Pedant

Gosh, I have been exposed. A commentator below pointed out that my semi-vegetarian principles don't sit logically with my "food with a face" comment -- and anonymous is right! They don't. But, fish makes life so much easier when you're traveling -- and they're just not as attractive as sheep or cows. Does this mean, to take the argument to a logical extreme, that I would eat ugly people? I guess it depends on how much they'd annoyed me, how hungry I was, and whether they were served with plenty of mashed potato. If the answers were "lots," "very," and "buckets of it," then yes, order me a table!

However, last night was another all-vegetarian meal. Given the booty-demanding weather, I decided to make a curry and turned to my Cinnamon Club cookbook. This has the most gorgeous pictures, and the recipes work pretty well in a domestic kitchen, although I lack some of the more esoteric ingredients. Indian food doesn't have the long tradition here that Indonesian does, so while it's possible to find shelves of sambal and cassava chips in Albert Heijn, it's not so easy getting hold of dried fenugreek leaves and asafoetida. In general, though, it's possible to approximate the flavors. Last night involved a cauliflower and mushroom curry, adapted from a marrow recipe in the book; this really exemplified the Indian ability to produce heat without the burn and was damn fine.


The side dish was more of a leap into the unknown: Rajasthani chickpea dumplings with yoghurt. I made up a stiff dough using chickpea flour, spices, yoghurt, and ginger; rolled it into two sausages; poached them in a spiced broth; cut them up into smaller pieces; and then cooked them again in a spicy yoghurt sauce. Although the yoghurt sauce split while cooking (hence the lack of a photo of the finished dish), it tasted great. I'm not a huge fan of yoghurt in savory foods -- it's almost too sourly tangy for me -- but it worked so well with the spices and the chewy dumplings. Definitely a keeper.