The Well-Fed Bong

Sometimes, simplicity can be amazing. Sometimes a chef can combine just a couple of very basic ingredients in a way that you cannot have enough of. Not all the time; sometimes a simple combination can be just that tad too simple to be considered seriously. Unless you're paying generously for it. Mario Batali has made quite an empire out of simplcity. There are those raw fish thingies called crudo at Esca , tiny bits of raw fish in olive oil and one condiment that will set you back a dozen dollars a bite. A flight of six is a little better, at $30. Yes, the fish are good and the combinations interesting, but most reasonable sushi restaurants give you a tenth of the pretension (not to mention half the price) to outdo Esca ( of course, they don't have olive oil). Caviar House at London Airport charged me the same $12 a bite for salmon dipped in nothing, but the memory of that salmon still causes drops of saliva to start heading downwards. At Esca, the only thing I remember is ...

I've just learned about more things that you can freeze. Freezing, of course extends shelf-life by weeks over normal refrigeration, which is specially useful for someone like me who's always cooking more than can be eaten. Bongs love multi-course meals, and its really tough to cook small helpings of each of the courses. The most useful thing that you can apparently freeze (though I have yet to try it) is rice. I've just been informed on good authority that rice does not suffer from extreme cold, and will come out nice and fluffy with a little help from the microwave. Another really useful freeze is fresh onion paste. You can even fry or boil it before blending and freezing it; perfect as the base for a quick gravy. And finally, you can freeze dal! This is really useful, because its so central to an Indian meal, but so difficult to prepare in one-person quantities.

Everyone already knows this, but India is truly the place for vegetarian food. The thing about veggie food in India is, its not the meatless version of something. This is a true, first class treatement of vegetables that one would find difficult to introduce meat into. This is specially true of veggie dishes from people who are not traditionally vegetarian, such as Bengalis. When they leave the meat out of something, there is good reason for it. This trip to India, I ate far more Bengali vegetarian food than I normally would. Courtesy a veggie girlfriend, my family shifted the balance of meals from multiple fish types to multiple veggies, including many of my hot favorites - Kanchkolar Kofta, Potoler Dalna , Chocchori. Then there were all those Gujarati favorites that I indulged in - Muthia, Dhokla, Khandvi, Sweet dal, Kadhi - little wonder that I'm becoming fatter.

My fridge is full of rotting vegetables. These are usually invaluable leftovers from my shopping trips; unique veggies that are essential to one recipe or the other, but not available at Jubilee Market next door. Or the next three hundred doors for that matter. Hence lies a problem with cooking Indian in New York - how do you keep veggies at hand without to take a jaunt to suburban New Jersey? The answer, in the land of huge refrigerators is of course frozen; tucked away nicely in that frosty-looking ziplock bag, waiting paitiently for your attention (somtimes for months on end). A few things are readily available frozen such as spinach and parathas, but I've discovered a couple of other really useful ones. The mostest value undoubtedly comes from frozen green chillies. These absolutely indispensable hot friends can be frozen for a good long while; a couple of weeks at least. They lose some of their shape and become slightly watery when thawed, but usually survive the ordeal witho...

An email from Gayot a few days ago warned of the five rising chefs in America. Amazingly, only one was from New York. Zakary Pelaccio's distinctly pizza-parlor name hid a penchant for peddling inexpensive Malaysian food in superhip Meatpacking District. This Saturday, suitably encouraged by my stomach, I headed into Fatty Crab to check the chef rising. Its a tiny tiny place, barely able to contain the tables and waiters. The three of us were so space challenged that lunch was a constant juggling of plates and glasses and forks and knives. The food did, however, live up to its promise of being both interesting and affordable. We ate all kinds of the things of the menu, and were not disappointed by any (except possibly the tiny portions of the skate entree). The nasi lemak was spectacular, the lo-si-fun delectable and the crab more than passable. Portions are usually small, though. Of course, this isn't traditional Malaysian food; more on the lines of "inspired by". ...

