Sambar Spicy

I Can Do Better Than That!

2009-06-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

I met up with my sister and her man friend the other day in an Indian grocery store I had told her about. Her friend is from Africa and uses many of the same spices as Indians. We had never met before. He offered to take us both out to dinner, and as there was a south Indian restaurant just a few blocks away...

I had been a frequent eater at this particular restaurant years before. In fact, it was the first south Indian restaurant in the area and once I had tasted their curried eggplant, I was an instant fan of their food. It was great. I ate at their Sunday brunch, where I could sample so many delicious foods. The clientele was almost exclusively Indian, so I felt I was tasting authentic food.

What a treat, to revisit this feeding spot twelve years later.

We got there and picked three dishes to share. Of course, curried eggplant was one. When I used to eat there years before, ramekins of dal, yoghurt, perhaps some pickle, came with the meal. This time...just the entrees. The food, the curried eggplant, the chana masala, and the vegetable biryani were all decent. But I was disappointed because I wanted something on the level I had eaten before and this was not quite up to that standard. As we were leaving, I looked around and noticed that not only were the entire wait staff Euro-American, but all the feeders were, too.

What a switch!

I asked one of the grocers about the place and she made a sour face. This was before I dined. I mentioned another eating spot where I went and she lit up. This was one I had visited weeks before and had a most incredible (and spicy!) lunch, just absolutely amazing foods. This other restaurant is highly recommended by Indians here.

We did have a nice meal and excellent conversation, so I did not spill the lentils, I mean beans, about knowing another eating spot that was on an whole other level of excellence. I did not want to seem ungrateful for the gracious hospitality of my sister's man friend.

Today I cooked some simple toor dal (with spicy tempering) and an eggplant/tomato dish I invented, cooked in the Bengali five spices, and while eating it, realized that what I had cooked myself was so much better than the meal the other day. Perhaps with a honky clientele now, they have changed the menu to better serve an American palate.

Lost in the Translation

2009-06-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

I find many of my recipes online, which means I am taking a big risk wasting time and resources on a dish, not really knowing the outcome, the finished product, so to speak. However, most recipes make a certain kind of sense, i.e. food objects that seem like they fit together. Cooking from recipe books does not guarantee success, either. I've cooked some 'official' dishes that were destined for the trash bucket before hitting the table.

Some recipes get lost in the translation. Perhaps a difference in culture, like a variance in the size of an average lemon, can make quite a difference. When I first started cooking southern Indian food, with tamarind as a frequent ingredient, the book I used said to use a 'lemon-sized' ball. Great. Where I live, lemons are often humongous, piled on a display table at the vegetable market, with table legs bowing from the weight...lemons the size of bowling balls, almost. Well, those are the ones grown from Monsanto genetically modified seeds -- one lemon...lemonade for the week.

That one got me for quite a while, trying to figure out what the size of a lemon might be in India. I know Monsanto is busy destroying the food industry in India, so perhaps the average sized lemon there is now the size of a soccer ball or something. I have a penchant for hot spicy pickle dishes, and while hot lime is my favorite (so far), I tried a bottle of lemon pickle. The key ingredient is halves of lemon, and they are very small. That got me thinking...maybe this is the size of the lemon measurement called for in my book! Since following that guideline, my south Indian recipes have been tasting better. ;)

Capsicum. Now what is that? Is it a sweet green bell pepper, or is it a hot spicy chili pepper? Both fruits come from the same generic vegetable womb, the Solanaceae family. There is a big difference between the taste of these two relatives, the green bell and the chili peppers. Common sense sometimes rules...if a recipe calls for a cup of finely chopped capsicum, I highly doubt it's calling for hot chilies. And if a recipe calls for a teaspoon, deseeded and finely chopped, or a pepper slit up the sides...I doubt it is a sweet bell.

Cardomon. Now...is that green or black?

It is interesting to deciper recipes!

