The prawn I dipped in the curry sauce was delicious. Sorry, I couldn't resist; I hope you have an extra to replace the one I ate.

Oh my that looks soooooo good! I have been sick for more than a week. I have not had a desire to eat anything. I ended up giving away the corned beef eye of round roast that I made last Sunday. Now that is sick in my book because it is one of my favorite foods.

I must be getting better because your photos are stimulating my appetite in a really big way. I just want to bite into those shrimp!

Please tell me you did not dye the wild rice purple! Just kidding! :-)

Well it certainly has every in the rainbow.... Listen, tried to google myself, but, I didn't come up. What now? :o)

Indian food has never caught my fancy,
Probably because I've never
had much of an opportunity to try it.

But those prawns have me drooling!
Everything on that plate looks delicious!

Rusty

Thank you so many times over for making me laugh with pleasure when I open your posts. They delight, instruct, and entertain.

It don't no how get much better than that!!

I have learned as much from you as from a long-long-long-ago intro art class!

The eyes (as well as the tongue and teeth) feed on beauty.
Sandra

I'm allergic to shellfish but hey, I'll join you. Looks so yummy!!

I received Aai's Recipes: Traditional Indian cuisine from Maharashtra a few days ago, and so it is not Bengali cuisine, being from the opposite coast, but it does look like a good book. I was going to start using it this week-end because Kevin brought Indian leftovers yesterday, which I saved and want to add to. Maybe they celebrate Pohela Boishakh in Maharashtra also. Anyway, I will remember this holiday this week-end!

Lars

Thank you everyone. You are very kind.

Cathy, I am glad you âÂÂenjoyedâ that one shrimp. LOL!. Actually those shrimps have somewhat interesting textures. They were sous vided at 145F first then pan fried at 600F. ThatâÂÂs right, I measured. 600F on a cast iron skillet. That gave the very tender shrimps a very nice quick crust

Teresa, I am sorry that you were under the weather. Actually that was white rice. I mixed in some black rice and the black rice made the white rice purple.

Yes Bobby, I have found that many Indian dishes are mono chromatic, so I decided to rainbow-ize the ingredients. BTW, I found a youtube video which gives you an idea of the recipe. Link below.

Rusty, if your area does not have good Indian restaurants, there are many recipes you can make yourself.

Sandra, I can tell you for sure artistic talent is in everyone. It is free for the taking, but it takes a change of attitude to nurture your self-confidence to empower yourself to discover where you have it hidden.

Lars, I hope you will post your new creations from that book. Sounds like a wonderful book.

dcarch

Here is a link that might be useful: Daab Chingri Macher Malaikari

Well it certainly has every in the rainbow.... Listen, tried to google myself, but, I didn't come up. What now? :o)

We had a sort of busy day today - got up early, had lingonberry scones for breakfast, went to a truck accessories shop in Redondo Beach and bought a cover for Kevin's pickup, had lunch in downtown El Segundo at our favorite fish restaurant there, came home, and then I took a nap for three hours! I don't know why I slept so long, but by then, I decided to make some sort of chickpea recipe for the Indian celebration. My new Indian cookbook does not have a single chickpea recipe, and so I checked other cookbooks and still could not find an Indian chickpea recipe, although the Frugal Gourmet's book Our Immigrant Ancestors came closest with a lentil recipe, but it was too late - I had already started soaking the garbanzos. I have another book called Best-Ever Asian Cookbook and was certain to find an Indian chickpea recipe there, only to find that the book did not have a single Indian recipe!!! When I think of Asia, I think of India first, and how dare a book call itself an Asian cookbook without a single Indian recipe! Everyone I know from India would be very upset. The book, however, had recipes from the Philippines, which is not even part of Asia, which added to my disappointment.

So I had to go on line, and found This recipe, which is more or less what I made. I've been making chickpeas like this for quite some time without a recipe, and so this was a bit of a difference experience for me, if not a different taste. I added salt before cooking the dish in the pressure cooker, and I think this was a mistake, as it took twice as long for the beans to cook. They retained much more texture than I was used to, but this was not bad - just unexpected.

Lars

Looks good, dcarch! I did google, and got confused between green coconut and young coconut. Daab seems to mean green coconut, but then green coconut seems to be young, but it looks different from the young coconut that I see in the store, which appears to be what you used.