One of my biggest challenges to cooking Indian food, surprisingly enough, has been to do with grinding spices. Wet or dry grinding is a staple with Indian spieces. This may not sound like much of a challenge but it's huge. To start with, the quantity problem; most appliances (such as coffee grinders) are suited for larger quantities (such as handful of coffee beans). That's enough ground spice to run a restaurant. You can't simply grind a large quantity and store it for later use - many spices will rapidly deteriorate into sawdust (and the ones that don't - duh - you can buy those pre-ground). The other problem is the blending of those strong spice smells; Coffee grinders are meant to grind the same thing over and over again, while an average Indian meal may require you to grind some ten different spices in one meal, and they should not all end up smelling of each other. To top it all off, coffee grinders cannot be washed. The best you can do is wipe them with a wet cl...

The Michelin Guide is the most famous of restaurant guides. Till recently, however, Michelin stars weren't available to American chefs; not having never set up an office across the pond, the Michelin guide kept its opinions of American eateries to itself. That changed yesterday, when Michelin announced its ratings for New York - the first American city to be so listed. 507 restaurants made it to the list while 39 recevied at least one star, catapulting New York to the top of the list of food cities - nearly. Paris still beat it handily with 70 starred restaurants, but what do the French know of food anyway? Michelin is not the lone star in the world. Gault-Millau (thats Go-Me-oh to you illiterates) - has its own 20-point rating system, and is considered influential enough to that a downgrade supposedly led to the suicide of superchef Bernard Loiseau. However, Gault-Millau does not deign to step out of continental Europe (even London isn't considered worth it). New York has lo...

I've always had a low opinion about chains and their ability to create anything resembling gourmet cuisine. Chains, are fine for steaks and fast food, but by the very nature of their business, focus on standardization and repeat production than on the finer, more complex processes of producing great food. It was with some trepidation, therefore, that I walked into Roy's . I noticed they had restaurants in list of cities long enough to cover all four glass doors, and the parking-lot suburban location next to an Amerisuites in Dallas did nothing to lessen the worries. Inside I was handed a large menu duly marked with the chef's specialities, which I dutifully decided to restrict my choices to. My first choice was a ceviche. It came in a martini glass and was absolutely wonderful. Things looked up even more when their signature Hawaiian buttefirsh landed up beautifully presented, and made it after a mouthful to the list of the world's greatest meals. Ok, a few mouthful...

When I went to Dallas people joked about how I was going to have to stick to steak everyday, and for the first week (not knowing any better) thats what I did - and a New York steakhouse at that. A little enthusiasm on the Internet showed me, however, that Dallas had a very lively dining scene with choices like seafood and even salads in quaint neighborhoods and hidden nooks that would compete favorably with the best in the country. Many of them were beautiful restaurants, some tiny, some huge, decorated with vert individual styles and serving excellent and distinctive food. Here are my favorite ones so far, not ranked in any order. They all serve essentially the same cuisine - modern American with southern and mexican touches. Surprisingly enough, most places are heavy on fish - but in landlocked Dallas excellent quality nevertheless. The one I've been to most often is Jaspers; its right by where I work and is open for lunch and serves a sophisticated take on American food with s...

Vegetables often have these inconvenient biological barriers that need to be removed using advanced devices called peelers. There's obviously quite some tachnology involved, given the wide variety of different kinds of peelers in the market, but they all serve the same basic purpose - to strip certain kinds of veggies naked and fill up garbage cans. I cannot do too much about those naked vegetables, but Bengalis are sensitive about filling up garbage cans (possibly because of Kolkata municipal corporation's dismal record in emptying them). They have, therefore, come up with various options to avoid the trash can - many of which are ridiculously tasty. Here are two choices that I love. First is the potato. Peeling the average potato yields a fairly substantial volume of potato peel, and Bengalis wash them up, cut them into inch-sized pieces, add a touch of flour, dip them in a generous handful of poppyseed and deep fry them to the most delicious, incredibly crispy fries ever. B...

