allVishal.com - Food - 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 :)

WHY so MaNY cHOiceS!!

arts — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:31:39 -0700

oh what a dilemma !! How life gives us such tough choices !! sigh!!

:) the single color works very well giving it a dilemma feel :)

Oh noes, I FORGOT ABOUT

Maija — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:40:17 -0700

Oh noes, I FORGOT ABOUT COMIC KONGA! I still remembered on Saturday. ;_; I'll have to work hard to catch up before it is over!

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.

Your imperialist-fu is most

Vishal — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 16:03:10 -0700

Your imperialist-fu is most welcome compared to the hundreds of trackbacks I get per day trying to appropriate my blog as ad-space for viagra, xanax and phentermine.

Other than the first, I have no idea what the other ones even are! Don't they realise I'm Indian? We still call aspirin 'aspro'!

Sadly it seems your comments continue to be caught by the bot, and I can't find a place to change that. So if you comment and it doesn't show up please be patient until I find it on my daily run though the backend and publish it.

IM IN UR SPAM FILTER, F*XX0RIN UR COMMENT THREAD

dan l-k — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:51:49 -0700

Obviously, it's trying to prevent my rampant cultural appropriation. Ha! My imperialist-fu is mighty!

You're right, that would be

Vishal — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 05:39:12 -0700

You're right, that would be the way to make a masala omelet (but don't add in any water, of course). Generally speaking, Indian omelets are prepared without the tomatoes. If you ask for a regular omelet in most places you get a salty (by Western standards), fully cooked -- some would say overcooked -- disc with with fresh green chillies and finely chopped onion in it. The onions are mild, and are therefore put in raw into the egg mix itself before pouring. It adds a nice sweet and crunchy dimension to it.

I too am more of an omelet man, having tried every variation I can think of (and then some). The burji is something I've never fully experimented with. I'm sure you could add a whole bunch of things to it from bell peppers to bacon and come out with something edible.

(and on a side note, sorry your comment took so long to show up. It seems that whatever CMS I use, the spam filter just wuvs you.)

Omne vivum ex ovo.

dan l-k — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 09:08:37 -0700

I imagine a pre-beaten egg mixture added to the bhaji in a big skillet or wok would make a fine omelet. (I am an omelet guy. Scrambled eggs, not so much, although the dry consistency of this might make me a convert.)

I know I've seen turmeric in the spice aisle of almost every grocery store I've been in; it shouldn't be hard to acquire in one o' them Effnic neighborhoods in NYC.

Bhurji Pav Today!

Nandita — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:49:30 -0700

You have now made me sufficiently drool. now, i have to go have bhurji pav this afternoon in the mess. They make it really well, and its totally filling. Good ol' bhurji-pav