Milagai

Barcelona: those beans look and sound delicious. Can you explain the name please? In English, "Fiasco" means something gone disastrously wrong...... What does it mean in Italian? Very curious Milagai

Describing Indians vis a vis other Asian cuisines: There are many Indians who travel widely and enjoy a wide variety of cuisines (though I suspect most harbor a preference for 'the spicier the better'). The large Indian metros esp Delhi and Mumbai have several very authentic and excellent Italian, Japanese, Thai, etc. restaurants..... But there are many who dislike other Asian foods: e.g. they will like "Indian-Chinese" but not authentic Chinese; or not care for many Thai/Vietnamese/other SE Asian dishes) because of the perception that fish sauce lurks in everything.... And middle/upper class, traveling Indians are often not open minded to sampling unfamiliar meats (e.g. cat/bat/dog/snake, etc.) Many won't care for Japanese food ("raw fish!!" or "Looks pretty but tastes bland" are common stereotypes). Definitely the stereotypes and dislikes work both ways. I've often seen/heard people of other Asian origin make fun of Indian food or the 'eating with hands' customs.... Middle-Eastern foods (e.g. the felafel/hummus/tabbouleh/kababs genre) are the most acceptable to Indians as there are so many familiar elements (subtext: sighhhh if only they were a bit spicier ) Italian food: widely enjoyed, whether authentic or desi-fied (e.g. chhole pizza) African: Many have not tried Ethiopian food but those who do almost always love it, the similarities are self-evident.... Other regions of Africa have had large Indian populations historically who have injected their elements into the local foods.... Mexican food: also widely enjoyed because of the similarity of so many ingredients and techniques - beans, cumin and other spices, cilantro, etc. American: Many people chow on McD, KFC etc because of the globalization thing. They enjoy the Indianized versions (e.g. McD vegetarian menu) as served in India or UK, and when traveling are sometimes baffled by the monochrome US versions. Those living in the West have adapted to US foods and will be gracious guests, and younger generations are adapting more and more. But I feel there's always a lingering preference for spicer, jazzier versions of the local foods (e.g. Mac and Cheese spiked with cumin and red pepper) etc. Milagai

No sugar whatsoever. I made the dressings myself. Little oil, lemon juice or vinegar, a few herbs and spices.... Variations on the theme..... Maybe some grated coconut (sprinkles really) or other nuts or cheese occasionally depending on the recipe I just flat out overate. 10 servings instead of one, because 1) I felt hungry 2) They tasted good..... 3) I thought (or failed to think) that these foods were without consequences... I mean, grated carrots and cucumbers? Milagai

I wish I could say the same. Last year I GAINED weight eating unbridled quantities of the very good salads I make. Calories! lurking in shredded cucumber! No explanation other than I ate too much..... Milagai

Malawry, what do you mean by seasoning? The spices and quantities are given in the recipes. Sorry, if you were making a joke, it's totally lost on me.... Pliss to 'splain? Milagai

Rajmah = red kidney beans. Chaaval = rice. Voiila! Great comfort food, and very very simple, yet so psychologically and physically satisfying. Can do it on autopilot. Can be made in the crockpot for cold winter days. Google turns up a zillion recipes for rajmah. One that looks right is here: http://www.greatindianrecipes.com/great-in...recipe-167.html Another site that has useful pictures is here: (this version adds potatoes): http://www.route79.com/food/rajmah.htm For chaaval, make basmati in usual way. Just plain white rice. Try these recipes, but please no piggy parts in rajmah, save those for the LA version...... Milagai

duh! I wasn't aware that there was a meater version of red beans and rice! In my mind, "red beans and rice" equates to "rajmah chaaval" and that is a straight up vegetarian dish that needs no tweaking or improvement whatsoever.... Milagai

Markk: replying to one specific point below (I hope I've got that quote thingy correct): The study that the media jumped all over, which reported that slightly heavier people may have a survival advantage, was flawed in its design and execution. The study didn't exclude the super-thin people who are skinny due to terminal disease (e.g. cancer). So yes, compared to a group that has many of the ill super skinny, the heftier people have a survival advantage! The researchers caught their boo-boo later and have been trying to backpedal, but the media doesn't like to report that.... Milagai ←

In the US: I live in a small college town, delivery options include Chinese, several pizza chains, and some others... In India: Bangalore - you name it, it's deliverable, round the clock. Any cuisine, any time of the day or night! Can get very expensive. Milagai