Most airports have boring food; at best, a range of fast food choices or minimal cheesygreasy food to go with beer. International airports generally fare better - London or Amsterdam in particular, and also see my raves about Milan - but some domestic ones are catching on too. Jetblue is a pioneer of a kind here. Along with their much advertised mantra of not serving food (though the food they do serve - Terra chips and real almonds - is miles better than the hated airplane staple of mini pretzels) Jetblue terminals tend to have a nice (though pricey) range of salads and take-away sandwiches. At JFK, however, they go further - a full food court provides options like sushi too - which even at its average is quite a change from fastfood hamburgers. Los Angeles airport used to have nice choices, like outlets of Wolfgang Puck's ever expanding chain, but I haven't been there for a while. Interesting airport food popped up, of all places, at Denver airport. The last time I was here...

Texas is barbecue land, so of course I had to go chasing down some of the real stuff. My first experience of Texas barbecue started with Sonny Bryan's Smokehouse in Dallas, which I was told was famous. One of the eight branches of Sonny Bryan wasn't too far from the office, so I headed there on a hot summer's day. It turned out to be inside a strip mall, looking all the world like takeaway Chinese. The stories on the wall were entertaining but, unfortunately, the barbecue was not much better than ... well ... takeaway Chinese. In short, a washout. I went a few weeks later to Tioga, TX where a Sonny Bryant prodigal started Clark's; the resut is much the same. I discover later that Sonny Bryant is no small operation - its a franchise chain with a CEO. First a bit about Texas barbecue. It's not the regular backyard stuff - here things are very slowly cooked over woodsmoke heat in massive pits. The traditional way is to start with raw meat that's dry-rubbed wi...

My uncle in Calcutta would go to a lot of trouble for pork chops. They were a special treat at his house, served only when guests came from out of town. Good pork is not common in India; in this case he would leg it all the way to a single vendor in New Market's meat market to get the perfect cut. Later, when he became too old to try the journey himself, he would persuade others to go. It had to be that one vendor, and with good reason. Simply broiled and had with bread, they were wonderful pork chops - more than making up in a rich, robust taste what they lacked in tenderness. Now of course, cholesterol fears and a modernized New Market have put paid to the tradition for ever. I've only recently returned to pork chops. Never having tried to cook them, I can only comment from outside, but pork seems to strain a chefs chops more that one would expect. Perfectly competent chefs seem to falter at the attempt as diners scowl their way through dry, tasteless meat. Its easy to get c...

Steaming is a time-honored way of cooking fishes, mostly because the results are so good. Microwaves aren't exactly time-honored, but they seem to be a great way to steam fishes without ...well... steaming them. The exotic Bengali word for steam is bhapa , and the most famous of the bhapa varieties are undoubtedly the one where mustard is involved. When wrapped in banana leaf, it's also called paturi . This is not the only way that bongs know to bring fish and mustard together, or even fish and steam - but it is the most well known. Bhapa fish is a really simple dish; just two things are absolutely required - mustard paste and fish. And, of course, a wrapper of some kind to steam in - traditionally banana leaf, but I use parchment when that's not around. You coat the fish with the mustard paste and steam it for enough time; this yields a fairly interesting (if not wonderful) mustard fish. In India, it's made with hilsa - the holy grail of steamed fishes - or bhetki ...

A friend of mine wanted me to cook for her, but had no spices at home. We made a pact; I'd cook something truly Indian with only what's available at her local supermarket - which sounded like a huge challenge till I discovered her 'local' was a WholeFoods with neary every kind of spice there is. Life, however, wasn't as simple as all that. First, each bottle of spice is at least $3; buying a decent complement would soon have made holes in pockets enough for spaceships to pass through. We decided therefore only to buy condiments that would be useful after the mess I made had been cleared up - that is, she could keep using them. Second, there were some critical missing ingredients such as besan, green chillies, ghee, mustard oil - all of which made cooking most standard Indian dishes (like the basic aloo-jeera or my superquick aloo golki) impossible. Chillies were a particular challenge - I've learned with experience that Mexican chillies don't work - the tas...

