susruta

A city that has quite a few Sri Lankan restaurants and grocery stores is Toronto. On a recent visit I discovered a new Chettinad restaurant that is the first overseas branch of a restaurant in India. The food was good but, not surprisingly, very hot! It is on Eglinton Avenue in Scarborough near Markham Road, just a few blocks from my childhood home. Also a lot of Trinidadian and Guyanese restaurants in the neighborhood.

Is paneer a common item in South Indian diets? Or is it mainly a North Indian ingredient?

Hi, Milagai. No, I'm not a physician. For some reason, that name came to mind when I signed on with e-gullet. You are right -- you need to eat a LOT of fruit to get the nine servings. And tropical fruits like mangoes and papaya are really rich in vitamins and trace minerals. Chinese and Southeast Asians probably find it easiest to meet the dietary requirements since their meals are typically a lot of vegetables with a little meat. I find it easier to include a lot of green, yellow and orange veggies in Western style meals than I do in Indian ones.

The new US dietary guidelines recommend 9 servings of fruit and vegetables a day. Although Indian food is predominantly vegetarian -- even non-vegs eat just a little meat by US standards -- my sense is that it is heavy on starches and dairy products. and that it may be hard even for vegetarians to comply with these new guidelines. I'm interested in hearing what others think about this.

In Chicago the blizzard came and went yesterday. For lunch I made a hearty punjabi meal of sarson da saag (using frozen mustard greens and spinach) with a packaged dal makhani (wasn't too bad!) and corn tortillas (makki di roti). For dinner I made pork vindaloo. I don't usually cook so much but we were housebound all day, so it seemed like a good thing to do .

Episure, that is very interesting. My late Bengali father in law (who would be in his 90s were he alive) used to love tomato soup and would have it as the first course even of an Indian meal, The preferred variety in their household was Heinz, which became the model of tomato soups. Among Westernized Bengalis, this may have come from restaurants like Firpo's in Calcutta which served soup as a first course.

IS soup actually part of a traditional Indian meal? Apart from Maharashtra, I don't think soup is taken as a first course, as it is in western cuisine. I don't count sambar, dals, etc. as soups.

I made Peking duck at home a couple of times on Thanksgiving and Christmas.. I hung it from an upstairs window on a sort of pulley I rigged up; it blew back and forth in the Chicago wind (It wasn't freezing either time, fortunately). The sight of this bird flapping back and forth outside of our kitchen window drove our late dog berserk, especially since duck was her favorite food in the world. It wasn't bad; half of the skin separated but the other half didn't. I wanted to make it again this year but my husband tactfully suggested we go to our favorite restaurant, where a six course peking duck dinner, including lobster and steamed fish, is availble at a reasonable price. So we got a group of friends together and had a great dinner.

I don't really know why chickens are not eaten by the orthodox. Achaya speculates that it may be because it is a scavenger that eats everything it finds, like the pig.

I believe the reason that duck eggs were popular in Bengal and perhaps elswhere was that some Hindus did not eat chicken eggs for the same reason they did not eat chicken. My husband remembers as a child in Calcutta that the egg man would come to the house selling duck eggs and then would whisper secretively "We have chicken eggs too, if you want them." Any thoughts on this?

My most memorable meal: My favorite Bengali meal is a simple lucchi/chenzhki, basically sauteed onions and vegetables. Whenever I would visit my father in law in India, the family cook would prepare this simple dish for me as my first meal after arrival. One day a very fat pompous Bengali lady was present at this welcoming lunch. She was shocked that the "bou" (daughter in law) was being treated so inhospitably, ordered the cook to go and get me some ice cream, and promptly ate the rest of the lucchi chenzhki. I have resented this ever since.

Does anyone have a recipe for kobiraji cutlet? We'd like to try it at home but have no idea how to get the right "fuzzy" texture.

One of the best Indian restaurants I've ever dined at is in Houston, of all places: Indika at 12665 Memorial Drive (though they are moving closer to downtown.) The service is excellent, the dishes superb, especially the roast lamb which melts in your mouth, the wine list nice, and the prices very reasonable. In my books, it's superior to some of the very expensive places in London and Delhi. The chef/owner anita Jaisignhani used to be the pastry chef at annie's cafe, perhaps Houston's top restaurant. Her clientele was originally American but when I was there recently most of the tables were filled with people of subcontinental origin.

There are so many ready made Indian foods on the market now that you barely have to cook. Most Indian grocery stores stock dozens of kinds of frozen breads from every region of India as well as frozen entrees and dishs in cans and packages that don't need to be stored in the refrigerator. They're not always great but they are good in a pinch. You can buy them in the Indian grocery stores that are ubiquitous in the US now. Every large city has an Indian shopping area and Indian grocery stores abound in the suburbs as well as small towns and university towns. Of course, it's boring eating ready made foods all the time so do as the French do: make meals that combine ready made and home made dishes. Also, Indian food has the advantage of improving for a few days after prepration so it encourages you to make things in larger batches than you would do otherwise. However, my rule of thumb is that when I am cooking only for myself, I won't eat any dish more than three times or more than twice in a row.