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Making small talk with my niece in Delhi I asked her what was the latest in the food scene. Pat came the answer 'Nanzza'. What the heck is that I enquired? Here is how she described it. Its a cross between a nan and a pizza. A nan is made the regular way in a tandoor(I forgot to ask her if its the traditional shape or rounded like a pizza). Its then layered sparingly with peices of butter chicken, a little butter chicken sauce is then smeared on top. Finally its sprinked with mozzerella cheese and baked till the cheese melts. Behold your Nanzza is ready. Thought I would share it with you. Monica's going to be in delhi soon, maybe she will let us know what else is happenening there. Prasad. You want to kitchen test this and let us know how it turns out? I would do it but I am extremely short staffed, with no free time

Much on the lines of the Tomato sauce confessions, now it's Condensed Milk's time. Milkmaid on Toast used to be my favourite! Given half the chance I still make a Chai with Condensed milk. A company here in India has just started making plain and strawberry flavoured condensed milk in toothpaste style packs. Great to put on Parathas. Stand up and be counted, everyone!

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!

my wife has returned from the grocery store with spaghetti squash. what she was supposed to get was either butternut squash or kabocha. i have never cooked spaghetti squash and from what i can see about it online it doesn't sound like it can be cooked like kaddu. any suggestions?

What is a katol or turbot?? Can someone help

Hi, Some of the most memorable dishes I have eaten in Indian restaurants had a smokey flavour to it. I can still almost taste the mixed dal I ate in a small restaurant in Edinburgh, the aloo gobhi and a mushroom rice here in Dublin , the smokiness enhancing their flavour superbly. I know that they must be using their tandoor to get that flavour, but is there any way to recreate it at home? I neither have a tandoor nor a BBQ, so I was delighted when Sanjeev Kapoor showed a way to cook 'Dhungar Dal' on Khana Khazana. The results were quite disappointing - there was no smoke flavour at all. These are the things I have tried: - Cook dal, place a piece of foil on top. Now put a piece of live coal on the foil and pour a few drops of ghee onto the coal. Cover tightly and allow to smoke for a few minutes. This is Sanjeev Kapoor's trick, but it didn't work for me. - I roasted the uncooked dal, even burnt it a bit on purpose, and then cooked it. This tasted burnt (and why wouldn't it? ) rather than smoked. - I added liquid smoke to my aloo gobhi, but the flavour of the liquid smoke goes better with Western dishes, definitely not with Aloo gobhi. - My bharthas and naans are good enough because I char them over the gas fire. And as I write that it occurs to me that perhaps I could char the aloo/gobhi a bit too. But how do I do the dal? Suman

Yesterday I bought a small pouch of Deep Foods' Dry Garlic Chutney. It is hot and garlicky and kind of dry and crumbly in texture. I would like to try this on my own. Anyone out there care to share a reciepe?

suvir and others, i never reported on my adventures with this recipe (from the home-cooking thread)--re-posting it below. i've made it twice now, the first time with a squash from the farmer's market in boulder that more closely resembled the indian kaddu and the second time with butternut squash. i am happy to report that in both cases the result was phenomenal and i would urge everyone who hasn't yet tried it to do so. suvir, please convey my thanks to panditji and keep a portion for yourself for acting as the conduit. here's my comments/slight variations on the recipe: *butternut squash cubes hold their shape far more readily than the mystery farmer's mkt. squash, so those who are experimenting with other squashes/pumpkins would do well to cook not by time but by feel. if you actually cook certain squashes for 25 minutes you won't need to mash any pieces, they'll completely disintegrate. then again this may be a matter of textural preference. i like more mash, my wife prefers a more solid texture. *in my second sortie i upped the spiciness quotient a little by doubling the green chillies (i use thai chillies) red chilly powder. i personally like the spicy kick with the sweetness of the squash--i also didn't add as much of the amchur, preferring the spicy/sweet with a hint of sour balance to the sour-sweet combination. again a matter of personal taste. *i also added a touch more hing--the earthy aroma of hing really goes well with the sweetness of squash but i can see how this is a dangerous game to play--there is such a thing as too much hing. we ate this alongside an improvised dish of potatoes and green-beans, bengali style mushoor dal with liberal squeezes of lime and hot phulkas. we were happy. while i like my slight variation i would recommend people start with the original: it is a bullet-proof recipe (the only complicated part is the cutting of the squash) and you should taste its splendor before you tinker with it. more home-cooking recipes please! ---------------------------------------------- here's the original as posted by suvir: SWEET AND SOUR BUTTERNUT SQUASH WITH GINGER AND CHILIES Kaddu Kee Sabzi Serves 4 to 6 In my grandmother’s home in Delhi, visitors would arrive begging to eat Panditjis preparation of this very simple and humble vegetable. His recipe, reproduced here, was fabled to be deliciously addictive; you will find out. Kaddu is the Hindi word for the oblong shaped, Indian pumpkin. In America, I use butternut squash instead: it comes close enough in flavor and makes it unnecessary to go hunting for the real thing in Asian markets. The end result is a dish that is authentic in taste and just as beautifully orange. Try it with a traditional Thanksgiving meal. 2- to 2 1/4- pound butternut squash 3 tablespoons canola oil 1 inch fresh ginger, peeled and minced 1 fresh, hot green chili, chopped 1/4 teaspoon fenugreek seeds 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1/8 teaspoon asafetida 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, or to taste 1 1/2 teaspoons sugar 2 teaspoons dried mango powder (amchur) 1. Cut the squash in half lengthwise. Peel it with a vegetable peeler or a paring knife and scrape out the seeds. Cut the two halves lengthwise into 1/2-inch-thick strips. Then cut the strips crosswise into 1 1/2-inch pieces. 2. Heat the oil in a large wok, kadai or frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the ginger and cook, stirring, 1 minute. 3. Add the fresh chili, the fenugreek, cayenne and asafetida and cook, stirring, 30 seconds. 4. Add the squash and stir to coat with the oil. Stir in the salt and sugar. Turn the heat down to medium. Cover and cook until the squash is tender, about 25 minutes. Uncover and stir the squash every 5 minutes and check on the cooking; if the spices begin to burn, turn the heat down. If the squash doesn’t brown at all, turn the heat up slightly. 5. Stir in the dried mango powder. Mash the squash with a spoon to break up some of the pieces. Taste for salt and serve hot.