I've been spending the last fortnight entertaining my mother and aunt, which means trying out some nice new restaurants. My travels took me to some new ones, and some old favorites. One of the new ones was Vong , the much reviewed restaurant from celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s chain of restaurants. It's hidden away under the lipstick building, and is populated entirely by Bangladeshi waiters, which made life much easier for us. I seem to be having French-Asian everywhere nowadays; cream sauces dusted with exotic spices and presented brilliantly. The interesting part is how they convert Asian street foods or communal serving to the plated paradigm, where each person gets a plate all his own all beautifully laid and not to be touched. Plated food always puts me in a bit of a tizzy. I have two worries; one is - am I supposed to eat all those things that make it look pretty? Do you put all of them in your mouth together (the perfect bite) or are there combinations t...

I've finally inspired other people. Here's the review (unedited except for links and capitalization) sent in a few days ago by the very friend of mine that fished in hell in with me. Last week, this foodie friend of mine suggested that we try sampling fare at restaurants/bars named after their addresses. I found the idea intriguing but we got drawn to the Osteria Gelsi fish (which was very very good), so today, when another friend came to the city from India I decided to try this place called 44 SW in Hell's Kitchen. It said ristorante and the menu outside seemed to have antipasti and insalata - so we walked in assuming they would have the usual entrees on the menu. The place turned out to be full of disappointments. First, they did not have half the wines on their list. The list itself was kind of sparse and uninformative. The pretty stewardess recommended something that turned out to be rather bland. More chicken than fish in an italian restaurant sounded like bad n...

I know you're running out of money. What better than a free magazine to recommend cheap joints, so here's the 2005 cheap&best list from Village Voice. And cheap&best was in fashion in earlier years too; here are the previous lists - Italian (2004) , Latin (2003), Asian (2002) and the Original List in 2001. No, I haven't eaten at all these places. I may be chubby but I am NOT FAT.

While Masoor starts life as pink, a little persuasion by hot water quickly converts it to a pale yellow. It's color makes it the easiest dal to recognise but people usually see the prepared version and go looking for a yellow dal. Bengalis use it a lot by itself while most other communities mix it with other dals. A light dal, it does not stand up well to heavy masalas. Here's my favorite recipe for it, which goes wonderfully well with spicy pickles and crunchy fries.

I found a good place to post formal recipes - RecipeGullet . They have a nice editor for entering recipes; it even comes out looking pretty (on the web page, at least). And, they have a fancy-shmancy search engine. Here, for instance, is my super-quick recipe for Aloo Golki .

Dal pretty much the core of Indian food. One could argue that it is more imporant that even rice, since many areas of India are wheat-centered. Dal is eaten everyday by pretty much all of India in some form or the other. Dals are pulses (dried food crops of of the legume family), and come either with or without skin. The skins make a considerable difference to the taste, so different recipes call for skinned or unskinned dal. It is also the generic name for the many kinds of soupy dishes made from one or more of those pulses. Just to confuse things, only the soupy dishes are called 'dal' - other things made with the same stuff are not. I'm eventually going to write an introduction to the dals - and there are a surprising variety of varieties. People get confused by which dal is what - even Indians. Identifying the dals by sight is not simple; that is traditionally the first test of a Bengali housewife (and it seems both my aunts failed). Luckily, they recovered so when I la...

Nothing quite defines the American food experience like the burger. And nothing quite defines the burger experience like a fast food chain. When I'm on the road driving the back roads, the only food I'm likely to get consistently is a burger. Sure, there's the occassional hippie who's opened a chai-latte place in the middle of a forest but dont count on that when looking for three meals a day. Even pizza pales in the face of the burger chain and its ubiquitious presence. My keen, inquisitive mind (not to mention huge stomach) naturally formulated the question - which is the fairest of them all, the best chain burger that exists, the best and the rest. The results of an extensive survey has a surprising answer. The best damn burger I've eaten at a chain is the Ciabatta burger from Jack-in-the-box . I know anything Italian is frowned on a true burger and In-N-Out is supposed to be really good, but that Ciabatta went wonderfully with two fat slabs of meat, cheese and...

