One of my favorite things about moving to New York was easy access to Yeungling Lager. I had my first taste at a house party in Pittsburgh, and it’s been a torrid love affair ever since. $4 dollar pitches at Phi and a pie from Pizza Paul’s is all we needed during our formative undergrad years. This brew is smooth, rich, and tastes like home.
I have yet to meet someone who dislikes Pottstown’s finest. -nrs
guest post by Sameer Aggrawal
After my parents got married, one of the first dishes my mother cooked for my father and my grandparents was a Garbanzo bean curry (Chole). It was a very rustic preparation done in the style of banias from western Uttar Pradesh. To this day my father remembers the flavor of that dish. Unfortunately that recipe has been lost to the sands of time. The recipe she uses these days has evolved over the years, and while it is perfectly delicious, my father continues to pine for the flavor of the years gone by.
One of the key differences between how she cooked then and how she cooks now is her use of Onions. In Ayurveda, Onion and Garlic belong to a category of foods know as Tamasic. Foods whose consumption is considered harmful to the mind or body. They promote the darker tendencies of the soul, thus many people in india, particularly the Vaishnavs, avoid Tamasic foods, and instead eat a Sattvic diet.
Onions and garlic were a big no-no in my maternal grandmother’s house. Her daughters — my mother and her two sisters learnt to cook without using these ingredients. My paternal grandparents were more liberal in these matters and while onions were allowed, garlic was still not permitted. So, over the years my mother learnt to use onions in her cooking and adapted the recipes she had brought with her from her mother’s house to suit her audience.
Onions and garlic are ingredients with pleasant but intense flavors that can easily dominate the other ingredients present in the dish. This can be a good or a bad thing. Sometimes they offers a way for hiding bad ingredients and sloppy cooking, at other times they can mask the delicate flavors you have worked so hard to create. A look at the Indian cookbooks around today will give the impression that no dish is complete without onions and garlic. So, it was a very pleasant surprise when I came across Lord Krishna’a Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamuna Devi. Yamuna Devi was a disciple of and the personal chef for A. C. Bhaktivedanta, the founder of The International Society of Krishna Consciousness. He was a Vaishnav, a strict vegetarian who did not eat any tamasic foods. The book is devoted to vegetarian cuisine from northern india, with a particular emphasis on the food from western India (A C Bhaktivedanta was from West Bengal), and all the food is sattvic.
One of my favorite recipes from the book is for Rajma (or Kidney Beans). A very popular north indian staple, which is usually presented as a punjabi dish. A cuisine not known for its timidity in matters of fat, onions or garlic. The recipe below trades onions and garlic for the deep flavor and fragrance of Ajwain seeds. I usually eat my Rajma with some Chawal (rice), but it can equally well be eaten as a vegetarian Chilli with all the usual fixings.
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