Yesterday I had a weak spot for some lemon dal. I found an Anhar recipe that tasted damn good to my eyeballs. The author was not shall we say very clear about certain steps in the preparation, and it made it difficult to build that recipe. Two ingredients, ginger and chili peppers (capsicums!) were listed and mentioned after the instructions on cooking the toor dal. And following these ingredients were the listing for the tempering process. I couldn't figure where exactly the ginger-chili fit it as absent from the description was relative cooking times. So I improvised and fried the ginger-chili together for a minute and poured it into the pot. I have never encountered this exact step in cooking an Indian dish before, so I know it's not authentic. However, I had to figure out a way to fit those two desired ingredients into the mix.

I thought...hmmm...I bet there are other versions of this dal online, and sure enough, there were. That is, until I started visiting the various sites, only to find they were duplications of the recipe with which I started! Plagarism!!!

After about seven in a row of the identical recipe, I found a fresh one.

Yeah, translating recipes from one culture to another, from authors who perhaps are not clear-thinking about describing the processes, can be a challenge. And if I completely fail, there's always the option of a bowl of steamed rice AND one of those MTR® ready-to-eat pouches, like the most excellent Bhindi Masala I had last night. It was hot-hot-hot, but oh...so good. I just love okra.

Next step is to track down that recipe and make it myself!

Dal-Lazy

2009-06-02T06:36:00.000-07:00

I sure have been the reluctant cook lately! Sheesh. I can't seem to muster the whatever to get me arse in the kitchen to cook. I have been doing some cooking, but have been depending more on precooked pouches that I just have to heat up. I must admit, most are great tasters, but the point is I have been lazy. At first I thought they might work out as an addition to a meal, helping to cut down on my prep time. A pot of steamed basmati, a dal preparation and perhaps a pouched paneer dish would make things right. But now...I'm just slipping by with the pouches and rice. Shame on me. As pentance, I am right now soaking toor dal for a lemon dal, as well as a pot of rice.

Shame on me!

Okay, it's not that bad, really. I did cook up a dish from a green pepper dal (with yogurt) the other night that was a bit on the sweet side, and a batch of green tomato chutney.

On Saturday I had my first bout with nasty ghee. It wasn't that old and I had opened it just a few weeks ago. I should have been more careful as it was all bubbly in the jar, and the aroma was sort of waxy, not really pleasant like good ghee. However, lacking any experience with the stuff, and since it was a different brand than I've used before...

Fortunately the 'sick' didn't last long and wasn't very intense, just a nasty taste and a short wave of nausea. Nice topic for a food blog, huh?

One frustrating element of cooking in such a radically different regiment than I know culturally is that I lack basic, simple know-how. I know an experienced cook would know right away that ghee was bad, and that when a recipe calls for capsicum, it means sweet peppers and not green chili peppers (both in the same species), and which type of cardamon is required for a particular dish, green or black. And what about a lemon-sized ball of tamarind? Here lemons at the stands can be humungus, no doubt thanks to Monsanto and all the demons they are releasing on us with their scientifically modified foods.

I don't think people realize how corporatized our world is becoming, has become. The rich do rule, the rich being corporations who are stealing our resources and hording all the wealth. We are slowly turning into some global nightmare. I have heard that Monsanto has unleashed demons on Indian farmers. I want to avoid politics in this blog. This poorly edited video tells the story. Monsanto Video.

Go soak some dal!

Confessions of a Culinary Slut

2009-05-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

It's true. I'm a total taste slut. I have no loyalty to any style of cooking. I am eating up the entire country of India, north, south, west, and now I'm exploring some recipes from that section of India that is not on the main portion, the part that pokes into China and Myanmar. I picked up a bottle of mustard oil and I'm going to cook up a few recipes from the Assam state.

Yeah, I'm all over the country. However, more often I find my taste buds tantalized more by the southern cooking. The roasted dal with chili peppers and other spices, ground to a powder or paste, cooked into the food...yeah.

