Indian food

In my backwards food world comfort takes two forms: pasta or Indian food. The pasta one is a no-brainer -- who can turn down a pan of gooey homemade macaroni and cheese under a buttered breadcrumb crust? -- but the Indian one is likely one of my idiosyncrasies. My family lived on the subcontinent for three of my adolescent years and we subsisted on dal bhat -- rice and lentils. It's a miraculous meal of sorts: one of the world's least expensive yet most nutritious food combinations, which locals eat (along with curried seasonal vegetables, tarkari) for both of their two daily meals, every day of the year. EVERY DAY! Forever! With meats like chicken or goat taken only on feast days. Now, I can eat pasta pretty well every dinner for a month and not get tired of it, but to sustain a nation of people on one basic meal for a lifetime makes dal bhat the World's Greatest in my estimation. And there is something so wonderfully satisfying about the combination of rice smothered with creamy, spicy cooked lentils; it has exactly the same filling qualities of a good tuna-noodle casserole or chicken pot pie.

It's not just Indian food; I recently read a great short piece by an American author extolling the same virtues of Mexican beans and rice (sorry, I'm mid-move and have already packed the anthology which contains the author's name). I should be less surprised that at least half the world is sustained by these comfort foods.

And did I mention how easy dal bhat is? These days I'm simmering a small potful of red lentils while I caramelize about 4 big, thinly sliced onions in the cast iron pan. Once the onions are sweet, deep golden and tender I add a big tablespoonful of Dean & Deluca's hot curry powder, a double-size pat of butter, a drizzle of honey and a load of salt. As soon as the onion mix-up goes into the lentil soup I clamp on the lid and let everything get to know each other. A scoop of sticky basmati goes into my favourite bowl, I dole out an enormous ladle of dal and then ...the magic happens. Add some Patak's hot lime pickle and eat with a cereal spoon.

Oddly, though, restaurant Indian usually doesn't cut it. There's too much heaviness from butter and cream in restaurant dals so you can't eat a whole giant bowl of it without nearly bursting and groaning the whole way home. I was excited to eat at and review Amaya, our city's best Indian restaurant, last week, because I know they are stingier with the ghee and fat, bit I still felt five feet wide when I left after an otherwise extraordinary meal.

But that's material for another day -- the restaurant "secret" of how to make everything taste better. Hint: it's fat.

Eating horse and Scotch eggs

There are two places in the city that serve horse meat. I guess there continues to be a general aversion to eating the flesh of creatures more commonly known as pets, because when I gleefully ordered an entree of horse tartare on Wednesday night, my 3 dining companions choked on their Pernods. What followed was a rush of unintelligent babbling about how it's wrong to eat horse, like it's wrong to eat dog or cat. Of course, I dismiss this logic out of hand, seeing no difference between any of these lovely creatures and the vital beauty and gentle cuddliness of pig, chicken, cow and fish. Have you ever delighted in the fervent nuzzling of a goat taking food from your palm? Of a puffy yellow chick at the egg hatchery in the science museum? Have you read Charlotte's Web? Did it turn you against a good roti, rotisserie chicken or extra order of bacon at breakfast? I myself am so fond of the docile wet stare of all ruminants that I've been known to weep spontaneously when seeing them represented in art (see Caravaggio's Rest on the Flight into Egypt). It doesn't stop me from eating them.

Generally, the French eat horse while the Brits abhor the practice. Leaning on the French quarter of my ancestry, then, (the Celtic remainder is just happy to have a whiskey afterwards), I have as much issue consuming horseflesh as I do consuming chicken, pork, turkey, elk, moose, snake or insects. Talk to me about eating farmed Chinese fish or inhumanly slaughtered beef and I'll rant till I drop, but nibbling on cavallo (so eloquent in Italian) is no biggie. And at this small, unpretentious, perfectly French bistro in the heart of Chinatown, the horse tartare is a treat I cannot resist. The meat itself is almost sweet and not at all gamey, and when all mixed up with Dijon and cornichons it's absolutely lovely.

Rarer still, though less contentious, is the Scotch egg, served only during pro soccer games at the lakeside arena. Brian and I shimmied through streams of fans in search of the one concessions stand where we would find the treasure we sought. And there it was, $4.20 of hard boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat, battered and deep fried. It feels reckless to eat one without a defibrillator within 10 metres, but it does match perfectly with sports-arena draft beer.