The search has come to an end. The best Indian food in the continent is to be found in a strip mall on Red Hill Avenue in Tutsin CA. It's called Dosa Place , and produces dosas that would make most chefs in Chennai sweat. Luckily, its well hidden by Del Taco and Chinese takeouts. Ok, so its a little bit of a hyperbole. The place isn't the best Indian food but it is - and there's no question about it - the best dosas on the face of the ...ummm... continent. They make a lot of other stuff (including the unavoidable chicken tikka masala and lamb vindaloo) but stick fairly and squarely to their dosas and come away blessed. I'm not talking "authentic" or "really nice for America". I'm talking real dosas, the kinds that would divert attention from Chennai films and Andhra politics. A real, true brown work of genius. For those who dont know much about these matters, a dosa is a crepe made from fermented rice-lentil batter. The critical parts of a go...

I discovered myself in French food fairly regularly in the last few days. I also realized that for some reason all French restaurants in New York look very similar. The first was Les Halles , one branch of which is right around the corner from my house and open till midnight. yes there's a celebrity chef involved, but the place isn't fantastically expensive. The roast duck was basic and simple, but beautifully executed - enough to overcome the bother of constant jabber from my somewhat inebriated (and male) neighbor. It had this half-inch thick meltingly sinful skin, browned and crisp on top but a sweet yam mash on the side that I didn't care for. Then there was Artisanal , widely known as cheese heaven with another celebrity chef in tow. The cheese plates are excellent; amazing choice and good presentation. A waiter with a disappointing lack of accent informed us that there was a short list of cheese (around 40) on the specials and the whole list of over 150 (some of whi...

A drive to get rid of excess clothes on a Sunday took me to the east village, where I stumbled upon Ma*ya Hurapan . It turned out to have nothing to do with Mayans; the food is a scattering of dishes from South East Asia. The interestingly colorful two-level eatery was empty when I went (for a late late late lunch) so I got myself a nice seat at a window (all the better to see summer belly-buttons through) and ordered Roti Canai and Chinese Sausage topped Vegetable Fried Rice. Before the roti canai, however, came a free plate of shrimp crackers with peanut sauce of the satay kind. I must tell you, however, that the peanut sauce was incredibly fantastically wonderful - this from a guy who's punded the streets of Singapore trying out every satay vendor there is. It's not as good as the best that a Singapore street vendor can offer, but it's close - and certainly far above the namby-pamby versions every other New York place offers. Even better - its free. The roti canai was ...

Hell's kitchen isn't on my normal routes, but a friend who lives there assured me that it would be well worththe trip so I found myself in his neighborhood Italian restaurant - Osteria Gelsi . It wasn't merely Italian; it was Puglian (they don't let you into New York City Italian restaurants without a geography exam nowadays - Puglia happens to be on the boot heel of peninsular Italy). I dont know anything about Puglia, but its obvious they're fond of fish. The menu leaned heavily towards seafood, but more interestingly (in a city of a million Italian eateries) promised fishes that I'd rarely seen anywhere else, such as porgie or rock scorpion fish. We ordered one of each, preceded by baked baby squid and followed by a huge square of (what else) tiramisu. The food was fantastic. Both the fishes were revelations; the assertive, coarse-grained porgie simply grilled with herbs, the flaky, buttery rock scorpion fish with cherry tomatoes. The baked baby squid start...

