Taken in Hanoi in December of 2015
I know I’ve given you a somewhat blurry photo, but it wouldn’t be the championship edition of NAME THAT FRUIT! otherwise.
DAILY PHOTO: Name That Fruit
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Tag Archives: food
DAILY PHOTO: A Hanoi Market Street
DAILY PHOTO: Bombay Vada Pav Stands
Taken in November of 2015 in Mumbai
This row of street food stalls is located across the street from Flora Fountain in Mumbai. They don’t all sell Vada Pav, but the most popular one does. (Alternative spellings: wada pav, vada paav, or vada pao)
FYI: Vada Pav is a delicious deep-fried, spiced potato ball served as a sandwich on a fluffy dinner roll style bun. It’s a Maharashtra specialty. There’s a video below if you’d like to see how they’re made or to make your own.
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DAILY PHOTO: A Bad Place to be a Guinea Pig
Taken in Arequipa, Peru in July of 2010
If you think this guy is eyeballing the camera suspiciously, it may be because it’s a resident of the Peruvian Andes. If you don’t know what I mean, check out this article from the National Geographic (particularly item #2.)
Anywhere else and he’d be someone’s fluffy little pet… or I guess a lab test animal–given the colloquial meaning of “Guinea Pig.” (So, maybe things could be worse than to be a Guinea Pig in Arequipa. One could be a Guinea Pig in the lab’s at Pfizer.)
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DAILY PHOTO: The Greens and Reds of Khlong Toei Wet Market
Taken on September 20, 2015 at Khlong Toei Market
In India there is a color coding system that one sees on all packaged goods and probably a majority of restaurant menus. A green dot in a square means the food is vegetarian (which means neither egg nor meat content in the product) and a red dot means non-veg.
Here in Thailand, at Khlong Toei Wet Market, it’s interesting to see how vendors used red and green awnings. In this case, it’s not so much to signify the product as to enhance its visual appeal. Vendors who specialized in green produce inevitably used green awnings to make their greens look greener. By the same token, meat vendors and fish vendors that specialized in “red fish” (e.g. tuna, as opposed to white fish, say halibut) used red awnings to make the reds redder. Incidentally, white fish and squid sellers often used a combination of white and blue tubs to create another kind of aesthetic appeal. Fruit vendors are out of luck because they have just too many colors to deal with. (Unless they specialized a single fruit like watermelon–or durian, because if you sell durian you’re out of luck on selling anything you don’t want tainted by the smell of durian.)
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Learning Indian Cooking in Bangalore
I’m stirring the pot.
The thing about Indian food–with its penchant for pureed gravies–is that I find it delectable, but often have no idea what I’m eating or how it got to me looking, tasting, and smelling like it does.
That is until recently. A couple of weeks ago I attended a cooking class at Manju’s Cooking School in RT Nagar in an attempt to rectify (or at least reduce) my ignorance. Manju’s offers a wide variety of classes (Indian and non-Indian, veg and non-Veg, cooking and baking, etc.)
I attended with a group of friends, and we constituted a class unto ourselves. We, therefore, got a quick and dirty introduction to a number of common / typical Indian foods (veg and non-veg, and both North and South Indian.) The menu we prepared consisted of two breads (kulcha and Malabar parota), dal makhani, paneer butter masala, and kadai chicken.
The class took 2.5 or 3 hours, and ended in a banquet of the foods we hand prepared.
Some of the fun facts that I learned include:
-“Kadai” in the name of dish just means that it’s wok-cooked.
-A Kulcha is essentially a naan of a different thickness.
-Dal makhani requires a lot of prep, even if you have access to a pressure cooker.
-There’s a lot of finely chopped onion in these gravies that often goes unnoticed.
-One can cook with the pot upside-down. This is how we cooked Kulcha. In a restaurant it would be cooked in a Tandoor oven, but at home you can cook it stuck to the bottom of a deep pot.
-Lastly, the key to a the flaky goodness of a Malabar parota is lots of fat… who’d have thought?
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DAILY PHOTO: Vörösmarty tér Lepény Vendor
Taken in December of 2014 in Budapest
This is the finished product.
Lepény is a Hungarian street-food that some might call a folded over pizza and others might call a flat-bread sandwich. It’s bread (like pizza crust) topped with cheese and various vegetative and / or meaty toppings and cooked on a grill. (I just realized it could also be considered a fancy grilled cheese that starts from a ball of dough and not from pre-made bread.)
Anyway, there aren’t nearly as many lepény vendors as there are for say Kürtöskalács (the cylindrical sweet bread that is so very, very awesome), but the vendor at the Vörösmarty tér Christmas market always had a massive line. (We did discover that part of the long lines had to do with the temperamental nature of the wood-fired grills they used and the long time it took to cook one if they let the fire die down too much.) Still, people stayed in line, and that speaks somewhat to the tastiness of this treat.
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DAILY PHOTO: Street Food Art
Taken in Bangkok in September of 2014.
This street vendor made crepes in the shape of various cartoon characters. The little drawings hanging from the front of the cart were the pictures you could select from. Or you could get a hot dog rolled in a crepe (pig in a blanket variation.)
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DAILY PHOTO: Fruit Stand
Taken in October of 2012 in Phnom Penh.
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DAILY PHOTO: Not a Tomato Out of Place at Russell Market
Taken June 21, 2014 at Russell Market in Bangalore.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 