Well, it has been just over three months now since we left Goa. In the normal course of events I would have wrapped up my meal reviews from there in March. But when the pandemic hit I wasn’t very motivated to write about meals that no one reading my posts would be able to go eat for god knows how long. Now that we’re into the second month of the “stay at home” order in Minnesota, however, with no idea when we’ll ever go out to eat again, I’m looking back longingly at the last time when eating out was almost all the eating we were doing and at what will turn out to have been our last family vacation for a long, long time. And so here is a brief account of our last meal out in Goa, the day before we left. It is of lunch at Star Light, an unfussy restaurant located in Assolna, about halfway between where we were staying in Velim and Cavelossim Beach, where we spent most of our waking hours. In fact we ate here after spending the morning one last time at Cavelossim and right before our visit to the Paul John distillery. Continue reading
Coming Soon…
April is in the bag—I think. Another month looms and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be very different from the one ending. Minnesota’s “stay at home” order will continue for another two weeks but it’s hard to see how we’ll be returning to anything resembling “normalcy” after that. On the home/work front we’ve been doing four simultaneous Zoom sessions most days and that’s going to continue through May as the kids’ school and our colleges are all staying online. The question right now is what the fall term will look like, for us and for all the people who work at schools and colleges with less security than we are privileged to enjoy.
Those questions are also looming large over the industries whose products I cover on the blog: spirits and food. In all the talk about social distancing and industrial workplaces I haven’t heard too much about what is happening at distilleries. People are certainly drinking more at home but what is going on with employees at distilleries, distributors, importers, stores? Is production being/going to be affected? Casualties in the restaurant world have begun to pile up. The Bachelor Farmer is the most prominent Twin Cities restaurant so far to announce that they will not be re-opening at all. Other smaller restaurants have closed too and I’m sure many others will as well. Will our favourite places survive? Will the industry—farming/food production, distribution, retail, restaurants, bars, food media etc—be able to remake itself to be more equitable and sustainable? Will any of the political and economic transformations that will be necessary to allow all of that actually happen? I hope so but I am not confident. Continue reading
Sookha Alu Sabzi
Here is another recipe from the Indian home-cooking repertoire that is more a genre than a specific dish. Something like this preparation is made all over the country with regional variations but even within regions there will be significant variations in how it’s made. The point of the dish is not actually the exact flavours but the texture of the potatoes and the almost paste-like masala clinging to it when it’s done. I give you seemingly-precise instructions here but this is a classic andaaz-se (or “by estimation”) recipe. I myself make it a new way pretty much every time I make it. Play with it and make it your own. The ideal way to serve it in the Indian context is with chapatis/parathas and dal and achaar, and it’s also good with dal and rice. But there’s no reason you can’t serve it as a warm potato salad at a barbecue. Make and eat it as you would like. Continue reading
Bunnahabhain 10, 1999 (Prime Malt)
One last peated-sherried malt to close out the month. This one is unlike the others I’ve reviewed this month. For one thing it’s not from a distillery known for its peated malt, at least not at the time at which this was distilled, back in 1999. While Bunnahabhain now puts out official releases of peated malt, independent bottlers used to be the only sources of peated Bunnahabhain from this era. I’ve had a few 1997s that were peated (see here, here and here) but this will be my first 1999, I think. This is also not a heavily sherried malt—it’s from a refill sherry cask and the colour of the whisky suggests it was a long way from being a first-fill cask. The bottler too has no real reputation. In fact, I’m still not sure who was behind Prime Malt which put out a number of releases in the US in the 2000s. I was under the impression that Duncan Taylor were the source but Whiskybase lists the bottler as Gordon Bonding and I have no idea who they are/were. If you know more about them please write in below. In the meantime let’s get to this whisky. Continue reading
Pandemic Takeout 05: Quarterback Club (Northfield, MN)
It took a pandemic and a “stay at home” order but I finally have a review of the food of Quarterback Club, possibly the most iconic restaurant in our small town of Northfield, Minnesota. This is not because we’ve never eaten their food before. We’ve stopped in a few times over the years for their signature fried chicken; and that same fried chicken features every year on the table at our neighbourhood’s annual fall potluck, paid for by some communal pool of money that the neighbourhood was bequeathed at the time it was incorporated by the city. This fried chicken is quite good but it never seemed like enough of a reason to write them up. And with El Triunfo at the other end of the large parking lot they anchor, we never quite seemed to make it to Quarterback Club very often. But now that our options for food made outside our house have shrunk—long round-trip drives to the Cities don’t appeal for take-out—the variety offered to us by Quarterback Club seems more appealing. Here therefore is a quick write-up of a recent meal of fried chicken and more. Continue reading
Talisker 14, 1994, “Manager’s Choice”
The run of reviews of peated whiskies from sherry casks to end the month continues with this Talisker. It’s been a while since I’ve reviewed a Talisker—the last one was the Game of Thrones release which I wrote up just over a year ago. And it’s been a while since I’ve felt very positively about the distillery whose recent releases have been on the cynical side. The whisky I’m reviewing today, however, is a different story. Which is not to say that people felt very positive about all aspects of it when it was released either. It was part of Diageo’s Manager’s Choice series which featured not very old whiskies at very high prices. With hindsight that series probably set the tone for Diageo’s special release pricing in the decade that followed. Which is not to say that the whiskies released in it weren’t good. My first go at this one was at one of my friend Rich’s tastings—during which I made the decision to pay the most I’ve ever paid for a teenaged whisky. But I’m not reviewing that bottle right now—it’s still closed. I did go to open it but in the process discovered this sample which I acquired in the first swap I did with Rich more than seven years ago. It may even have been drawn from the bottle I got a taste of a few years later. Here are my notes. Continue reading
“Irani Restaurant Bombay” (More Poems About Food and Drink)
Here is the second entry in my occasional series on poems that deal passingly or centrally with themes, locations and/or images of food/eating/hunger etc. (See here for the first entry, on Imtiaz Dharker’s, “At the Lahore Karhai.) This week’s poem takes on a very different geography than Dharker’s poem (Bombay rather than London) and is formally more…well, formal and forbidding: in place of free verse, a set rhyme scheme—though not meter—and in place of declaration, elliptical, almost opaque observation.
But I’ve started in on the poem itself without telling you anything about the poet. Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) was and is by any measure one of the most significant writers of the 20th century and a giant particularly in the world of Indian poetry, specifically Indian poetry in English. He was one of the central figures in the modernist flowering in the little magazines published in Bombay in the 1960s and 1970s and influential despite the fact that very few collections of his poetry were published when he was most active as a poet. His first English collection, Jejuri, only came out in 1975 (when it won the Commonwealth Prize for poetry) and two others only emerged in 2004 after his cancer diagnosis. Continue reading
Baingan “Stew” with Coconut Milk
I posted a recipe for sour baingan masala on Thursday and noted that it was in fact two recipes for the price of one. Here is the second recipe. It is a very simple adaptation of the first—in fact, it’s not even an adaptation. It’s the same recipe plus one ingredient: coconut milk. It was instigated by the missus finding the original recipe too sour for her taste and as I’d made it with two pounds of long eggplant I was left with the prospect of eating it by myself for the rest of my life. I like that recipe a lot but variety is nice. And so I separated half the finished sour baingan masala and added a cup of coconut milk to it. A little bit of simmering and it yielded a lovely, velvety stew with the sourness still there but now balanced by the sweetness of the coconut milk. Really, this is a recipe worth making for its own sake, not just as a way of salvaging a very sour dish that deranged members of your household may be refusing to eat. And where the original is a more rustic preparation, this one’s got style. Give it a go. Continue reading
Laphroaig 21, 1990 (Silver Seal)
Last week I reviewed a Laphroaig 21, 1998 bottled recently by the Whisky Exchange that I thought was amazing. Here now is another Laphroaig 21. This was distilled in 1990 and bottled in 2012 by the well-regarded Italian outfit, Silver Seal. I nabbed a bottle from Whiskybase when it was released. Even with the much higher exchange rate of the time it ran me less than $150. Those were the days etc. After almost 8 years on my shelves I opened this last week to pair with the TWE cask. When I tried it alongside that one it felt a bit overshadowed and so I decide to taste it a few more times and take notes on it by itself so it wouldn’t suffer unfairly by juxtaposition. Here now are those notes as the bottle has come down to the 3/4 full mark.