Lars - I wouldn't expect to find Indian food in an "Asian" cookbook any more than I'd expect to find Israeli food there. Yes, they're all on the same continent but colloquially I don't think we lump everything and everyone from that continent in the same bucket.

"I decided to make some sort of chickpea recipe for the Indian celebration."

Me too! I soaked the chickpeas last night. They sure do expand. Knowing this from prior experience, I used what I thought was a more than ample amount of water. Still, they had risen above the water by morning.

The dearth of recipes you encountered for Indian chickpea dishes is puzzling. As I'm sure you know, chickpeas are very common in Indian cuisine.

I will be making chana masala. I've had Indian food on my mind for a while and am ready to have another fling at it. Chana masala seemed a simple way to ease into it.

Jim

Lars, indeed strange to me also that chickpea recipes are not in that book. There is a ton of kabuli chana (chickpea) recipes on the internet and youtube.

Thanks FOAS. I think young coconuts is the same as tender coconuts and green coconuts. Coconuts come with very thick husk. The white ones you see are the young tender ones with part of the thick green husk removed. Tender coconuts are sold for the nice coconut milk and the very tender meat which you can scoop out with a spoon.

Jim, chana masala sounds easy enough to make. I will check to see if I still have kabuli chana in my pantry. I will be using my pressure cooker if I find some.

Bobby, found another video with recipe for Daab Chingri Macher Malaikari

dcarch

Here is a link that might be useful: daab

FOAS, everyone I know who is Indian considers themselves Asian, which they are, and I would be the last person to argue with them. Personally, I consider Israel part of Asia, as that is what I was taught in World Geography. My grandmother taught World Geography in high school, and I do not think the continents have changed. However, Israelis call themselves "Middle Easterners", and I am fine with that term for that region, but India and Pakistan (along with Afghanistan) are most definitely Asian, and central Asian at that. If you want to talk about Eastern Asia as a separate region, call it East Asia, and then you can exclude India. I tend to avoid using continents to describe regions because it is vague and use the names of countries instead, since that is more accurate. Africa in particular has two main regions - Saharan and Sub-Saharan, which are very different physically and culturally.

I will continue to include India as part of Asia, since that is what my Indian friends do.

I will have to look for an additional Indian cookbook, since the one I have is rather small. I like it because of the photos and descriptions, but there are not that many recipes. The good thing about it is that it includes quite a few fish recipes, and that will be something new for me to try. Today we will be making our first fire in the BGE. We would have done that yesterday, but my nap was too long. The weather has been cool (upper 60s), which is what I like for barbeques. We have a chicken to cook, and I was considering doing it Tandoori style, but I would rather cook it whole and have not seen Indian recipes that do not require cutting the chicken into pieces. I'll look in my Szechuan book to see if it has recipes for whole chicken, and if it does not, I will make it Algerian style, which I have not done for a while, although that is my favorite way to barbeque chicken.

Lars

Lars - I think in my previous post I made it clear that I'm not trying to re-map the continents but rather commenting on colloqueal use of the term Asian. But more to the point, I'm speaking of cuisine.

"Asian cuisine" most often refers to East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), Southeast Asian cuisine and South Asian cuisine.

In much of Asia, the term does not include the country's native cuisines. For example, in Hong Kong and mainland China, Asian cuisine is a general umbrella term for Japanese cuisine, Korean cuisine, Filipino cuisine, Thai cuisine, Vietnamese cuisine, Malaysian and Singaporean cuisine and Indonesian cuisine; but Chinese cuisine and Indian cuisine are excluded. (see linked page.)

Myself, I'd tend to include Chinese food in my own definition of Asian cuisine, but I guess that's all up to our own interpretations. I might be right or wrong not to expect tandoori chicken in an Asian cookbook, but I'm sure I'm not alone.

Here is a link that might be useful: wiki

I didn't mean to post that again... my phone re-posts things if I accidentally click on them again in the history of the browser, so annoying!

Darch - that looks lovely! I lived in Calcutta for several years when I was young and one of my favorite memories is drinking Daab in the big market next to the temple.

Indians do considers themselves Asian :) I always check the box as Asian and specify south-Asia as needed.

Yes I would expect so!