Tonight going out to Dinner. What type of food you having?

American, catfish to be specific. At a roadhouse called Willo outside of Nevada City, CA in the Sierra Nevada foothills at about 3,000 feet

 

Deleted dupe

 

None Of The Above. Stayed home, made chicken tikka masala. Not sure any real Indians would have liked it, but my American taste buds sure did.

 

As a busy working parent, I'm having one of several lasagnes that I made over the weekend and stuck in the freezer.

But I did have a very nice laksa for lunch, at a food court, on a balcony overlooking the sea.

Chicken Tikka Masala is, along with late 80s and early 90s grebo music, the finest thing ever to have come out of the British Midlands. It's as Indian as chop suey is Chinese, but that doesn't stop it from being lovely.

 

I'm well aware that much of what gets labeled as ethnic food in the States has been heavily customized or even completely invented somewhere between here and its supposed ethnic homeland. And anything I make has taken another step along the reinvention path. Tastiness, variety, and making use of whatever is already in the house count for more than authenticity.

My cooking has been well short of my household share, in part because the spouse generally found it bland and boring. But after finding a decent source of various Thai (or what usually passes for such around here) curry pastes, I was instantly promoted to household VP of Thai and Indian cuisine. Recently she brought home some jars of nominally Indian sauces, all with various names that we remember enjoying somewhere. This evening's selection of Tikka Masala over Korma curry was almost random. Add in some meat, a variety of veggies from the frig and pantry or (in season) garden, rice, and naan, and I had a meal almost ready when she got home.

Because the selection of veggies on hand is constantly in flux, none of these dishes is an exact repeat of a previous one. Authenticity? About the same as chop suey. But we don't care, it is still (usually) good.

 

El Chico Mexican Restaurant

Chip, Hot Sauce and Top Shelf™ Queso
Wife - Chicken Fajita Chimichanga - Margarita Rocks
Me - Mama’s Favorite El Caballero - Milk
Shared Mexican Apple Pie

 

Saturday: We went to our usual Saturday & Monday family-style place, Lil Chef, for salads and sandwiches after my girlfriend finished her workday.

Sunday: We spend Sunday afternoons visiting my girlfriend's mom in assisted living where we do dishes, laundry, an bring her lemon rice soup and a hand-dipped milkshake from a nearby coney island. We then went to an Italian place near her mom's, Alfoccino, which has great salad & breadsticks and they split an entree for us.

 

I quite agree. There's a place for authentic food, and there's a place for food that has been messed about with: as long as it's nice.

Chicken Tikka Masala's origins are thought to be in either Glasgow or Birmingham: Glasgow MP Mohammed Sarwar has campaigned for Glasgow to get European Union Protected Origin Status for CTM (like Parma has for Parma Ham, or the Champagne region has for champagne), but he hasn't yet succeeded. It is now Britain's most popular restaurant / take-away dish, having overtaken fish and chips a few years ago.

And it's lovely. I'm sure yours was very good too.

Do they sell Patak's sauces and pastes where you are? They're British, but they're so good that they get exported from Britain to India.

For me, it's whatever meat and veggies are about to go out of date in the supermarket, and are reduced in price. It's pretty much a sport for me. So, much like you, no two of my dishes are ever the same.

 

Really? I'd have thought laksa was pretty much universal by now. Is it not a common thing there? If not, you're missing out - it is a very fine thing indeed.

My mid-morning snack was kind of exotic for Californians, but not for Australians or British people. It was a meat pie.



Mmmm.

A couple of years ago, there was an Australian Rules Football exhibition match in LA. One of my friends - a British guy who lives in LA - went along. Apparently it was full of British people with no interest in Aussie Rules at all: the rumour had got round that meat pies would be on sale at the stadium, and it's so hard to get a decent meat pie in America that British and Australian expats came from miles around.

 

Ah, that's good news. It would be a terrible thing for British or Australian people to try to survive without them.

I spent a year at university in Tianjin in the early 1990s. No pies; no cheese; no cider. Local food was lovely, but you really do miss the taste of home. China's fine these days - there's even a meat-pie delivery service in Shanghai.

There are loads of vegans here. They're always a challenge at dinner parties.

I just can't get excited about quinoa.

Tofu, though. That's something else entirely. Great as a main course, and great as a dessert. Ma po tofu - as long as it's really spicy - is possibly my all-time favourite food.



And almond-flavoured tofu desserts in Japan. Mmmm.

 

Local place, Matthew Mai is ethnically Han but French trained
Mai Little China
Mai Little China - Greenwood, MS

Han Chinese - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia