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susruta

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Everything posted by susruta

  1. 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.
  2. Is paneer a common item in South Indian diets? Or is it mainly a North Indian ingredient?
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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 .
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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?
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. What about Ng gao pei (sp) My husband had it once at a Chinese friend's house and really liked it. I finally found a bottle in a liquor store in San Fracisco but haven't encountered it anywhere else. It's really strong.
  16. I adore Trinidadian ground spices, especially roasted geera (the spelling on the label of the Chief brand) and use them in all sorts of dishes, Western, Mexican, Indian, etc. They have a wonderful rich aroma. I haven't seen roasted ground spices sold in Indian food stores. My husband uses only certain brands curry powder sold in Chinese g rocery stores to make the old fashioned English-style curries he remembers from childhood. He says those sold in Indian stores don't work.
  17. Bukhara in Chicago used to be owned by the ITC group and was probably related to the other restaurants by this name, but ITC sold it several years and it is now called Bukara. I was only there once and don't remember it as anything special, but someone else might have better information.
  18. Excellent suggestions, thanks. I will perform a controlled experiment this weekend cooking masoor dal three ways: without any salt or haldi, with salt, and with haldi. I will then give samples to some people who aren't aware of the controversy and ask them to give their impressions of the texture and softness of the dal. I will report back here. We will see if age-old wisdom is correct or not!
  19. Is it or is it not correct to cook dal with haldi? My husband quotes a Hindi proverb to the effect that if you cook dal and haldi the dal will not become soft. However, all the cookbooks I consulted have recipes in which lentils are cooked with turmeric, whether it be masur, channa, arhar dal, etc. .
  20. Just returned from Toronto where we made a special trip to the Indian shopping area on Gerrard in search of Indian/Pakistani mangoes. We weren't disappointed. We found several varieties, including Chosa, Langra, and Dassehri (no Alphonsos; they apparently came and went.) The quality was uneven: some were ripe and very sweet, others were not. But one thing they had in common was a lack of fiber, which is the besetting sin of Western Hemisphere mangoes And in general they were better than anything I have had here.. The cost was $19 (Canadian) for a box of 8 Indian dassehir mangoes, which were the most expensive. We also picked up some mangosteen, jackfruit, custard apples, and rambutan and enjoyed a Sri Lankan meal in Scarberia (i.e., Scarborough, a large sprawling district of little shopping malls on the eastern part of teh city, which is mecca for all sorts of ethnic dining. East and West Indian/Chinese restaurants seem to be all the rage right now.
  21. Lots of frozen bread that I have every day for breakfast with yogurt, pickle, and a little green vegetable that I cooked in the microsave. My favorite are the Kerala-style porottas made by a company called Daily Delight based in Kerala. They're not as large as the regular parathas. The ready to serve vegetarian dishes in pouches made by Swad and other companies are also not bad and are handy for emergencies when you really crave Indian food.
  22. Ben, you are so right! The contributions of Asian immigrants to Toronto and Canada has been enormous, on the economy, of course, but especially in the culinary area. And this doesn't apply only to Chinese food; if you go to a French restaurant in Toronto, for example, a large proportion of the clientele will be Chinese. Someone told me that in Vancouver the waiters in French restaurants speak Cantonese -- but this story may be apocryphal. . .
  23. There are around 500,000 Chinese and Southeast Asians in the Toronto area, an enormous population base that can support a lot of specialized and high-end restaurants. ALso, many of them are from Hong Kong. The South Asian population is, I think, around 250,000 or so. There are a lot of South Indian and Tamil restaurants in the suburbs as well as innumerable West Indian places. Roti (Trinidadian style) might one day become the Canadian (or at least the Torontonian) national dish!
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