So, where's the OP? Have any of these replies been useful? For India: Traditional street food abounds, very regional, snacks: ranging from chaats, golgappas, chhole/bhature, sundal, spiced peanuts, etc etc. all over the place. There are also the street-meal guys, who make more substantial parathas/puris, idlis/dosais, etc for the office crowd. A step more upscale, you can get the same stuff at truck stops (dhabas); the Punjab style are the most justly famous - you don't want to mess with a burly Jat trucker's food - parathas, tandoori anything, jugs of fresh lassi with butter floating on the top, wet-sari calendar on the wall. The real dhabas seat you on plastic chairs and formica tables, the upscale/urban versions go "authentic" with string-cot seating and earthenware dishes. Then inside cities, there are the older chains like Woodies/Woodlands, Kamath, etc. specializing in South Indian vegetarian fast food (dosais etc.), and all the Haldiram type shops doing chaat type food in sit-down and more hygenic surroundings vs their street-brethren. Now of course, there's the McD and KFC incursions, and it's great how much McD has had to adapt to the desi market - special vegetarian menus (staff has to bathe, change into the green uniforms, and there's a separate kitchen etc.) etc. Food is so-so - I had a really incomprehensible "curry" sauce in the Bangalore KFC last summer.... Milagai

What about millet? Milagai

I definitely like the inside more, though when something is freshly baked and hot out of the oven I can see the appeal of crust. I am more an "unleavened" or "flat" bread person, so I prefer bread that does not have crust vs. crumb - it's all one... Milagai

Who does the cooking in your home? Mostly me, though others get pressed into service when I am sick or have a deadline. Others include DH, DD (9) and network of friends......Someday someone should write the tenure-track cookbook - who makes what for whom and when..... Do you eat foods from take-out or restaurants or buy ready-made foods often? Takeout: sure, why not! I love not having to cook, and would love to just sit back and issue orders.... Chinese takeout or pizza every few weeks. Ready made foods - rarely Do you cook absolutely "from-scratch" using unprocessed ingredients often? I'm sort of in the middle. I use a lot of canned beans (e.g. kidney or chickpeas), but also a lot of regular dals. I use frozen veggies sometimes (e.g. who wants to slice and dice in the middle of the week? Not I!) But some veggies (e.g. okra) are just abominable frozen and sublime fresh.... My priority is to buy what's on sale / cheap. Often those foods are fresh (e.g. cabbage at .29 c per lb, and cabbage poriyal is really tasty and v easy once it's been shredded); sometimes they are frozen. Also I dont make my own tofu or paneer, both of which I use a fair amount of. I have not yet bought frozen idli/dosai batter though... Are you single, married or living with other(s)? Married, 2 kids. Do you have children? DD 9 and DS 5. DD likes to 'work' in the kitchen but just as soon as she gains competence in something she no longer wants to make it. DS is still a caveman, and getting him to do something other than squish or stomp in the kitchen looks like it will be a loooong project. What sort of work do you do? Academia.... Do you feel you have enough time to cook the sorts of foods you like to eat? Sure, why not. I'm fairly work-averse though. I would much much much rather eat good food that someone else has made. But money constraints, plus the fact that the food we eat is not that widely available processed, forces me to get into the kitchen and COOK. This seems to have dogged all women in my family - my mother and grandmother are/were excellent cooks, malgre lui, they had to learn under various unfavorable circumstances until they reached a point where they found reliable help then they relaxed with a sigh of relief. Every now and then they would make something just to show that they still can/could (boy, they REALLY can/could!). I'm still waiting that happy day for myself. I'm not that great a cook, and I cannot bake to save my life (requires too much precision). I'm interested in the questions of time, culture, society, money and class. As they relate to food and how it fits into our lives, of course. As a question for "extra credit" , is the form of your daily cooking/eating/dining different than it was in your family when you were growing up, and if so, how is it different? My cooking is much more international (e.g. pasta, "Mexican-ish", huge reliance on hummus, million varieties of cheese, etc.). Also, I use canned / frozen stuff that my mother never had access to. Another funny thing is that my parents (scientists and rationalists) raised us non-vegetarian because that was the thinking in those days - meat is better for your health. Now the circle has turned, and in this era of over-nourishment etc. my splinter of the family has become vegetarian - not difficult when you begin with Indian food, and when we ate meat it was more like once in a few weeks rather than every day! But there is still the visceral food-emotion connection to the same darn things that we seem to have eaten for generations - the smallest emotional or physical upheaval and we all run for the rasam-rice! I am just recovering from flu, and have survived the last few days on an industrial sized tank full of rasam that I brewed when I felt it coming on..... The few times my father cooked, he took an engineer's approach: using geometry instruments to ensure that the chapatis were precisely round, experimenting with the bounce-coefficients of various foods dropped on the floor, etc. Very entertaining, but not much help when the family is hungry and just wants the results