I've been lazy in the kitchen, other than a delicious eggplant pilaf (which called for a roasted dal powder that coated this dry vegetable-rice dish) and a cooling cooked tomato-yogurt dish. No, this week has been a quick-fix with some meal-ready dishes in pouches that heat up in the microwave. They are authentic Indian dishes, cooked in India, so I don't feel like that much of a cheat. And now I see they could be most useful in rounding out my meals, with say, a paneer dish in a pouch, with a dal and steamed rice I prepare, and a loaf of naan bread to scoop up the gravy.

With summer coming, I need to rethink my cooking. My humble (and tiny) abode is an oven during the summer, with no AC. Cooking just adds to the sweltering heat. I'll have to think of dishes I can cook fast without adding much more heat to the room. Perhaps I'll develop a more intimate relationship with those MRE pouches. How did people in India cook their meals? My temperatures are mild here compared to how hot it gets in India. Maybe much of the cooking is outside. Maybe I'll check into setting up a campfire outside and cook out there. I bet there are city ordinances against that.

I bet a pot of dal slowly cooked over an outdoors fire would taste ever so much better.

I'm reading a book called The Calcutta Kitchen, more for the photos and insights into life in such an over-populated area. I will try a few recipes, to boot. However, my menu for today will include a few dishes from the Assam state, a tomato chutney and a cabbage kofta, both ripped from this site.

Damn Those MRE

2009-05-26T06:47:00.000-07:00

My cooking experiences have been marred by a recent fling with MRE pouches I buy at local Indian markets. They are authentic, made-in-India meals and quite delicious. And I have gotten lazy this past week, with my cooking-from-scratch hardly scratching the surface. So, last night, not wanting to spend an hour or two in the kitchen, I whipped up a batch of toor dal with green peas, heated up a pouch of Paneer Makhani, steamed a pot of basmati rice, and heated up a loaf of nan masala bread, poured a small glass of buttermilk, and had quite a feast of it. I would have included some green tomato chutney I had made the day before, but it never made it into the frig, but instead went directly into my mouth. What an oral delight that was! I had never made it before and when I saw many green tomatoes at my local Middle Eastern vegetable shop, I thought it might be fun. I will make this again, and soon...and in a double batch so I can taste a little the next day.

I've been wandering up north a bit, with the little cooking I did do last week, making a batch of spicy garbanzo beans a la a Pakistani recipe...very simple and quite tasty. And while in the neighborhood, decided to try a buttery black lentil makhani dal. The recipe calls for whipping cream, but I whipped in a cup of yoghurt instead. Very rich...and something I'd like to save for the occasional menu. I've also been making whole green dal stew with turmeric, chili peppers and yoghurt that is also quite good. That one is best eaten at the time of assembly, unlike some Indian foods that hold up well in the frig.

Now I have a stack of those damn MRE meals sitting on the table, tempting me, daring me not to cook at night.

While I'm up in the neighborhood, I think I'll pick up a new cookbook today, The Calcutta Kitchen. It looks decent, has some recipes I want to try, and is accompanied by great daily life photos and interesting tid bits of life in Calcutta. I really have enough general Indian cookbooks and will focus more on regional books now. My favorite food still is southern, with coconut, tamarind, sambars, rasams, kootus and poriyals.

Good thing I'm not going on an eating trip to India because I woudn't know which area to visit after a stint in Chennai.

Vegging Out

2009-05-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

Indian food offered me a hole new array of foods, from dals and spices to fruits and vegetables. My first impulse was to try and cook a few meals with familiar foods, with vegetables I knew. Later, as I peered into the coolers at the Indian grocery stores, I wanted to "know" those new vegetables! Some looked protective, with armour shell, like the ridge gourd and drumstick. Others looked threatening, as if they were suffering from a fatal skin disease, the bitter melon. Those are one ugly food. Maybe they are cultivated near toad ponds and have someone crossed the plant-animal barrier and contracted a severe case of warts? Not only are they UGLY, but bitter, bitter. One of the two types of beans, the long beans, were long and limp, very unlike the starchy stiff string beans on which I grew. I could see myself pasting bunches of those beans onto my head and creating a green corn-row wig of hair. They took longer to cook than 'normal' beans, something I learned after ruining the first batch. Tindora, little miniature cucumber-like green things, were unlike anything I had seen. Actually, they're kind of cute and cut open reminded me just a wee bit of a fruit like pomegranates. Chow chow (chayote) squash looked like a pear but sure didn't taste like one!

