Little India – Jackson Heights, NY

If I lived in NY, I would eat here every single day, at least until I expired from heart disease.

Being in the restaurant was essentially like a euphoric waking dream for me, as the menu included almost every variety of Muslim-style kebab and bread; this time I settled for chicken tikka and a keema naan; hardly adventurous, but a good measure of a restaurant is of course how they do the simple stuff.  Both were excellent and came hot-and-hot, the ovens being only a hand-full away from the counter and creating a quite authentic micro-atmosphere inside the shop.  Being in America, I of course had to have a Cola drink with them.

There was simply too much on offer in the restaurant to eat in one sitting; next time I swear the first dish to try will be the tava kuta-kut – made with offal and brain – and their menu, photographed for posterity, included nihari, haleem, paya, khulcha, gola kebab, a variety of biryanis and chicken/goat karhai.  With a paan-walla (more on this later)  in easy walking distance, there is little more I could wish for, except perhaps for a place nearby that would serve me some pre-meal chota pegs, and I suspect when I next visit New York my most likely first port of call will be Kababish, Jackson Heights. 

With a number of Indian stores nearby, I managed to stock up on some of the more esoteric items that I can’t get here in Tokyo: kewra extract, neem, Triphala (for the innards, post-eating), Naga chillies, kala jeera and South Indian tamarind.  Ratanjot (alkanet) unfortunately eluded me despite much searching, although it is quite unusual and I only ever use for one dish (liver-kidney kebabs).  There is always next time.

Kedgeree

made with the trout I smoked.  According to the writings of one Company factor in Calcutta, this is a breakfast dish ‘consisting of a little butter, two or three green chillies, a pyramid of boiled rice, a ditto egg, and a pound of dried fish, with salt and Cayenne at discretion, all mashed up on a hot water plate and baled down the throat with a spoon’.  As a homage perhaps to its very obvious and very Indian parent dish, khichri, I added lentils, turmeric, slivers of ginger and mustard seeds, and rather a few more than two or three chillies.  It came out very well, so much so that it was finished in two sittings.  I need to catch some more trout for smoking, although I think the sea-fish aji would answer pretty well also. 

Today’s Tiffin

Chana dal cooked with a simple garlic tarka; and chicken do piaze, a “real” one where the latter half of the onions are browned, dried and crumbled into the sauce when the chicken is done, rather than the somewhat uninspiring sliced raw onions mixed into a chicken curry, as served in restaurants back home.  The deep colour and richness of the sauce comes from the onions, whose sweetness really took the edge off about a cup of ground chillies that went into the saucepan. 

Cooking

Made some Indian dishes for guests last weekend.  I strive to produce new and unusual dishes each time I have guests, and although the Hyderabadi pullao was a little under-cooked, the brain-nihari went down very well, as well as the fish kebabs and cucumber-garlic-mint-yoghurt.

Ayo Gorkhali

One of the brews on offer at my local Indian restaurant.

After a whole day of fairly demanding rod making today, it was very pleasant to quaff a brace of these before squaring my elbows to some chicken tikka, egg curry and garlic naan.

Trout Treats

and other dishes from the Hindustan: chole bhatura (stuffed with paneer and green chillies), lime pickle (not home-made) and red chilli, orange and lemon-flavoured fish kebabs. 

Trout kebabs. These are very easy to make, by cutting the fillets lengthways, marinating briefly and then bunching up the fish strips onto metal skewers and grilling very quickly. 

Also a Bengali-style hot fish dish, again made with trout (although the authentic version would probably be made with rui, catfish or a similar creature), to a very Bengali taste with mustard oil, nigella seeds and gur.   Also the real dish would use steaks or even the fish cooked whole, rather than fillets chopped rather small as I used here; this is just to make it easier to transport in my bento box. 

Amazingly, one of the paneer-stuffed bhatura survived the evening, so I will have a treat with my lunch tomorrow at work, and no doubt shock my colleagues with my barbaric cutlery-less eating.