This morning as usual I stopped by my wholesale seafood vendor where I buy my seafood for the restaurant. I was buying some Chilean Sea Bass which looked gorgeous, one pound red snappers, some Halibut and some mussels. On my way out The guy asked me if I was interested in buying some big prawns. I said I got pretty big prawns in my freezer. He said these are unusually big, I would say two or three per pound or may be five for two pounds. Since I had quite a bit of seafood in my hand I said I shall return in a day or two to get those big Prawns. Any suggestion on how to prepare these big prawns. As appa or as an entree...

Planning a first foray to India, 11 days in Kerala. We're flying into and out of Kochi, but itinerary will be guided by, of course, food. I know little about Keralan food other than that it is varied and delicious ... so any recommendations in terms of "must-eats", reference sources/cookbooks that would help me bone up on Keralan cuisine before the trip, even specific restaurants, shops or stalls in Kerala to check out, would all be much appreciated.

Does anyone know of cookbooks that cover the cooking of the Indian diaspora? I'm researching some stories on Indian cookbooks, and I thought this would be an interesting angle. The few such cookbooks I've seen are fascinating - familiar Indian recipes, but with differences in ingredients and influences that reflect the histories of these communities. I guess many of these cookbooks are conscious attempts to commemorate these communities, so they all filled with anecdotes and nostalgia that make them really interesting, and often moving, reading. I know the classic South African Indian 'bible' - Zuleikha Mayat's 'Indian Delights'. I have some South African Indian relatives myself, the wives of my Gujarati cousins who now live in India, and make some interesting recipes which they tell me they brought with them from SA. For example, they take kandh - yam with a weirdly blue-purple coloured flesh - and cook it and slice it thinly and use these slices to sandwich a mixture of grated coconut and coriander leaves and some other spices. It looks bizarre: purple sandwiches with a white-green filling, but tastes great. I've just picked up another really interesting book: Recipes of the Jaffna Tamils, edited by Nesa Eliezer and printed by Orient Longman. Since Jaffna is just a strait's distance from Tamil Nadu one wouldn't expect the food to be that different, and much of it is standard Tamil stuff. But there are interesting variations, like a whole section on recipes using the products of the palmyra palm. Also, and I realise this might sound political, but its not meant to be, Tamil Brahmin cuisine and culture seems to have less of a hold in Sri Lanka as it does in India. So while the image of Tamil food in India is dominated by vegetarian Brahmin cooking (at least till the recent rise of 'Chettiar' cooking), the recipes in this book reflect the non-vegetarian cooking that is very much a part of Non-Brahmin Tamil life. A recipe for rasam flavoured with chicken bones for example sounds really surprising to someone used to the common vegetarian only version. Are there other such cookbooks for the desi communities in Trinidad, Mauritius, Fiji and where else? A friend who was coming from Guyana promised to get me a Guyanese-Indian cookbook, though unfortunately he cancelled his trip at the last minute. (But this link has some interesting recipes: http://guyana.gwebworks.com/recipes/recipe...pes_alpha.shtml ) Any names, comments, recipes, suggestions from people with experience of desi diasporic cooking would be welcome. Vikram

I'd like to try it at home, but could not find a recipe. Thanks, Boaziko

I love Indian/Chinese food how it is made in India and I believe some restaurants are cooking up a storm on this kind of food in most major comopolitan cities. I make a decent Manchurian. For instance tomorrow I have to serve a party Gobi (Cauliflower) Manchurian... crisp cauliflower balls in soy, coriander and hot garlic sauce and they also requested a Chinese/Indian style Chilly Chicken. Any suggestions, comments and recepes for .... Chilly Chicken Chicken 65 Ginger Chicken Any Manchrian Other recipes of Indian/Chinese origin. P2

I had a conversation with someone last night about the use of fruit in Indian food and it was very difficult to come up with more than a few dishes. In Latin food, the use of hot chilli is balanced with the use of fruit in salsas etc but this is not the case in my knowledge of Indian dishes. Where fruit is used it almost fuels the fire not calms it ( chutneys, pickles etc ) Desserts too seem almost entirley milk and sugar based. I have scoured the net looking for recipes but can't seem to find anything. Am I really missing a trick? S

What is your favorite Saag? Where do you get it? What is it made of? What restaurant serves your favorite Saag recipe. How do they make it? What do they call it?

