Kem cho? Maja maa!
 

I go to Dunkin Donuts pretty much every day... the same one, right down the street, run by an extanded family from India. We've become pretty chummy over the years, although my buddy Jay, who was teaching the kids and I the language, is no longer there.
Lately they've been offering us more Indian treats as opposed to handfuls of munchkins when we stop in. The food is often too spicy for the kids (although Spencer won't admit that to Jigna, I think he has a crush on her and she teases him every day about marrying an Indian girl), but they usually have at least a tiny taste and are wayyyy burned out on munchkins anway...

So anyway, I had the camera handy today and thought I'd start documenting our Indian food treats.

These are delicious. Nice and spicy, not too greasy... Jigna said they taste great with pepsi but I'll just take her word on that, I ate a couple with my tea instead.

That is so cool. Shake the hand that feeds you!

er . . your Dunkin' Donuts sells Indian food?

I think I'm missing out here. The most we get are empanadas.

How come we can't have a Dunkin Donuts like that.

No, the Indian food isn't on the menu, the workers just share their lunches with us (and we occasionally give them rides or run over to Sonic for french fries for them). We made them cookies at xmas, but it's hard to keep track of who is vegan, and giving them baked goods seems silly anyway... Ripley plans to make them some black bean soup, we'll see how that goes over...

About 20 years ago, my mom took my grandmom up to Montreal for a heart valve replacement. While they were there, finding palatable vegetarian food was a hard thing to do.

After my grandmother was sprung from the hospital, Mom routinely went to the only Indian restaurant in town to get take-out, to bring back to my grandmother who was recuperating in their hotel room. She never had much of an appetite, and the doctors were always exhorting her to eat more to she'd regain a little weight and get healthier.

After the third or fourth day, the proprietress of the restaurant asked her why she kept coming, day after day. Mom explained the situation, and the lady was shocked! "You can't feed her this restaurant food every day! She's trying to get well!"

This woman proceeded to bring in food she cooked for her own family (cooked in a much healthier, lighter, fresher style -- home cooking is very different from restaurant cooking! You didn't think they ate like that all the time, did you?!) for my Mom and grandmom every day, till they were ready to leave Montreal and come back to New Jersey.

Just some tortilla sort of things today.

Top looks like pakora (nom, nom, nom)
Bottom like chapati. There are restaurants in Dana's neck of the woods that serve curries with a choice of cutlery or chapati - what they lose in cooking the flour & water dish they gain in not washing up!

This is one of the fundamentals of the Indian sub-continent - if you like people you share your food with them. Which was why living in Leicester, with a high Asian population was such a pleasure, but so bad for my waistline! Everyone from my work colleagues to my local convenience store (who would discount home cooked curries for me) were always pressing food on me.

Glad to hear you're such a good customer Jinx. Keep up the good work in documenting! And if you ever get to ask, ask for some Gulab Jamun (a dessert). Just never Indian sweets, which melt your teeth even if all you do is open the box. Those things are S.W.E.E.T with a capital sweet.

ETA - pakoras and bhajis taste great dunked in natural yoghurt. And it will cool them off for the kids too.

Thanks for the info SG!

The stuff we got today was sweet, and oily. No idea what it is... although it resembles quinoa.

Sorry about the pic quality... phone cam pic at a stop sign...

Kesari halva?

That sounds about right - thanks pie!

Not the sesame-tasting stuff that I associate with halva at all....

It's a dish that has spread through many cultures. One of the most popular Indian variants uses grated carrots and raisins. :yum:

Um, eh?

We get this stuff a lot. It tastes like the stuff in the first picture, but it's more oily and harder to eat... I do like the flavor though.

it's all yellow, man!


I'm freakin out

start getting names of stuff off her! So many of these things I recognise but can't remember the names.

Oh and do go for indian sweets, theyre delightful. They are very sweet yes, but they also usually have a slightly malted flavour, as theyre often made with boiled down milk. Used to take ages for Gran to get the 'powdered milk' (e.g thick milk mush) ready.

I have a running joke with the family -- that the only reason the British conquered an Empire was to secure decent take-away.

That's not a joke, it's truth!

'British' cuisine may well be a contradition in terms for much of the last hundred years or so, but 'English' cuisine is a little different.

'Britain' as an entity carried certain self-conceptions, including things like plain speaking, plain cooking stoicism. Around the the eighteenth century native fruit and vegetables, drawn as they were from the dirt, and suitable food for beasts of burden, became the food of the poor. Proper solid British yeomen ate meat and bread. White bread mind, none of that nasty black shit the Frenchies were eating. Beer, not 'vinegar' as French wine was termed. Stout leather boots, not those silly wooden shoes.