Other than that, the home front cuisine of late has been particularly underwhelming. On one of the most humid evenings of the summer I slow-simmered (because I love to add steam to humidity) San Marzano tomato sauce and it has gamely formed the base for most meals since -- plain on pasta, with a can of Italian tuna on pasta, cold on crackers after a night of drinking. Bio-K, crackers and cheese filled out pretty well the rest of my in-home dining. I suppose my ex-domicile culinary abandon makes up for it.

'licious

SIDENOTE: I've discovered a new iteration of hell: gastro-intestinal distress has forced me to survive on the BRAT diet for 5 days. I had no idea how mind-numbingly boring bananas and rice could be. Effective, yes, but my stars it's dull. I even resorted to making jello on Wednesday just to let my tongue taste something vaguely fruity. Vaguely.

Luckily enough, the distress hit me right in the middle of the city's summer "restaurant festival", so I'm staying in anyways. Lots of cities are doing this now; originally it was a way to get people out of their houses and bunkers after the SARS panic several years ago. Now it's just a sad repetition of something that was once a good idea. Restaurants offer $25 or $35 3-course meals, in theory providing the plebs with an opportunity to go to the exorbitantly-priced top rooms, or even just to more than one moderately-priced room. That's the idea. In practice it's a scam. Here's the dirt: the hippity-high-end restos are first of all utterly swamped by reservations, and then by rabid wannabe diners calling and calling trying to get on the waiting list. Many restos triple or quadruple their covers (the number of meals served), which means diners are essentially kicked off the dining room's pant leg after about 75 minutes. To accommodate the insane increase in covers, fine kitchens work distinctly un-fine hours, make food in bloated, oversized quantities and buy in things like ravioli and desserts (which would normally be made in-house). The food is compromised. Diners do not get an authentic experience.

But my biggest beef (and clearly I have more than one) is the loss of service. My favourite part of going to an uber-resto is the way they make you feel like the only person in the room (the good ones do this, at least). Service is the make-or-break element to a good restaurant and it just evaporates under the pressure of the resto-fest.

I love fine restaurants, and it's worth it to me to save up to splurge on dining properly and well. But during the 2-week reign of the 'licious resto-fest, I'll stay in.

Fior di Zucca

After a week that included such memorable meals as "Raw Cauliflower dipped in Hellman's" and "3 Gins-and-Soda", I'm doing quite well this weekend. The brunch rant stuck in my craw all week, so after a luxuriously long morning in bed on Saturday, nothing would do but the greasiest breaky. I even enjoyed it at one of the sketchiest intersections of this fair city. For $6.99 I ate most of 2 scrambled-to-extinction eggs, a mountain of homefries, 2 sausages, a thick slice of ham, 2 slabs French toast (with table syrup), 2 slices of regular toast dripping with edible oil product and about 8 little cups of thin coffee with cream. So so good; my first square meal since Thursday, and at 2pm it hit the proverbial spot.

Off to market this morning then to get some fruit and veg into this body I clearly do not treat like a temple. Heirloom cherry tomatoes (at least 6 varieties in one punnet), the mother of all red leaf lettuces, her sister the enormous bunch of spinach, new potatoes, eggs, another of Amaranth's great grass-finished sirloins, raspberries and strawberries should cover it. I fried up some of last week's green garlic with quartered cherry tomatoes and a handful of spinach, poached an egg and buttered two slices of multigrain toast. I was so delighted with my endeavour that I took its photo and insisted on pouring a Pimms and lemonade into a proper champagne flute (garnished with berries) to accompany. It is Wimbledon weekend after all.


But the thrilling, danced-on-the-spot find was a punnet of 14 perfect, picked-this-morning ZUCCHINI BLOSSOMS. In Rome this spring I had fior di zucca every day and vowed to try making them myself, not knowing that just getting my hands on the flowers would be the first challenge. I nearly poached a bunch from a neighbour's front garden last weekend but couldn't quite descend into criminality at that moment. My favourite way to eat them is stuffed with fresh mozzarella and a piece of anchovy, battered and fried. But just battered and fried is good too. Oh, and as a topping on a pizza with tomato and anchovies. I'm almost paralyzed by the options!