Without a cooking guru, I was pretty much on my own when I began investigating these new green things. I started with bitter melon. How could I resist anything that was bitter? My found recipes for the vegetable said nothing about removing the pulp, or just how nasty those seeds taste. I found out. And later I learned I could parboil it, or soak it in salt water, and draw off some of the bitterness.

Then I found some fresh drumstick. Interesting. Long, thin, hard. I cut it up into smaller pieces and cooked it. However, when I went to eat it, I found my mouth filled with stick. Nobody told me that its customary to open a section and scrape out the delicious meat onto one's teeth, and discard the outer shell. It reminds me a little of asparagus.

Unripe mangoes sure are tart!

Snake gourd is interesting, the outer shell that is eaten a little leathery texture, was one of the more acquired tastes I encountered, more for the texture than the taste. I'm still getting acquainted with that one.

Now, I'm not afraid to clothes my eyes, and stick my hand into the cooler and see what vegetable I grab. Once I can identify the sucker, it's easy to find recipes.

The good thing is that I have a whole new collection of interesting tastes to expand with in my cooking.

Next for me is mastering tamarind, and learning how to crack open a coconut without firing up the oven.

Trekking Taste Buds

2009-05-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

My blog is really a record of my personal adventure of discovering Indian cuisine. I find my taste buds come so alive when I'm eating this style of food. I like how my mouth has a warm glow after a moderately spicy meal and how, with the consumption of just the right foods, how I can eradicate the heat. Indian food is very exciting, with the mix of flavors and textures. One of my favorite aspects is that I can so easily customize my meals, taking a few basic foods and with pickle and chutney, expand the culinary experience to new bounds. A simple dal dish, with a bowl of basmati rice is many dishes, with perhaps the first mouthful just a dash of rice and dal on the spoon, and then adding a dash of garlic pickle in the next bite, and the next, a dab of hot lime pickle, upping the temperature factor a few notches. And the next bite, perhaps some nan bread dipped in sweet pungent tamarind - date chutney. Or if I've created too much of an oral inferno, a spoon of something with cold yoghurt, a real cold shower for my taste buds. No other cuisine captures my taste buds quite like Indian food. Middle Eastern food is also fantastic, with a clean, fresh less spicy taste (for the most part) and I dabble in the food of this region as well, especially the lentil soups. And Thai food excites me, though I like to reserve eating it as a treat more than a daily regiment.

What drew me in was my quest for exciting, tasty vegetarian fare. I swore off the meat decades ago. At first, my reasons why were bordering on spiritual and health-consciousness, but now I'd have to say while I am not a strict vegetarian anymore, and definitely not a vegan when immersed in Indian food fare (yoghurt, buttermilk, paneer cheese, ghee...), I still follow the octo-lacto-vegetarian style of cooking at home.

Starting off my vegetarian adventures with a heavy meat-based diet was a challenge. Somehow, somewhere I had cultivated the notion that I needed, absolutely needed meat with every meal, except perhaps at breakfast, as long as I had a burger just a few hours later. I loved eating meat, and often cooked up partly raw hamburgers even (buying a premium grade of beef), cooked rapidly in a hot frying pan, browned on the outside, cold in the center. That was a real yum for me back then. I actually and truly believed if I missed a sequence of meals without meat that I would instantly develop malnutrition.

That's where I was head-wise when I first started.

The American culture diet is not especially vegetarian friendly. That was before restaurants and markets began catering to the vegetarian diet. Ordering from the menu at Denny's was tough, especially vegan. How many English muffins (without butter of course) and salads can one guy eat for breakfast?

