allVishal.com - Health - Comments

Well, food is certainly a

Vishal — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 01:01:37 -0700

Well, food is certainly a great reason to travel, and I hope you enjoy your next trip!

I have been living in

bj psychology — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 23:01:00 -0700

I have been living in Philippines for the last 20 years. Once i visited India along with my parents and the food culture there was really amazing and very diversified. Each and every state there has it's own speciality in especially in food (language cloths, and tradition would be other terms). I enjoyed many recepies their, some of them i remember Chola bhatoora, shahi paneer, matar paner i like most. If in future i will get a chance to visit India, I would not like to miss it, exclusively for Indian Food :)

I've missed my blog too.

Vishal — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:19:50 -0800

I've missed my blog too. Back in Dubai, vacation painfully short and over, and should get around to blogging all that stuff I couldn't get time to do in Mumbai.

Falooda is a cthulhu

Vishal — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:08:15 -0800

Falooda is a cthulhu dessert. I'm sure most foreigners (and indeed some Indians) are alarmed the first time they the see sabja (that's the basil seeds, which, when soaked in water, have a gelatinous outer layer -- they look like hundreds of tiny eyeballs!).

It's the complexity of falooda that makes it work; the variety of textures from the soft noodles to the ice-cream (or kulfi), the milk and the unexpected crunch of the seeds. It's not quite an ice-cream dessert, not quite a drink, not quite a milk shake, but all good.

As for the mysterious 'fruit' in the Lebanese menu, I'm assuming from experience that they mean 'dry fruits' -- nuts like cashews, almonds and pistachios which are usually sprinkled onto these thick concoctions.

Last but not least; chikoo. I daresay it does taste a bit like caramel, and the sweetness of it can be as intense as cotton candy. It is perhaps the sweetest fruit I've yet tasted, which is why it's hard to compare its taste to other fruits.

Strange fruit.

Falooda looks

Maija — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:04:06 -0800

Falooda looks delicious...

But I don't believe in the chikoo: "The fruit's flavor has been compared to cotton candy or caramel." - that's impossible! That can't be fruit!

Also wondering what the restaurant menu means when it says "fruit". Eid Mubarack = Mango, Strawberry, Fruit... er, yeah?

And you are back! I've

Aishwarya — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 20:32:18 -0800

And you are back! I've missed your blog. :)

Juices

Vishal — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:09:19 -0800

Glad you enjoyed it! I like writing about food, despite the generally negative tone of this piece (but this too was born of my love of food).

I could exist only on juices in India. There are several days in a week when I will make an excuse and skip 'real' lunch at home, and take an hour-long bus ride downtown to my favourite juice juice joint.

New fruit varieties are always being imported and grown locally -- almost anything takes to the soil and gains a bit of a local flavour. This year anjou pears seem to have come into the fold, and fuji apples.

Today at a juice shop in another part of town my cousins and I had between us cocktails and milkshakes of: watermelon + litchi; chikoo* + chocolate; peach + muskmelon; and apple + butterscotch icecream. All were yummy.

The epitome of Indian liquid dessert is the falooda (well, the Bombay variant, anyway). The wikipedia article is decent so I needn't get into the details here (or I might go on for pages!)

In Dubai the juice culture is different; there too the fruits are mainly imports, but there has steadily arisen a wide repertoire of ice-cream + fruit combos. There's the abood, which is mango + musk melon with a swirl of honey, or the tabakath which is a 'triple layer' juice of avocado at the bottom, mango in the middle and strawberry at the top (the three juices being of decreasing viscosity, they just sit on top of each other). My own favourite is a mix of strawberry, avocado and vanilla ice-cream: it looks like crap but tastes great.

The names of some of these concoctions are funny too, and I think a lot of them originated in Lebanese-run** shawarma/mezze restaurants. A lot of these juice shops are now run by Indians who are introducing more strange mixes, so I guess this messing with fruits thing comes naturally to us. :)

* (It's a brown, grainy-fleshed fruit with almond shaped dark smooth seeds, and is very sweet. More here)

** (Found a restaurant menu. It even lists the ingredients! Whee!)

Wow...

Maija — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:29:46 -0800

That was very enjoyable to read, though, sometimes, not to imagine. I really enjoy the way you write about these things!

I'm really jealous about the juices. To think that a country has so many fruits available at different times of the year... That's very different from Finland, where most of the fruit is foreign, and domestic fruits/vegetables are very expensive during the winter. I'm just going away to dream about a vast selection of cheaper fruits right now.

All I can imagine are these

Spyder — Thu, 27 Nov 2003 20:39:32 -0800

All I can imagine are these wee bitty monkeys that look like those plastic ones from that kids game Barrel of Monkeys, and you dump them into your mouth and they scrub your teeth for you.

Yeah.

minty fresh monkeys .... now

flowofthought — Wed, 26 Nov 2003 00:25:48 -0800

minty fresh monkeys .... now thats a novel way to get your teeth clean .... rise and shine :D

D'you know, of all the

dan l-k — Tue, 25 Nov 2003 15:39:46 -0800

D'you know, of all the varied weirdness that's found its way into my novel this month, "powdered monkey" was one that never even worked its way up to crossing my mind.

Next draft, maybe.

Yes, but this is monkey

Vishal — Mon, 24 Nov 2003 21:34:48 -0800

Yes, but this is monkey powder.

I would think monkeys would

Spyder — Mon, 24 Nov 2003 14:45:23 -0800

I would think monkeys would get caught in your teeth, and probably be a bit hard to chew.

Yes, neem is minty minty...

Vishal — Sun, 23 Nov 2003 20:27:28 -0800

Yes, neem is minty minty... mmmm... :P

i tried one of those stick

Sid — Sun, 23 Nov 2003 17:16:57 -0800

i tried one of those stick things once.....mmmm minty :laugh: