines--all of which could care a hoot about the strictures of fine dining. what are your favorite chinese restaurants in the san gabriel valley?

miguel, bu turf-delineation i didn't mean that i thought you were saying only locals could truly appreciate a cuisine; the turf i was referring to is that of the gourmand and the food-writer. certain egullet conversations suggest a belief in an implicit gastronomic evolutionary cycle to me; with the underlying assumption being that people in the next higher level always trump those in the lower. presumably, established food writer is the pinnacle. regards, mongo

this post is in response not to the most recent set of posts from robyn and others but to those from vserna, miguelcardoso and russ parsons (and others) in which they posted their takes on the earlier "theoretical" discussion of el bulli and ferran adria. i am not quoting from all their posts since my response is not to specific things they said but to the tenor of parts of their argument. with that preamble out of the way: i can't help but read a certain amount of turf-delineation in some of the not-quite condescending takes on the discussion in question. let's take a look at this for example: the terms on which a "real" critique of a restaurant can be made turn out, not surprisingly, to be ones on which only very few can operate. say nothing of us parvenus who have not actually eaten at el bulli (or some place else); those who've visited once or twice (the food tourists) get a little bit of approval but they too are dilettantes; it is only the heavyweight--the one who stays a while and eats everyday--who truly can write about the food. there is something to this, of course, even if the logical end, the only true authority, is someone who sleeps in the restaurant every day and then dies there (presumably choking on the day's special). all of this may or may not be intended to dishearten the non-specialist, but i can't see how it doesn't. at least that's my take on it. in any event, what comrades serna and parsons seem to miss in their more than not-quite condescending takes on posts made by me, boris_a and others is that we are quite clearly not talking about the food at el bulli. in fact, this is made quite clear in many of the posts. what we were discussing/attempting to understand was aspects of adria's theory and philosophy of food and relating it to larger cultural narratives. i don't quite get what the problem with such discussions is or why they need to be predicated on prior ingestion, digestion and excretion of the actual food at el bulli. adria is a food theorist. people are presumably buying his books for more than the pretty pictures. are you suggesting that this aspect of his work is not to be taken seriously? that really he's just a hyper creative chef who likes to spin fancy theses on what he's doing to enchant the easily impressed? if so, it is possible that you are not taking him seriously enough. or are you saying that you can't discuss the theory without eating the food? of course the actual experience of the food will have a profound impact on the reception of the theory, but the two can be separated as well (if only provisionally), just as adria's approach to his food can, and has, influence(d) profoundly chefs who've never actually eaten his food. all we're doing here is discussing things anyway--no one is claiming to have hit upon the authoritative understanding of adria or el bulli without having been there (which seems to be the underlying accusation). in the end i think this and the discussion of net vs. paper comes back once again to the question of who gets to talk about food, and more to the point, who gets to talk seriously about food. part of the power of the internet is it allows a certain democratization of conversation (well, at least among people who own computers and internet connections). sure, this creates a lot more static but it also undermines the authority of the old experts who no longer get to monopolize the conversation. this may explain the condescension that many in the old media have for information on the internet. all in all, however, this has been, and continues to be, a very illuminating discussion--in more ways than one.

a better place in venice for mexican would be la cabana on the corner of lincoln and rose. i especially recommend the carne adobada. they also make a mean cadillac margarita. casablanca across the way on lincoln provides more of a kitschy than culinary kick but they do have the most amazing thin fresh tortillas. or in santa monica--on pico between 4th and bay (right by vidiots)--there's a decent oaxacan place named el texate. i used to get their goat burrito. however, if you're looking for more of a scene none of these places would be for you.