CNN Money has come out with The World's Top 50 Restaurants taken from a survery by the British Magazine "Restaurant". Its an interesting excercise; and of course a deeply flawed and controversial one. The western-palate bias is obvious; the London outpost of a New York sushi joint (Nobu London #20) supposedly makes better sushi than anywhere in Japan. And who knew that the best Chinese in the world (Hakkasan #30) is found in London's Fitzrovia? The only representative from all of Asia (Felix Hong Kong #49) is a bar that serves throughly western creations such as seared Ahi Tuna. European food doesn't always fare well, either. England, France and Spain appears up there but poor Italy is left out of the top twenty altogether - squeezing in with Checcino dal 1887 only at #23. Interesting also to see its variance from another great restaurant list - the Michelin guide. The long-time bible of star eateries does not cover New York (they dont have an office here), b...

This sunday a charming woman chose academics over me, so I was left to my own devices. And, just by that solace of abandonded souls (Bed Bath and Beyond) was a very interesting restaurant indeed. Almost as soon as I had gotten on my trusty steed, my eye was caught by a chic modern whitelaminate space that prominently announced " Tebaya " and threatened to sell me Japanese chicken wings. What captured my interest was that for such a slick space the menu was miniscule; Nagoya-style chicken wings in three portion sizes, kushiyaki (chicken on a stick) and a katsu burger. Teba, it turns out, is deep fried chicken wings with a secret sauce - soy, sesame and pepper to be sure, but there's more in there. The sides are gummy, sticky potato balls in a wonderfully buttery soy sauce called potemochi. It takes some courage to sell such a small menu, but Tebaya does a great job. The wings are fabulous, and messy and cheap to boot. The potemochi is kind of strange but addictive - s...

So, I changed it...the name of the blog, I mean. I think it's cool to have a name that matches the URL. Gives an aura of...of...well something.

This book deserves a place on my blog as a whole new take on the concept of fast food - look here

Every once in a while, you stumble upon a restaurant that you really like but critics ignore and no one else knows about. A few weeks ago I was led to a small, almost unseen vietnamese restaurant nestled in Tribeca between much more famous neighbours. We could see Bouley from our window, and Nobu, Megu, Chanterelle and a dozen critical raves were staring over our shoulder, but our quiet little place held its own. Not unlike Vietnam itself, one might say. Hoi An , named after a once-famous port town in Vietnam (ok I googled that) is small, unpretentious, inexpensive and strangely enough staffed by small cheerful Japanese women. There is no easy way to discover Hoi An. I was taken there by a friend, and that's probably the only way to go; on your own you'll almost always get distracted by one of the much better reviewed neighbours that abound in Tribeca. That would be a mistake, though - the food there was some of the best Vietnamese I've had in recent times. We ordered the ...

You can now subscribe to the blog. I've been told it helps the poor of the world but that may not be entirely true. There's a text box and button on the sidebar that makes the magic possible, though I warn you it will automatically throw you into the arms of an Yahoo group (or should I say...group). At the moment it's all the way at the bottom of the sidebar but may relocate without warning or unnatural squeaking sounds.

I landed in Birmingham Alabama hungry, having been deprived of food since the night before. A quick drive got me from the airport to what the GPS told me was the center of the city, where I promptly started looking for a place to eat. Having cruised the crumbling and mostly shuttered city blocks of downtown Birmingham, a fine dining restaurant was the last thing I expected to find. I nearly chose chick-a-fil but last minute parking problems forced me to attempt the rather plain exterior of the oddly named Restaurant G . Once past the door, the change was dramatic. The plain glass Eurodiner gave way to valuted celings and original artwork. A soaring staircase led the previous group of four diners into the heavens while we soacked in the smile from our glamorous hostess and occupied a table at the window. The extremely pleasant space, it turns out, was matched by some marvelous food. Right off the bat, bread basket came with excellent sesame nut and walnut raisin breads. My choice of sp...

I have surrendered to crass commercialism. There are now advertisments in my blog. Luckily they seem to be highly intrusive and real money spinners. I promise to treat all readers to dinners with the accumulated wealth, so click away. And dream on...

