Dimple

[anil]

Falooda is that pink ice cream sundae with gelatinous worm-like noodle-ish things in it? .....

Gelatinous worm-like noodle is vermicelli.

[Fat Guy]

Anil, over in India is that how they actually reference the product or is there some Bengali or Hindi word for it? I know that in Italian vermicelli actually means "little worms" so I'm wondering whether a similar description has sprung up in other languages.

[anil]

Anil, over in India is that how they actually reference the product or is there some Bengali or Hindi word for it? I know that in Italian vermicelli actually means "little worms" so I'm wondering whether a similar description has sprung up in other languages.

My recollections lead me to believe that glass vermicelli, is called falooda.

Home-made vermicelli was made by pressing the viscous paste (don't ask me what goes into the paste, since I'm not a cook ) through a "semai" (sp?) press - very similar to paste noddle hand-cranked machine one see's in Italy.

If there is a specific word for flooda in Bengali, Simon would have to chime in, and for the rest - We have suvir to thank..

[Stone]

This morning I walked up to the flea market on 25th and 6th. Boy, was it sad. Almost completely empty. I wonder if that's because it's Easter or if the flea market is dwindling away?

Anywho, since I was in the neighborhood, I walked over to Dimple for lunch.

I ordered a thali. It was very good. They loaded my tin tray with a huge pile of food. Rice, yellow lentil daal, a spicy curry of cheese, tomato and onion, aloo matter (with peas so incredibly flavorful that i was shocked) and something that looked like malai kofta with a little piece of chili in the middle of the dumpling.

In addition, they gave me something they called "patra". It was completely new to me. Spiced chickpea flour with spinach pressed into a large meatloaf-like cake and sliced. It was a tad too dry, but the flavors were very interesting.

On the side were two chapatis, papad, a few chutnies, and a good-sized bowl of brown lentiil daal.

On the whole, the food was very good. The different curries managed to pull off a nice range of flavors with a good amount of heat that wasn't overpowering. My one real criticism is that the food wasn't heated enough.

The thali was $9.75.

[Papaya]

My (Indian) aunt in London makes patra, though she uses some kind of special leaf instead of spinach and rolls it into logs, then slices it into spirals. It's delicious.

I've never seen it or had it here in the U.S. though.