mongo_jones

vikram, thanks for bringing back memories of food i can't get anymore. i remember fondly jaunts to the jama masjid area in my delhi university days to eat slow-cooked nihari early in the morning. though our politicians are trying their best to change all of this, the syncretic nature of indian society (as manifested in our much less complicated relationships with each others' foods as compared to religions) isn't just a romantic, nostalgic conception. while on the subject, i'd like to commision an up to date piece on current recommended old-delhi spots for kababs, biryani and parathas. i'll be in delhi this winter and part of the itinerary is ruining indian food in the u.s completely for my wife. mongo

Speaking of...I've heard of a couple places around here serving pizza using naan as the crust. There's a pizza place on the other side of town that serves a spicy chicken vindaloo pizza. california pizza kitchen has an unfortunate tandoori chicken pizza as well. i'd see this as an example of what i was talking about more if something like this originated in an indian restaurant--naan and keema served pizza style, or some version of macaroni with keema and paneer (yes, i know it sounds horrible).

yes, but as amitav ghosh describes in "shadow lines" (when ila takes the narrator and robi to dinner at a "indian" restaurant run by sylheti east pakistanis in london) the food that sprang up in indian restaurants in england wasn't really anything like what the british colonials might have experienced back in india.

indo-caribbean food is a good example of the kind of thing i'm looking for. you can see the indian origins clearly, yet it is also quite clearly different. italian food in the u.s has also changed since the first immigrants arrived (pizza anyone?). in both those cases, and that of chinese food in the u.s and also in india, the immigrant communities have been around for more than a hundred years. is that what it takes? the process seems to have sped up in the u.k--which seems paradoxical since you'd think the higher concentration of immigrants would result in a longer preservation of "authenticity" (as with korean food in los angeles or chinese food in the outlying san gabriel valley). perhaps it has to do with how quickly the (relatively) newly arrived cuisine is adopted by people outside that community (not foodies--who insist on things being made the way they "should"-- but mainstream folks).

curries with fruit is a colonial english thing. curry powder is not an american concoction either--indian cooks in india have been using it for ages. i don't know about sauces in jars and mixes either--patak's is an english brand anyway, and it seems to be the most popular of all the jar-mix brands. chicken tikka masala may have a greater profile in the diaspora than in india but i would have to say that it too is more an english than an american thing, or at least earlier. in general, i guess i'm looking for something other than just a blandified version of an indian staple.

does in indian food in the u.s have its analogue for orange chicken yet or even chinese chicken salad? or even for balti food? has anyone come across any indian dish that has hybridized or adapted to meet local tastes in the u.s, in the process becoming different while still recognizable in a geographically homogeneous way? i use "indian-american" to describe what i'm talking about not to suggest food eaten/cooked by indian-americans (though i would also be interested to know if the food of second generation indian-americans is qualitatively different from those of first generationers and that of the home country) but to suggest a similar hyphenated identity for food that we use for all the various hyphenated immigrant american identities. in other words, how has indian food in the u.s changed (if it has) over the decades that it has been here? has the change been only in terms of adapting to the tastes of more recent waves of indian immigrants (thus giving them more of what they were used to in indian restaurants in india) or has it also been (if only in a few areas) to completely local non-indian tastes? it would be too depressing only if it turns out the cookie-cutter north-indian menus have held out largely unchanged since the sixties.

good going suvir. i hadn't realized making serious southern food is what amma is trying to do though.

or at the least nepali. however, just as you have bangladeshis running indian restaurants in new york and london many indian restaurants in boulder seem to be at least staffed, if not owned, by nepalis and tibetans--something to do with the climbing culture here. sherpa's has a token tibetan section on their menu, but if the execrable momos i sampled are representative of their skills they're better off pushing their cookie cutter north indian dishes which were marginally better. what is bizarre, or not, is that the place was crammed and apparently has won awards locally. seeing all this i thought perhaps i'd caught it on a bad night but one of the people i was with said she'd been there many times before and it wasn't much worse than usual. ah well, so far the indian restaurant record in boulder is 1-1-1.

whaddaya know, i'd even posted a couple of messages in that thread! will try it some time soon--hopefully my local indian grocer carries sambhar powder (normally one wouldn't ask such questions, but they also carry only one brand of basmati rice).

