Sunday night potpourri

Ugh. We need new titles. As I hit return, a little voice in my head said "I'll take 'potent potables' for $300, Alex'"...

K made cauliflower and potato curry tonight. K, incidentally, does all the cooking. For a while, my sole dish was an interesting sort of egg fried rice, but now K has mastered and improved my recipe, managing to cook it so that a velvety layer of crepe-like rice paper forms on the bottom of the pan, springy and unburnt. It's my absolute favorite part of the dish -- one can roll it up around the fried stuff on top of it to form a gluten-y sort of wonton thing, yum.

Anyway, I realized I haven't had Indian food for ages. The last time was pretty much right when we got back, when friends took us out for what seemed like faint echoes of the stuff we'd been eating morning, noon and night for the past two years. Since it really hasn't been a conscious avoidance, and it really is a bit strange, when I think how long it's been -- I like Indian food -- I can only guess that that initial experience upon returning subconsciously caused me put it in the same category as Thai food, which is to say "that which is to be avoided in the US."

Which isn't quite fair. At least, when I first went to Thailand, I was confronted by strange and dangerously spicy flavors that bore zero resemblance to the "Thai food" I knew and liked in the US. And then I grew to love it, inflicting probably permanent capiscum damage on my taste buds in the process, and now can't abide the insipid coconut-laced Cantonese dishes that pass for "Thai food" here. It wasn't really like that with Indian food. The dishes I liked here I could definitely recognize there; it was just that there were so many more of them. Actually, that part was pretty neat: it was like discovering that your favorite restaurant, one you'd been going to for years, had a "part two" to its menu (and one running another ten or twenty pages at that).

And so it is that tonight, with the aftertaste of cumin lingering agreeably in my mouth, I'm suddenly desperately craving a nice greasy cheese dosa, batata powa, upma, chaat...oh my god, chaat. I mean, we (and by "we," I mean "K") can probably figure out how to make powa and upma if we can only find a grocery with a little urad dal on its shelves. I can't see us figuring out the twenty thousand ingredients that go into dahi sev batata puri, and more's the shame. Worse, I haven't seen the various street foods that comprise chaat on any local menus, except one place I went to before Mumbai, and even at that point in my culinary education I could tell they'd gussied it up and tried to make it speak with received pronunciation.

This is not, I wish to make clear, a fit of nostalgia for India. But good food is good food, and the street snacks were exquisite: complex blends of spices, in which each note sounded but also harmonized; fabulous contrasts of texture -- thick explosions of yogurt in crisp shells; semiliquid tomato yielding to strings of vermicelli; flavors sequenced like fireworks, with tamarind ebbing as chili began to crest, only for both to be subdued by fried potato emerging through the leftover smoke. Granted, there was that one time I put the leftovers in the fridge, and the next day flies hatched. Is it possible, I wonder, to have the glory of the first without the risk of the second? I'm not suggesting larvae are the secret ingredient. I mean, can one reduce the unhygienic chaos without losing the magic? Personally, I think one can; but, if that's true, where are all the people doing it?

In other news (and to keep this a "potpourri" post and save me the trouble of renaming it), our hand-tooled bed is almost finished. We opted to eschew the classical motif, with all its visual limitations, and go for a more organic no-right-angles sort of thing. Or rather; the style found us, and what could be more organic than that? And -- thank you, all, for your suggestions and inquiries -- the drilling went much more smoothly after we realized the drill had both a "reverse" and a "forward" mode.