frandroid: A faroher, emblem of the Zoroastrian religion (faroher)
It's really a crime how Indian food is limited in North America. I live in Toronto, where Indian restaurants abound, but we mostly get North Indian restaurants, and mostly a certain number of standardized dishes at that. On the veg side, I can predict with about 90% accuracy what will be on the menu of any restaurant. There are some South Indian restaurants too, but also there they focus on dosas, which is technically a breakfast food. There are some hakka restaurants as well, which is Indianified Chinese/Szechuan/Manchurian food.

I'm mentioning this because my own partner is Parsi, aka Zoroastrian from Mumbai, which has its own food culture, greatly influenced by Gujarat. I don't cook Parsi food a lot but the other day my partner suggested that I make papri. I picked the recipe from Niloufer King's My Parsi Kitchen, followed the instructions, replaced goat with TVP chunks, and it was freaking amazing. Parsis are indiscriminate meat eaters, having none of the restrictions that other Indian religions have, but we've veganized most of the Parsi recipes that we know of. Parsi cookbooks will often offer veg alternatives within a recipe, as well.

Anyway. I mention this because I wonder about how much more Indian food we're missing out on, since there's a narrow expectation of what Indian Food should be in this city. The internet is a great resource to expand one's horizon (we regularly make one Nepalese recipe we've first tasted at one such restaurant) but you have to know what you're looking for, you need to be exposed to dishes! Some foods are acquired tastes, you're not going to know you've made it right the first time you taste it! And then in some restaurants, you get white spice syndrome, where the spiciness of a dish is cut by 3/4rds when you're white.

Maybe I just need to venture out to Scarborough some more.
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
I made myself a "pspycy szechuan stirfry" (I mean, spicy.  But doesn't pspycy look way better?) from one of my vegan cookzines. It asked for chinese chili sauce, which we don't usually keep at home, so I decided to look for the chili powder.  As I couldn't find the powder, I stumbled upon szechuan peppercorns, which I had bought in Milwaukee a few years ago. They're quite different from the peppers I usually use, so I haven't used them much yet, but since I was making a szechuan stirfry, I thought, why not?  So I took a teaspoon, and roasted them in the pan (1 part peppers, 2 parts salt, but there was already a fair bit of soy sauce in my dish so I roasted the peppers on their own).  They started smelling like pot, like if I was hot-knifing pot. Then I ground them.  I finally found the chili powder, so I put some of that too.

Turns out that I didn't put enough chili powder, the stirfry was kinda underwhelming on the flavour side. (Except for the tofu, which I half replaced with tempeh. Yum tempeh. Tempeh is like the peanut butter version of tofu.) I didn't quite taste the peppers while eating the dish.  However, now that I'm done, my mouth is tingling.  It's a bit like the light stinging effect you get when you start brushing your teeth and the toothpaste gets to your gums, except without the peppermint flavour. It was starting to pass after a while, but now I'm drinking tea and it's bringing out the effect in full force, except now with a metallic aftertaste. (That's the tea, steeped for a few minutes too long as I was cleaning up some dishes.)

---
On an unrelated note, try out Café 668, at 885 Dundas West, for decent chinese veg food. It looks somewhat chi-chi, according to Siue, but really, it's just not dumpy. :) (It's does stand out from its surroundings though.)

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