Here are two places that I visited recently Bridge Cafe turns out to be the oldest surviving bar in New York, which is big in a city where some 99% fail in the first few years. Situated just below the Brooklyn bridge on Water street, it turned out to be a small, plain cafe that showed few signs of its ancient heritage. However, age is not the only reason to go there - we went for brunch and the food was very good, specially their apple-smoked honey bacon. They also have one of the best selections of single malt whisky in Manhattan, stretching three deep across half the bar. Von Singh was my midweek, a somewhat quirkily named store on West 8th and McDougal selling its own take on Indian kati rolls. As the name suggests, the menu aims at fusion. The rolls here come in tortilla-like baked flatbreads (which, in my opinion, is not ideal) and contain varieties of curried chicken, optionally topped with a few kinds of sauce. The effect is more pita or burrito than kati roll, but the chick...

I have often bemoaned in these columns (ok I haven't ever bemoaned and this isn't even a column but I think it makes me sound like I'm getting paid for this - lets not get distracted here) that Indian food abroad is a bit like Chinese food in India. Every restaurant sells the same menu, and most of those dishes dont even exist in traditional Indian cooking. Chicken Tikka Masala is firmly a British invention, almost certainly the fortuituous combination of Bangladeshi cook and tomato sauce. It is, in fact, so British that the British Council uses its history in an English lesson - I kid you not! It was with considerable admiration, therefore, that I stared at the menu of Babu . A vast expanse of nicely expensive paper made no mention of either tikka or tandoor, and vindaloo was mysteriously invisible. At first I though it was a trick of the dim lights (entirely candles) but no amount of blinking made any of the familiars appear. I was instead marooned with names like doi m...

A friend of mine recounts with much amusement how I once gave a long speech on cooking rice to some hapless woman at a grocery store. Here's the shortened version Rice is the staple of Indian cooking, so one should not treat it lightly. Basmati is the king, but making it as fragrant as the restaurant requires a little technique. There are four steps in cooking any kind of raw (as opposed to parboiled) rice - rinsing, soaking, cooking and fluffing. In India they would always rinse rice to make sure it was clean, but also to wash away the talc commonly used as a milling agent. Most rice today is clean and has no talc, so rinsing isn't required. Some of the surface starch gets washed away in the rinse, so you might want to do it anyway. Soaking is a 15-30 minute affair, where cleaned and rinsed rice is left to soak in warm water. It's supposed to soften the grains and release the flavor and should be done unless you're in a hurry. They say you should use the same water t...

I never expected to like large slabs of meat barely cooked and served with nothing, but steaks have a way of growing on you - sometimes literally. There are two steak joints of note inches from where I work - Rainwaters on Kettner and Ruth's Chris . One a resolutely independent steakhouse, one part of America's largest fine dining chain. Both, however, were very similar in appearance - dramatic curved stairways leading to a huge, heavily wood-panelled upstairs dining room. Ruth's has the advantage of better views, perched as it is just off Harbor drive, and also seemed busier than the very empty Rainwaters. I had the ribeye in both places (no, not on the same day, not even the same month - I'm not that fond of cholesterol). To start with, both steaks were excellent, but there are differences. Ruth's gave me a detailed writeup of the special oven, the New Orleans rags to riches story and placed a sizzling medium-rare steak floating in butter in front of me. the butte...

America is a land of choices. In India you go to a store, ask the guy there to give you a kilo of chicken, and he hands you a bag of the stuff that you go home and cook it. That doesn't work in America. In the land of the choices, you're faced with breasts, thighs, legs, wings, portions, skinless, boneless, ground, fry, stir-fry, roast, antibiotic, biotic, organic, free range (there's a rumour the average American has to pass an exam before he or she is allowed near the poultry aisle). So which one is the one to choose? Fear not, I have been there, done that research. Read on, if you're not chicken. First, if you dont know what cut of chicken is, then here is a guide from the original Spam guys. Online grocer FreshDirect has an excellent section on cuts of chicken complete with pictures but you have to put in a New York zip code (say 10016) to look at it. The absolute worst pieces to buy for most Indian food is breast. It is commonly recommended for western cooking...

