India with passion (without leaving the kitchen)

This may seem strange, coming from a Limey like myself, but I didn't begin to appreciate Indian food until I moved to the US. My experience with the cuisine growing up was that it was a test of endurance best exemplified by the seven-alarm vindaloo at the end of a lager-fueled night.

(The ne plus ultra of insanely hot curry is Curry Hell, created by the late Abdul Latif, Lord of Harpole, who is best known for holding the Guinness World Record for long-distance takeout delivery from Newcastle, UK, to Sydney, Australia. If you finish the dish, it's free.)

I'd probably still harbor suspicions about Indian cuisine, were it not for the existence of such places as Diva in Davis Square, which goes beyond curry and rice to such yummy dishes as tandoor-baked salmon, fried okra, and coconut-cardamom soup. They also have a fabulous cocktail of ginger-infused rum with mango juice and fresh lime, finished with a dash of cayenne pepper. Gives one's tongue a fruity tingle, it does.

While The Boy has become quite adept at throwing together a curry, he's been working from the same recipe for a while. So we picked up India with Passion by Manju Malhi. The book splits the cuisine up by region and hits the high points of each. The recipes are reasonably straightforward (few are longer than this post so far).

As we'd pledged to eat healthily this week, we decided to try something veggie, so made both dal makhani and aloo gobhi. The former is a dish of black lentils simmered with kidney beans and spices; the latter involves cubed potatoes and cauliflower fried with onions and finished with fresh ginger. There was a small amount of prep for both (the fine chopping of pungent ingredients), and the lentils needed to soak for eight hours in advance, but everything came together pretty quickly.

The kitchen smelled wonderful: onions and garlic and chilis and ginger; turmeric and coriander and cumin and garam masala.



India with Passion is also edumacational: I learned that the vicious vindaloo of my youth came to India by way of Portugal--the name is a variation on vinh d'alho (i.e. garlic vinegar), a leftover from Portuguese colonization of the island of Goa.

The book also has chutney recipes (fig, apple, tamarind, garlic), as well as instructions for drinks such as mango lassi and a ginger lemonade with peppercorns and cumin.

Now, I don't want to promise anything, but if we try out a few more dishes, we might need some volunteer tasters ...

Just add water

I am not a happy camper. In my whole life, I've spent five nights sleeping under canvas (and no, I'm not including family trips to campgrounds in Italy, where the pre-erected two-bedroom tents came with fridges and stoves, and one of our fellow campers had brought his own chip pan all the way from Teesside).

My one week of Girl Guide camping involved sharing a tent in a muddy field with three girls and thirty spiders, cooking up enormous vats of rubbery scrambled eggs and building dish-draining racks out of sticks and twine (an important survival skill, that is).

And yet, somehow, I didn't aquire a taste for it.

In fact, I share The Boy's credo: "roughing it" is when you have to go outside of your hotel to find a martini--a belief strengthened by a recent trip to outdoor-stuff store REI, which sells such vital accessories as hand-shovels for digging one's personal latrine and "Feminine Urinary Directors," not to mention all manner of bear protection products (you know the best way to protect yourself from bears? Don't go to places where bears live!).

But on my way out, I found the food section. And it wasn't loaded with trail mix and power bars. There were packages of real meals: beef stroganoff with mashed potatoes. Pasta with salmon and pesto. Jamaican chicken with rice. Paella. And desserts: French vanilla mousse with raspberries; peach crumble; chocolate brownies.

Of course I had to investigate, so I brought home a package of curry with lentils and veggies (potatoes, peas, carrots). Here's the desiccated "before":



You add water to the bag, seal the top and wait 13 minutes. And then it looks like this:



And actually, it wasn't bad. I mean, it wasn't great; it had that springy texture of reconstituted dehydrated food, and the veggies, which were pretty good raw (the peas tasted like peas, for one thing) became invisible and anonymous in the all-enveloping curry. But the sauce itself had a bold, warm, garlicky-spicy kick.

We cleaned our bowls, mopping up the last traces with garlic naan. And then we curled up on the couch, turned on the TV and decided this camping business wasn't so bad after all.

Side note: the curry has one user review on the REI site. For the record, we have not fallen victim to the same after effects. But it's perhaps not surprising, given that the meal provides 126% of one's RDA for fibre ...