People have also become used to eating more and more at each meal, so the subjective view of what's a reasonable portion (or serving?) has gone up.... http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2006/healthy.b...et.exclude.html Milagai

Kerala and Goa: i.e. India's south west (spice) coast. Do I really need to talk more about the food or the scenery? Milagai

What about dedicating some to making preserved lemons? Milagai

ITA! Like "curry powder" - what dish does that make? Especially stuff like "Madras curry powder".... That said, I do use many spice blends for specific dishes like chana masala that use ingredients like pomegranate powder that I would rarely use otherwise. The list on my chana masala spice blend packet has like 15 spices on it, and it's really a lot easier and I do get better results when I use the packaged blend and then tweak a little..... I also will admit to keeping some sambar powder and rasam powder on hand for days I am really feeling to lazy to toast and grind the relevant spices, though I really concur that grinding your own tastes much better.... Milagai

Oh gosh yes it is! In the South in particular. Every time there is a BBQ, I would suspect. Every time a pot of grits is cooked, I'm sure. Every tortilla and slice of cornbread. Every turkey wrap with extra tomato. Every time cornmeal is used to keep a pizza crust from sticking. Every time a squash is baked. Huge influence. ← I agree there is a huge influence in terms of ingredients and perhaps some technique. I don't see it widely acknowledged..... And what about Native American dishes as such? Milagai

So, Native American ingredients (corn, tomatoes, beans, turkey, etc) are widely incorporated into modern American cooking (whatever that is - seems mostly Euro-derived) but Native American cuisine does not even blip on the radar of modern American cooking? What about stuff like chili - not seen as American cooking? I'm curious... Milagai

Chufi: I don't know if you have been asked this upthread, but have you considered writing a cookbook and / or cooking feature on Dutch food? You have great recipes, pictures, food lore, history, etc etc. Seems a winning package... Happy new year to all Milagai

I'm too late to play my "A is for Asafetida", but then I'll save it for "H is for Hing"... Miraculous spice... Are we at E now? E is for Eggplant (in some form of entree) on the menu..... Milagai

Soy is also used quite a bit in Japan, Korea, and Java, in various forms. But I don't think anyone is claiming that Chinese food is traditionally "built around" soy. Rather, rice is the staple, for the most part (flatbread is used a good deal in the north). But alarmism over soy just doesn't pass the smell test with me. My challenge to those who are alarmist about soy is: Point to evidence of a greater level of birth defects and breast cancer in China and Japan (or a decrease in fertility, good luck there!) as compared to low-soy-consuming nations, that can be clearly attributed to the consumption of soy, or hold your peace. No-one says you have to like or eat soy. I don't like briny fish eggs. But I don't tell people those are going to emasculate them or give them cancer. ← What Pan said! More thoughts: 1) China and Japan have very low birth rates these days, not because they have been rendered infertile by soy, but because social conditions lead people to choose not to have more kids. 2) There is very little evidence for health benefits or health negative effects of soy. People who get alarmist, or are over-strong proponents of soy, seem to have other agendas. 3) As with any other food, why not eat soy because it tastes good, and not attribute all kinds of properties to it? Edamame rocks! tofu is terrific - I mean, really, though it's fashionable to have an anti-tofu knee jerk reaction from the gizzards-and-lizards crowd, few of them seem to have actually eaten the stuff well prepared..... 4) And if we are considering the pros and cons of different foods for kids, I would rather (and have done so) feed my kids soy not-dogs on occasion, rather than the concoction of pickled pig rectums + wierd chemicals that stuffs the average hot dog..... Milagai

or desi slang for samosas... Milagai

I have a family (DH and 2 kids) but I also do what you do. I shop weekly. I have a mental idea of how many meals (breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks) we need. Then I see what's on sale, and plan the specific dishes around those. We have some specific items we buy each week (e.g. milk, fruit, veggies, etc.) but other than milk, those categories are so broad that they can adjust to include anything that's on sale.... Milagai

Another bafflement: why is pizza called "pie" in some places (New York?) Milagai