As benefits a coastal town, San Diego is full of seafood restaurants, from hole-in-the-wall fish taco places to black-tie affairs. I've already written on some of them earlier, but I recently had a chance to go to the two that were the highest rated on downtown - Point Loma Seafoods and Top of the Market. Point Loma Seafoods is much away from the beaten restaurant track, serving salads, cocktails and fish plates amidst counters of fresh fish for sale. It was rated the number one in magazine reviews so I went there with high hopes and, well, came away very disappointed. The location seemed the only thing worth the effort; I wasn't impressed either with the quality of the fish or the cooking. Though the jetty next door gives the impression that the fish just came off the boat, many of the offerings at the counter had names starting with "Atlantic" and "farm raised". I tried their smoked fish, but its a very far cry from the stuff at, say, Katie's Smoke...

Chicken is simple to cook. If you put your mind to it then a delicious, genuinely Indian chicken dish is not that tough. Of course, there are some basics to cooking chicken Indian style. First, boneless chicken does not work - lose the bones and you'll have a weak tasteless gravy. Second, the skin has a lot of flavor so dont throw it away before cooking - pick it out after the dish is done and throw it away (you need just a little skin though, too much will just make it greasy). Third, dont go to a supermarket chain for your chicken - those look great, cook beautifully but taste of nothing. Shell out twice the money, but its worth getting non-frozen free-range chicken. The simplest chicken dish I know is a Raj-era dish called Shikari Murgh, or Hunters Chicken. I don't remember how I came by it, and the name - I guess it was cooked by shikaris when on a hunt because it's really quite simple to make. Take some large pieces of chicken, make a few slits in them to let the flavo...

Malpensa sounds like a Bengali dessert but is actually the name of Milan's airport - as a disembodied announcer has already announced several times in the twelve hours I have spent here. Airports aren't usually food destinations. Even in countries that should know better, the fondness for food and drink seems to stop at the check-in gate and passengers are usually stuck inside with a choice of three different outlets of the same single vendor offering ordinary sandwiches at outrageous prices. Milan does not disappoint. There are seven restaurants, or so it seems at first glance. It turns out that all of them are run by the same company (MyChef) and offer the same food - just the decor is different. In the central food court, because of some wierd workflow that only the Italians seem to understand, you pay first at the chocolate counter and then order what you want at each seperate counter - one for coffee, one for sandwiches, one for wine and so on. Since the items and prices...

Bongs are very fond of bitterness. I'm not talking attitude or psychology; this is something that's far more important to the bhadrolok - food, or more specifically the first course at lunch. Now the whole business of a bong lunch is ridiculously elaborate. The full ceremonial version, usually served when someone is dead, goes to fifty plus courses and is supervised by a stern grandmother. More common, however, is a managaeable ten-odd choices in a very strict order and the first course is, traditionally, a bitter dish. The most common bitter is the pedestrian karela - usually steamed and mashed with potatoes in mustard oil - but there are more exotic choices None more than neem-begun and sojne phool. Neem, of course, is India's wonder herb - able to cure everything from bad hair days to tropical malaria, minor infection to major infestation. Its fruit is inedible and its tough, fibrous leaves taste bitter enough to deserve every wonder-drug epithet. The persistent bong,...

Kolkata is always an indulgence in food. It helps, of course, that my aunt is both keen and competent as a cook. Bengali food is all about simple spice combinations and exotic vegetables. Given that Bengal is full of banana trees, it isn't unexpected that banana florets - which we call mocha - is on the menu today. The stuff is horrendously laborious to clean and peel since you need to go through a lot of those tiny florets to arrive at any volume of the curry, but the result is one of my favorites specially since I play no role in the aforementioned labour. Mochar ghonto is best had with rice for lunch, where the blandness of the rice matches the spicy cinnamon-clove flavor of the ghonto. Then there's thor (rhyming with more) - the spongy pith inside the stem. When the green outer layers are peeled off, a white hollow tube emerges that looks and feels quite like plastic, but someone somewhere persuaded the bongs that it was edible. Since then, the chopped up, nicely spiced ...