Entries tagged with 'Indian'
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Jalfrezi is not as popular with the U.S. audience as it is in Britain (yet), but it seems that as palates are shifting and folks are becoming more and more accustomed to spicier foods, jalfrezi is getting primed to win over this side of the pond as well. With its origins in China, jalfrezi is more similar in its cooking method to dry-fried Chinese dishes rather than the typical wet Indian curry.
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Academy Award nominee
Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India is a fun and inspiring movie that would be great at a dinner party, especially if preceded by this easy, Indian-themed menu of
raita,
pickled onions,
shrimp with ginger and peas, and a fruit plate for dessert.
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In January I find myself looking around for vegetables—not always the easiest option, especially when root vegetables and frozen peas are the most available. This
Aloo Matar, an Indian dish featuring a mixture of potatoes and peas, is comforting and filling, and completely vegetarian.
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These days, pretty much every Indian restaurant in the United States prominently features Tandoori Chicken on their menu in varying degrees of quality. At its best, it's
incomparably juicy, mildly spiced, with an intense hit of smoke. Served simply with sliced onions and a squeeze of lemon or lime, it's good, honest, simple cooking. But more often than not, you end up with dry, stringy breast meat reheated in the oven. My goal this week: figure out how to make this Indian classic in my own backyard.
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In many ways naan resembles really great Neapolitan pizza crust. It's a soft dough cooked at extremely high temperatures. When it's at its best, it should be puffy with a crackling thin, crisp crust spotted with bits of smoky char that breaks open to reveal airy, stretchy, slightly chewy bread underneath. Painted with melted butter (perhaps flavored with a bit of garlic) and sprinkled with good salt, it's so good on its own that sometimes I have to talk my curry down from its fits of jealousy.
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By now I think it's reasonably common knowledge that curry powder is a British invention, not an Indian one. Indian cooking is no more summed up by that blend of turmeric, cumin, and black pepper than American cuisine is by ketchup and cheddar cheese. But there is a spice called curry—even by Indians!—whose singular aroma and flavor herald Indian cooking more than almost anything else. I'm talking about curry leaves, the nigh-magical herb essential to much of South Indian cooking.
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We're fortunate to live in a time with more readily available spices than ever before. Imperially-controlled trade routes have been toppled; oceans can be crossed in an afternoon. But a number of flavors have been lost in the transition to a free spice trade. Long pepper is one of them, and its general absence from the modern culinary world is something of a culinary injustice we all owe to ourselves to right.
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Done right, turmeric an ingredient that can change the way you cook ethnic food. The aroma is intense: earthy, pungent, redolent of dried citrus peel and dusty streets soaked in sunlight. The flavor, though subtler, warms the tongue, the missing link between black pepper and chile. After tasting the real deal, one automatically understands why the food of over a billion people is stained with it.
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As food aesthetics go, the murky, rust-brown, pebbly
lalla musa dal at
Tamarind Bay Coastal Kitchen can't compare to the restaurant's other specialties like the fennel cream-sauced cauliflower dumplings or the spiced lobster tail. But famed Indian chefs like Julie Sahni don't consider this dish
"the most exquisite of all dal preparations" for nothing, and speaking in terms of decadence, it outclasses the rest by a long shot.
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Sweet beverage drinkers can be divided into two camps: those like
bubble tea and those who don't. Fans relish a sweet slurp mixed with mildly flavored chewy orbs; detractors regard the innocent pearls as nuclear caviar that should never cross human lips. If you're in the second camp, maybe we can still be friends, but I've got nothing for you this week. If, on the other hand, you like your beverages on the chewy side, basil seed is just for you.
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