A local gourmet vegetarian restaurant regularly offered up Indian feasts that were so different than the Indian food I had eaten in other restaurants. The flavors were warm and delicious, and the food so clean and not laden in a bed of grease. I learned later the owner had studied cooking in India, which is why these meals were so artistically and masterfully crafted. Then a new restaurant opened in town, one devoted to Southern Indian cuisine. And I was where I wanted to be. This food was so different than the northern Indian meals customized for the American palate. I've come to enjoy northern Indian food also, but it was definitely the southern menu that was my open door to this spicy fare.

Next, about fourteen years ago, I found a tome of vegetarian cooking, a book with so much information! I started making the recipes and it was good, very good. Very very good. The book, Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamuna Devi gave me a basic foundation into some of the foods and methods. It is really a remarkable book, with a depth into various topics and cooking methods. Then cooking went to the wayside for me until this past winter when I picked up the spatula again, and fired up the food processor. After a delicious romp through the Middle East and northern Africa, mostly Morocco, I again tackled Indian cooking when I found a fascinating book, DAKSHIN: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India by Chandra Padmanabhan. This book really opened new doors and this is where I am, more of less, right now: Sambars, rasam, kootus, poriyals.

Curry-Us

2009-05-08T18:48:00.000-07:00

Recently I told an acquaintance that I am cooking primarily Indian cuisine. He made an off-hand comment that he did not smell the curry on me. I frequent Indian grocery stores, and I have never "smelled curry" on anyone. Maybe I need to get in closer, perhaps sniff the back of their shirt collar or something.

I wonder if the Irish smell from potatoes. Or the Russians from borscht. And the Poles from kielbasa. And the dumb American jock from Mac Donalds and pizza. Hmmm...I'll have to start paying closer attention with my nose.

When I made my first plunge into Indian cuisine, I thought the trick was to stock up on a lot of curry powder. All those exotic aromas, the ones that define "India." Cloves...mace...cinnamon...cumin...turmeric. Yes, that definitely defines Indian food.

As a younger person, I recall visiting Indian restaurants a few times. I did not care at all for the offerings. The food smelled like...like curry. And it was greasy, with chunks of meat and vegetables swimming in gobs of fat. It was a turn-off for me. I had no way of knowing what I was smelling and seeing was Americanized Indian food. A local gourmet vegetarian restaurant served a totally different kind of Indian food, one that drew me in. The warm, sweet, hot aromas were merely a prelude to some very exotic, alluring tastes. The owner had been schooled in Indian cooking, learning his trade, I believe, in the ranks of the Hare Krishna movement. I sort of remember (it has been years since we spoke) that he went to India to learn cooking. And he did learn Indian cooking.

Why was the food so delicious at the vegetarian spot, and so disgusting at the Indian restaurant? Surely just pieces of meat couldn't make that much difference!

Then one day, a new Indian restaurant opened up, one devoted to southern Indian cooking. And it offered that same delicious taste. It was not a vegetarian-only establishment, and it smelled so wonderful inside. I also noted that most of the clients were Indian, and as I recall, the clientele at the American Indian spots were mostly American.

Back to the curries...when I acquired my first Indian cookbook, one with authentic recipes, I immediately noticed a lack of "curry" powder in the ingredient list. Instead, I found certain spices congregating, cumin, coriander, turmeric, chili powder, ginger, etc.

The dictionary defines curry as:

1.	East Indian Cookery. a pungent dish of vegetables, onions, meat or fish, etc., flavored with various spices or curry powder, and often eaten with rice.

2.	any dish flavored with curry powder or the like: a lamb curry.

Interesting. That's basically how I thought of curries as I grew up. Many dictionaries obviously still perpetuate the myth. The truth be known, a curry is a dish with a sauce or gravy, like so many of the delectable delights from India. It really has nothing to do with the spices. Perhaps it was the Brits who did up the curry powder mixtures, wanting to capture the exotic tastes of India at home. Most of the authentic recipes I encounter in cookbooks mention nothing of curry powder. The usual gang of spices include turmeric, coriander, cumin, chili powder (cayenne), asafoetida (aka: hing - not exactly a spice but included in many recipes), ginger, fresh green chilies, garlic (some regions avoid garlic), onions, and a spice mix called garam masala, which has spices often found in commercial curry powders. Those are my hardcore spices for cooking, and the major ones called for in recipes.