Culinary creation and variety, which had always been a feature of aristocratic English society, even if it hadn't been available to the labouring classes, now became a sign of weakness and effiminacy. By the time of Victoria, this had become wrapped up with a kind of morality of plainness. The Victorian age then added the concept of 'nutrition' to their diet. The scientific Victorians were eager to solve their social, moral and class crises. Along with new investigations into sanitation and the effects of city life on the constitution of the nation (e.g. the moral and physical strength of the workforce) came a focus on food. Again, the emphasis was on plainness. Good, wholesome food. None of that foreign muck. Simple flavours. Balanced meals (probably not what we might considered balanced now).

The morality of food is a major part of the development of British cuisine. The wealthiest and most favoured of our elite sent their sons, who would impose themselves on the globe, to schools that built their character. Cold showers are not a myth. The regimes of those schools concentrated on a lack of physical luxury. Food was simple, basic, 'wholesome'. And three generations of our ruling elite fostered a taste for over-boiled vegetables and suet puddings. Add to that ideas that 'rich' foods were bad for children, and the nurseries of the wealthy also had no truck with spices and fancy-shmancy sauces.

OUtside of the elite our food is highly regionalised. People talk about 'British' food, or even 'English' food. But the truth is the traditional foods of Yorkshire and Devon are wholly different from each other. Obviously there are also common trends. Traditionally our cuisine is very similar to German and Scandinavian.

We lost touch with a lot of our food traditions during the nineteenth century because of increased urbanisation and the introduction of mass produced goods. Fruit was no longer needed as a sweetener once sugar was cheaply available: this changed the nature of our desserts for example. Without agrarian life patterns and with food being imported in large quantities, our diets became less seasonally defined. This drastically reduced the level of variety in poorer diets. With work now taking place primarily outside of the home, and the family no longer a discrete production unit, food as a daily event reduced in importance. Interestingly one area where there was (and is) great variety in shape and flavour was in 'street foods'. Things that could be eaten on the move, like pasties and pies, fish and chips etc. Baked goods are where you get the most variance regionally I think. Seafood to go (mussels, whelks, eels etc) was a biggy with the workingclasses: actually that survived for a good lone while. As a teenager, I remember guys coming round the pubs with their trays of mussels and whelks.

Into the 20th century and two world wars devastate the country, and we are left with privation and rationing into the 50s.

There's nothing about traditional English cuisine that warrants the reputation it has. 'British' cuisine however is a very different matter. 'British' is a political and cultural definition, and that carries through to food, style of dress, preferred arguing method, attitude towards the French, everything.

A couple of additional points:

The need for high energy food that would stave off hunger for a long time, drove working-class diets towards high protein, high starch foods: meat stews etc. Access to meat as a regular part of that diet was a sign of relative success and stability; it was also indicative of a man's ability to provide for his family. Add to that the increasingly macho nature of working-class culture and food easily becomes coded for gender: fancy food is feminine and feminising, real men need proper food. It also gets tied up with class and national pride: fancy food is for the effete elite, or the effeminate French. And regional pride: none of that fancy southern muck, we eat proper Yorkshire fayre up here.

That's survived some within working-class culture. Cooking is still seen as a very female pursuit in more traditional communities and fancy food is for the soft.

But...'British' cuisine now is not what British cuisine was. Just as 'British' means something very different now than it meant fifty years ago. British cuisine is a multi-ethnic and varied as 'British' is. From the closing decades of the 20th century we began reclaiming older culinary traditions, adopting new culinary traditions and then fusing them altogether into what became British cuisine as it now is.

Dana : passionate about her food. :D

I give her an A+

Me too.

For the record, someone in my Mum's family had a seafood stall outside a pub. I can't remember who (Cousin Tommy maybe?) but I remember it was a Courage pub. How? Because it had the Courage cock on a sign outside. And I was young enough to associate it with chicken flavoured crisps - which I didn't really like - so was very grateful when we had a tray of seafood instead. Doused in vinegar of course, this was the East End!

Today's treat was some sort of spicy curry muffin/cake think... A little dense but very tasty.

And it was all Yellow.

Yummo! That all looks great - especially the oily sweet one. You are lucky to have a nice relationship with them.
Do you ever take them in a sample of your families signiature dish?

Wow, sorry Sun, didn't see your question till now... But yes, I've made them a few things. Most recently was vegan black bean soup (I can't keep track of who is vegan there and who isn't so I just assume they all are at this point) a couple weeks ago.

Jigna made us this about a week ago, forgot I had taken the pic...

For your 60th birthday, Jinx? :lol:

:haha: