The Well-Fed 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 ...

Atkins made the potato severely unfashionable, but it hasn't become any less tasty. If you're in the mood for some rapid fire food and can't be bothered with the elaboration of a full Indian dinner, there's nothing like the potato to rescue the day. Life was much better in America, I discovered, because potatoes came in cans already boiled and peeled. Armed with that sort of weapon, suddenly a whole world of desi food opens its doors to you. There's aloo methi, aloo dum, aloo palak (yes, spinach comes in cans too) ... but nothing quite as worthy of lipsmacking dreams as aloo jeera. It's a very simple dish - even amateurs can make edible versions of it, but there's enough in it for the pro to show his tricks. And, having lived off many a can after a night of excess, I can safely lay claim to pro. The basics are straightforward - heat the ghee, pop the jeera in hot oil, toss in potatoes with enough salt and red chilli powder - and in three minutes you...

Spinach comes in cans too, but by far the better spinach is the one that comes in frozen bricks. My personal feeling - sacrilegous, Im sure - is that this spinach seems to taste better than most grocery-fresh spinach that I buy. The problem - thawing. You can't microwave them without turning them half into jelly - the only reliable method of thawing them without cooking them in the process is to leave them out overnight or in warm water for hours. Once that's done, however, you have really nice spinach. My mother taught me the Bengali way to make palak aloo. It's different from the Punjabi school, which is essentially paneer in palak paneer replaced with aloo. The Bong style has no spices but whole dried red chillies fried, and you keep stirring the chopped (not pasted) spinach in oil (not ghee) on the flame till it's dry. That takes much longer than it sounds - spinach tends to keep releasing water - but if you've had the patience to stir through it all (yes, cons...

You would expect a place on the coast to be full of seafood restaurants, and downtown San Diego does not disappoint. Specialist seafood places abound in San Diego, and here are some of my favorite ones. Relarively speaking, San Diego restaurants are very good but usually never rise to the level of incredible. The focus of most seafood places in San Diego is to get freshly caught fish from various parts of the world - this from hawaii, that from Spain - and serve it simply grilled with butter-lemon sauce - which is all very nice but makes it difficult to distinguish restaurant A from B. The menus look similar, and they probably get their fish from the same suppliers too. Also, the skill is really with the fish supplier, not with the chef. Understanding, therefore, that all these places have the SGLB (simply grilled butter lemon) thing down pat, I'm going to write about what stood out. The most highly rated seafood place in San Diego, according to most reviews, is the Star of the S...