Perfect Pooris

Well, one perfect and its fellow, not so.  I had guests on Friday and some oil left-over, so I made pooris to go with my dal makhani for supper and amazingly, some of them even survived, so I have a treat to take with my tiffin to work tomorrow.  The one on the right was first in the oil, and the temperature wasn’t quite high enough and the poori didn’t inflate properly.  When done correctly they puff up like a fugu in the oil, and when draining – here on kitchen paper and the Japan Times – they emit the most lethal hot steam out of their sides.  Amazingly the poori are crispy on the outside yet surprisingly soft, layered and moist on the inside and hardly as oily as you might imagine it would be; a marvel of Indian and Pakistani cooking.

Today’s tiffin

Dal makhani and matar paneer, to bring back memories of dinnertime on the banks of the Ganges in Uttrakhand.  To think I was only there but two months ago!  Sat at my desk at work in front of the computer, I couldn’t resist putting my spoon down and eating a little with my hands; surreptitiously, as my Japanese colleagues would be shocked at the sight of something so barbaric.  Whenever the subject of eating with one’s hands comes up, I always echo the words of Mughal Emperor Shahjehan (or it may have been the old soak Jehangir): “Eating with cutlery is like wooing a woman through an interpreter.”  Whilst it always seems so hedonistic – mostly making me recall Frankie Howerd’s Up Pompeii – the food really does taste different when eaten with one’s fingers.  On the campsite in India, we would obligingly hold out the jug of water for each other to wash our hands before and after each meal, a most civilised yet intimate ritual.  Whilst you probably won’t get that in your local Indian restaurant, an after-dinner fingerbowl with a slice of lime in it – to refresh one’s lips – always brings back memories of eating tandoori chicken by the campfire to a background of nightjars and the rushing waters of the Ganges, and my daily mealtime attempts at learning Hindi, butchering the language to the indulgent smiles of my dining companion.  Here in Japan, sushi is one of the few Japanese foods that traditionally should be eaten with one’s hands, and it always seems so much tastier to me that way, and it seems a shame when the beautifully crafted sushi falls apart in the soy sauce dish after being clumsily handled with chopsticks. 

Today’s Tiffin

Been a while since I posted one of these, but I assure you I am eating a good tiffin everyday at work.  Old favourites include Madhur Jaffrey’s Delhi Hindu-style potatoes and hot, hot karhai chicken.  Another stalwart is malai ande – eggs, hard-boiled, in a tomato and cream sauce – which I had today with a Konkani-style dish of chickpeas, pork and potatoes.  Both come with a hefty kick of red chilli and lots of garlic and ginger to fortify myself over the sweltering Japanese summer.

The plastic pots and carry bag of my Japanese bento kit are becoming rather worn (and stained with red chilli) and I thought about picking up a proper tiffin carrier when I am in India next month.  Ideally I would buy something like this which, although it would stand out somewhat amongst the weird and slightly psychotic Hello Kitty and Disneyland boxes of some of my colleagues, would hold a proper tiffin with room for breads, pickles and salad also.

My New

favourite website:

http://eoid.org/

Well I booked hotels today for my trip; it looks like I have been lucky and got to stay in my first-choice places.  In addition to the difficult choice of what to do and see in the three days I am in Delhi – out of a mass of just too many – I am also faced with the agonising, and delicious, prospect of choosing where to go to eat the six or so meals I am in the city.  This EOiD website is proving to be a goldmine of information.

For the first part of my trip my hotel is in Old Delhi, so I look forward to testing out a few of the old eateries famous in that part of town.  I have a great weakness for kebabs, and still have fond memories of scoffing Bade Miya’s boti and tikka kebabs in Colaba several years ago – so good I went the very next day to buy kebabs to eat on the plane on the way home – and hopefully the kebab-wallahs in Delhi will refuse to be outdone by Mumbai.  Also I hope I can persuade my guide to take me for a Muslim nihari breakfast at some stage, as this is a dish I love.  I will also have to do what I always do on these trips and buy some local spices to bring back with me for my cooking. I still have Crawford Market dried red chillies and Sri Lankan cinnamon and coriander from Kandy, and every time I open the bags up whilst cooking, the very faint India-smell immediately brings back memories of those wonderful trips.