I ate Mirchi Kaa Saalan (chilies in a curry sauce) today. Do you know it? Make it? Is it made at a restaurant near you?

Do you all know Chikki (nut brittle)? In northern India it is mostly made with peanuts. In western India it is made with mixed nuts, with peanuts alone, just almonds, or just cashews, or even all these nuts and some times sesame seeds are added. What is your favorite brittle? How is different from others? WHere do you find them?

Pav Bhaji is the mash of potatoes, peas, onions, tomatoes and other vegetables with pav bhaji masala (special blend of spices) and lots of butter. It is served with pav (buns) that the Potugese are meant to have introduced to India. I find the hot dog buns closest in texture and shape. Do you know Pav Bhaji? Where do you eat it? Restaurant or home? Where is your favorite Pav Bhaji place? What do you know about Pav Bhaji legend?

Any favorites? Where do you get them? Why do you like these Beers opposted to others?

What do you cook in the realm of Indian cooking during the summer? What are those dishes? What makes them suited for this season?

On Friday night my friend and I tried to duplicate the Indian meal we'd learned to prepare in our Indian Cooking class. I won't bore you with too many details but want to share one revelation and make one plea for help. 1] we tried making pakoras from thinly sliced vegs [potatoes, eggplant, squash]. i thought the pakora batter looked wrong but wasn't sure why or how, being a total novice to Indian cooking. we coated the slices and dropped them in the heated oil [@ 4 inches] and all the batter came off. so then jennifer got the idea to make fritters--she added about a cupful or chickpea flour to the batter, we diced the vegs and mied them together in the batter, then i dropped them by the tablespoonful into the oil, reduced to about an inch in the bottom of a wok--they cooked nicely, crispy, just a little greasy but otherwise flavorful. i asked jennifer if this was another traditional way of making pakoras and she said she'd never heard of them done this way, and that maybe she had made it up. did she? does anyone know? this method works splendidly, in any case. 2] i think but dare not voice my suspicion to my friend, who seems commited to her belief that Nirav gram flour is the correct flour, that we used the wrong flour. help me, someone. the recipe, and our teacher, told us to use "besan [Nirav brand,chickpea flour, gram flour]"--the instructions ahveme confused. okay, so at the indian grocery we get a bad marked Nirav besan gram flour. it looks courser and darker than the chickpea flour she added later to the batter--and no where on the bag does it say chickpea flour, just gram flour. what IS besan? is there more than one type? do pakoras require a blend of gram and chickpea or are these the same thing? i have no idea and would appreciate any advice. [the rest of the meal, stuffed parathas, kadhi, kichadi, green chutney--all good tho salty [we followed the recipes to a T, something I normally don't do]. the besan burphi turned out the best, tho it was a little stiff]

Hi Guys, As I live in London and being a person who eats out at Indian restaurants here all the time. What is your opinion of them? Good, bad or plain nasty? Generally speaking of course. Just interested.... Hasmi

Mushrooms are made quite a lot in northern India. They are avoided in vegetarian homes for people associate them with meat. Do not ask me why.. I have heard a hundred different answers. In fact in my own home, till I was 13, we never ate mushrooms. But then, my sister got a taste for them and I became lucky for that. We never stopped eating them after that and now have many recipes in our household using them. And these are age old recipes. In fact in Srinagar Club or what used to be called that they made the best Open Toast Mushroom Sandwiches. These were toasts topped with a spicy preparations of Karahi Mushrooms and it is heaven tasted at every crunchy bite. Our friend Bindiya whose family fled Srinagar would make these as evening snacks. It was nostalgia for her and a feast for the senses for me and our other friends. In my cook book I will have at least 2-3 recipes with mushrooms. In my kitchen at home, I make them in innumerable ways. All Indian and all recipes I learned at home from Panditji, a very conservative Indian chef. Mind you my father never eats mushrooms. He finds t hem meaty and enjoys looking at us eat them but cannot even fathom tasting one.

Not sure whether this belongs on this or the NY thread, but after "chatting" with Suvir, I thought it might be fun to get a group to go for chaat at Dimple Chaat House on a weekend afternoon for a quick bite of some Indian treats and to meet people who have kept the India thread alive and interesting. What do others think? When would be a good time to go?

I have been invited to the wedding of a good gujurati friend and he has asked that all guests bring a dish of food or a dessert. All must be Indian. They can come from any region and all must be unusual, in his words "rarely found outside the region" can anyone help with some suggestions? S