The food I cook does not smell like 'curry powder.' I like the lingering aromas in my humble abode, as I come in after a romp at the stove earlier that day. The warm, sweet spicy smell gives me wood.

As a kid, the few times I visited Indian restaurants, the aromas inside were more 'curry powder.' They were all northern Indian style with thick spicy 'curries,' probably including typical curry-esque spices like cloves, cinnamon, mace, fenugreek, turmeric, chili powder, etc.

I found a section in a cookbook I have on my shelf that deals with this exact topic, 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer. He had the same questions as I, but from the Indian perspective. A friend recently recommended a recipe in this book and it motivated me to open it up and read some.

I had not read the introduction before.

Perhaps one blog I'll devote to cookbooks. But next time out, I think I'll tackle all those strange (and delicious) Indian vegetables! It's Monday and that is fresh Indian vegetable delivery day in my area.

See you at the market.

The Great Indian Deception

2009-05-08T15:37:00.000-07:00

I've been cooking exclusively for a short while, and this is not my first bout with Indian cuisine. However, this time, it is all different because I have a weak sense of actually starting to 'get it.' There is really a method to all this madness.

My dishes, the dals, the sambars, rasams, kootus, are coming out nicely. Or so I thought. Then I made the grave error of going to a lunch buffet at a South Indian restaurant in my area. The food was heavenly, truly some of the best eats I have devoured. Everything was perfect! And that got me to thinking, to wondering...why doesn't my cooking taste like this? I just don't get it. I'm using what I thought were authentic recipes, posted by actual natives of India, hopefully for other Indian cooks. I shop at Indian grocery stores and do not make American substitutions for anything. The recipes are becoming a template almost, the same cast of spice characters usually showing up around my frying or sauce pan or pressure cooker, and as of today, around my kadai. I'm having pure thoughts when I cook, too.

Aum...love...world peas...swirling peas...

Then I decided that there must be one secret ingredient that only Indians know about, something included in each and every dish. Maybe it is like magic fairy dust or something.

Not for honkie eyes.

It has to be. Maybe they store it in their incense burners, a secret compartment. Or better yet, all Indian women have a sack of it hidden in a layer of their sori.

Something's going on, that's for sure.

If I have to climb the Himalayas to learn the secret, I will.

Humbling Beginnings

2009-05-04T19:24:00.000-07:00

First off, I renounce American food! Yes, I am an American, so I can do that.

The United States of Amerika is a great country and I'm very proud to be part of it.

No more hamboogers, or fried chicken.

Truth be known, I quit American food years, decades ago. But now I'm dedicating myself to learning the art of Indian vegetarian cooking. I tried learning about ten years ago and made some mighty tasty meals, but the whole process eluded me. There is a process to cooking Indian. As is usually the case with me, it was a book that inspired me. Last time it was The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamunda Devi. The nearly eight-hundred page tome reveals many secrets of the Vaishnavan approach to food and nutrition, something that I am completely unfamiliar with. I was after the food, the spices, the food. The philosophy and spirituality did not interest me. I am still of Western mind and my brand of spirituality comes Western style. The Indian cusuine draws me in.

Earlier this year I started cooking again, exploring the fantastic food of the Middle East and northern Africa. And Thai cooking. How delicious! My impacted sinuses began loosening with a spicy Thai soup I made.