"a noodle dish called upuma" -- is this something other than the suji based upmas i'm used to or is this faulty labelling. elsewhere in the article i ask if someone told the writer that sambar isn't a kerala specific dish and/or that kerala food isn't the only indian cuisine different than the north indian food most americans recognize. and did nobody feed the poor man and his wife some appams with stew? on the whole though, an interesting article, and good to see other parts of india getting some play--i wonder if this visibility in the ny times is the first concrete sign of kerala food perhaps getting a higher profile in the u.s.

episure, how about that recipe of yours that bhasin referred to? i suppose i could just scour the site for it but that seems like too much work. mongo

actually, the larger site is also interesting: http://www.indiaprofile.com/cuisine/index.html

repeat: the naga dried meat thing i described is not a momo. here's a link to a site that has some information on food of the north-eastern states. vikram, you'll like the title: http://www.indiaprofile.com/cuisine/northe...ast-cuisine.htm

so, what would your recipe be episure? just remove the step in which bhasin adds 5 heart-attacks worth of ldl? i should track down my mother's recipe and post it too, so people can compare.

sounds good bhasin, and my arteries are clogging up just reading the recipe. anyone else have a (perhaps slightly less saturated by saturated fat) recipe?

when in boulder, colorado do NOT eat at sherpa's.

as winter in colorado approaches it become time for gajar halwa. of course in two months i'll be in delhi eating far superior versions of it than i could ever make but i'd like to take another stab at it. my mother's recipe is a little too cholesterol unconscious for my heart (though this may be a built in problem with the dish), and also it contains a number of short-cutty maneuvers that don't bother indian cooks in india but make people like me in the diaspora feel all inauthentic. so let all your gajar ka halwa recipes fly people!

no, no, if the momos you're talking about is the same thing that monica is talking about that's a nepalese/tibetan incarnation of what in the u.s are known as potstickers. what i am describing is literally a powdered meat and spice thing. i have no idea how it is eaten in nagaland: my friend used to bring it back in large tins and we would just scoop it out with our hands and eat it neat (and then rush for water or the toilet).

my mother was a horrible cook when she first got married (she's from a large calcutta family and as the youngest daughter never needed to cook--plenty of cooks and widowed aunts around to do that) but evolved very quickly to become a pretty good one. she is largely self-taught, i think. certainly she never used cookbooks for anything other than "continental" food. the food we ate at home was largely bengali (both west and east bengali stuff--my father being an east-bengali) with her takes on other regional dishes thrown in (see my earlier post about kali dal). my father's family consists of a fine collection of home-style epicures (almost all of them now have major medical problems related to food consumption) and my grandmother on that side may be one of the greatest cooks of her generation. my mother's only regret about not having lived in calcutta after her marriage is that she didn't get to learn my thakuma's recipes. the recipient of that privilege was my youngest uncle's wife who may, as a result, be among the finest cooks of her generation. oh to live a life without eating her dal-puri and alur-dom is like living a life of denial regardless of how many michelin starred restaurants you've eaten at. i've thought of asking her for a recipe and then observing her cook on my trips to calcutta but i abstain since i'd prefer not to taint my memories or torture myself with my takes on it and instead look forward almost religiously to eating at her house once every two years. only two more months!

thanks for the tip episure. i'm going to be in india this winter, i'll make sure to pick up a stack of the stuff, of course, while there i'm not going to eat any gulab jamuns made from packet mixes; no sir, anyone who wants to find me will be able to do so at nathu's in bengali market.

maybe it is me but i think i could find lots of ways (and pleasure) in denying this guy fulfilment of his sense of entitlement. anyway: beers. i like beer with north indian food but i don't see much point in fetishizing indian beers over others. any good hoppy lager or pilsner or pale ale style beer works for me.

ah, now if it had been non-veg the north-eastern states would shine. i had a friend from nagaland in boarding school who used to bring back tons of this ground meat (venison i think) laced with powdered chilli and spices. it looked and tasted like gunpowder. ah, how we ate it by the handful and how we paid for it soon after! also, i've had some brilliant assamese food involving fish and yes, bamboo shoots. one of the advantages of being from a military background is that you not only get to live all over india and taste lots of different indian cuisines but you also have easy access to home-cooking of a lot of states when you're nowhere near them. this menu sounds ghastly. it sounds like whoever came up with it exhausted their imagination with the concept and didn't have anything left over when it came to actual dish selection. by the way vikram, you're missing rajasthan as well.

well, despising it is putting it a little too strongly; to say i am bemused by most descriptions of contemporary indian cuisine would be a better description (for all the reasons both i and vikram have posted in various threads in the past). and it really has nothing to do with you--i haven't eaten your cooking so i can't say if i would despise it. if it makes you feel any better i've had adverse reactions to the fusion cuisine of such luminaries as wolfgang puck (at chinois on main and the now defunct indochine) and joachim splichal (at patina) whose food i have eaten. why don't you post the green beans recipe here? i'm sure other people would love to see it too.

presumably you've seen suvir/panditji's kaddu recipe (substituting butternut squash) that's on this site.

hi all, i'm looking for a new way to cook grean beans. i'm open to all suggestions that don't include more than 5 minutes of prep time or more than 7 ingredients (including spices and condiments).