And then THE BOOK entered my life. I chanced upon this one, but as soon as I took it home, I knew I was in for an adventure. DAKSHIN: Vegetarian Cuisine from South India by Chandra Padmanabhan. A gorgeous photos accompanied every recipe. The recipes are complicated and the processes, as I was about to learn, were sometimes tedious. I was immediately drawn to the sambars, which were the first type of food in the book, followed by rasams. This is where I began. Both of these are essential to some branches of Indian cooking, both are quite wet and usually eaten with a bowl of rice. The sambar is more like a vegetable stew, with lots and lots of delicious gravy. The "gravy" is comprised largely of cooked dal, toor dal to be more specific. The first step to making a sambar is to start the dal cooking. It slow cooks and slowly transforms to lens-like peas to a soft pudding-like substance. Next a spice paste is created by first roasting various spices (cumin seeds, mustard seeds, hing, etc.) and dried chili pepper, with a dash of curry leaves, along with, in many recipes, dals. Urad dal. Channa dal. This roasted mixture is then ground into a paste, adding water or a moist substance like fresh coconut. Put to the side, the next step is to cook the vegetables. Sometimes more spices are added, almost always turmeric, and often a sambar spice. Next the paste is added and cooked into the mixed vegetables and dal. And finally, the tempering. Oil or ghee is heated and a few spices are fast fried, usually starting with black mustard seeds, follwed by cumin seeds, when the mustard seeds begin to pop. The cumin seeds quickly turn from a greyish greenish to a rich brown. Hing is often added, sometimes more dal, often urad dal, fried for a few seconds until it turns golden brown, then usually a dried red chili (broken in half, when super spices is desired), followed by curry leaves that immediately begin to jump and dance in the hot skillet. This hot mix is poured over the vegetable, covered to marry the hot spices to the rest, and served. It's a fantastic process.

The rasam is more like a traditional watery soup. It is often cooked in a similar manner as the sambar (sometimes with cooked dal added, sometimes with a paste, sometimes with a rasam spice mix.) Both of these are consumed with large quantities of fresh, hot rice. A sambar/rasam combo is a marriage made in heaven. Other foods can be added or substituted here, including a dry curry, known as a poriyal, and a food style between the wetter sambar and the drier poriyal, a kootus. Special rices are often prepared, green pea rice, mango rice, mustard seed rice, cumin rice, etc. And special spice mixes are often spinkled on white rice, sesame powder, peanut powder, coconut powder, etc. And there are salads and desserts, and other fare. Eating this style is a great honor, with hot, spicy food that sometimes makes my eyes water. And usually there are cooler, soothing dishes served as the caboose of the meal, often with cool yoghurt or other flame retardants.

So today I christened my rebirth as an Indian chef by purchasing a rather expensive (for me, at least) piece of cooking ware. It is a special grinder, a wet grinder, so I don't have to pop my triceps beating those hard fenugreek seeds in the mortar/pestle, taking upwards of half an hour, with a rather poor showing to boot, spices that weren't crunched down quite enough. The wet grinder allows me to add liquids as I grind. It also makes all the powder mixes I could ever want, and is great for chutneys and spicy pickle.

That's the other thing I so lust about Indian food. With no hot sauce on the table, or the shelf, usually, various pickles and chutneys accompany my meals, little dabs of firey substance to turn up the heat a few notches. My favorite so far is hot spicy lime pickle. It's hot! And so delicious. A dab in a spoonful of rice and sambar transforms the flavor of that mouthful, expanding the culinary delight with new flavors. And perhaps next bite, or a few down the road, I might add a dab of pickled ginger or garlic, and an whole new taste sensation bursts in my mouth. If I want to cool it down a bit, some watery date-tamarind does the trick. Eating a simple meal of just a few items is truly a taste feast!

I should have my grinder up and grinding by tomorrow or perhaps the next day. I have a small onion sambar that was so so delicious, that I want to recreate. This was to die for. That and perhaps a spicy buttermilk rasam and knocked me on my arse.

Tonight's dinner was light and tossed together quickly: some reheated tomato rasam and a cucumber/tomato/onion salad topped with thick Indian yoghurt, and a side dish of a south Indian kootu, long beans with coconut. All was so delicious, I wish I could invite you all to my dinner table.

This blog will be all about food. And food networking. I have much to learn and perhaps in a short while, something to share. In the meantime, it will be mostly my stories and adventures in cooking, and consuming, delicious Indian food!