Laphroaig 21, 1990 (57.7%; Silver Seal; sherry cask #10839; from my own bottle)
Nose: Big sherry here too but much more organic than the TWE cask. There’s toffee and citrus peel and cocoa but floating above it is something rotting in wet undergrowth (I know it doesn’t sound appetizing but it works). Definitely a dose of savoury sulphur here. Dry woodsmoke running through it all. Gets saltier as it sits (soy sauce) and earthier (dried shiitakes) and the decomposing rodent note subsides. A few drops of water push the sulphur back almost entirely and emphasize sweeter biscuity notes along with pipe tobacco. Continue reading
Sour Baingan Masala
Here is a baingan/brinjal/eggplant recipe that seeks to recreate the flavours of some preparations from various parts of South India but which doesn’t follow a traditional recipe. This, I have to warn you, may not be for everyone. I think it’s delicious but it is very sour. The missus is not a fan. Even I wouldn’t eat it by itself but with dal and rice I think it’s great, especially after the second day when the tamarind has done its pickling magic. Deploy it almost as you would an achaar. Or I suppose you could be a weenie and tone down the amount of tamarind you use. Your choice. But I would suggest you don’t. That’s because this is really two recipes in one. Make it with two pounds of eggplant as described and keep half of it aside for a simple adaptation that will appeal greatly to members of your household who object to too much tamarind sourness. Continue reading
Pandemic Takeout 04: Joy’s Thai (Lakeville, MN)
An unexpected aspect of the pandemic is that it has led me to realize that I miss some flavours so much that I am willing to eat replacement-level food in order to be able to taste them. The flavours of Thai food are the major ones in this category. We’re covered at home for most Indian and Korean food; Grand Szechuan and El Triunfo scratch our Sichuan and Mexican itches very satisfactorily. However, there is no Thai food in our town, we don’t have a pantry or fridge stocked with Thai ingredients, and our favourite Thai restaurants in St. Paul are a two-hour roundtrip, which—at least for now—seems like a bit much for takeout (check in with me again after a few more weeks of isolation though). As a result, I went to Lakeville last weekend to pick up a large order from Joy’s Thai. We’ve eaten in there before and it’s not normally a place that we’d choose over a longer drive to the University Ave. stalwarts. But these are not normal times and any acceptable Thai food is more than acceptable. Continue reading
Ledaig 11, 2008 (The Whisky Barrel)
Yesterday I had a review of an excellent teenaged Ledaig from a sherry cask. That was a 13 yo bottled by the Whisky Exchange. Today I have a review of another Ledaig from a sherry cask. This one is a couple of years younger and was an exclusive from another store, the Whisky Barrel. I reviewed three of the Whisky Barrel’s other recent exclusives in March. Like two of those—a 10 yo Balblair and a 10 yo Bunnahabhain—this too is from a first-fill oloroso hogshead. I’m not sure how they got their hands on all these first-fill oloroso hogsheads from different distilleries at the same time. It wouldn’t surprise me if these are all cases of re-racked “single casks” (a la Glendronach) but that’s just speculation. Anyway, howsoever it is that these were matured, I was not a huge fan of the Balblair but liked the Bunnahabhain a lot more. Here’s hoping that this Ledaig will be at least as good as that Bunnahabhain even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of yesterday’s Whisky Exchange release. Let’s see. Continue reading
Ledaig 13, 2005 (The Whisky Exchange)
Here is another recent Whisky Exchange exclusive and it too is a peated whisky matured in a sherry cask. This is a Ledaig and a bit younger than Friday’s Laphroaig 21 (which you may recall I found to be outstanding). I don’t dare hope that this one will be as good but there has been a lot of excellent sherried Ledaig about in the last half decade. I suppose there must have been some that I tried and did not like but I can’t recall any and am too lazy to open another window and check. (Before the pandemic this was a character flaw; now it is a sign of my humanity.) Anyway, let’s see what this is like.
Ledaig 13, 2005 (57.4%; The Whisky Exchange; sherry butt 900174; from a sample from a friend)
Nose: Earthy peat, salt, preserved lime. On the second sniff the classic organic, farmy Ledaig notes are here though not as much of the dead rodent as is often present. The salt expands with each sniff as does the lime but it also picks up some sweetness. Nothing new as it sits but it all comes together really well. A few drops of water bring out some pastry crust and cream. Continue reading
“At the Lahore Karhai” (More Poems About Food and Drink)
It’s been two weeks since I said I’d soon be inaugurating a new occasional series of posts on the blog on poems about food and drink and so I guess I’d better get on with it. As I said in that first post, these will be poems either directly about food, drink, eating, drinking, hunger, thirst etc. or poems that use related metaphors to talk about other things or poems that mention food or drink just in passing. To begin the series I have a poem I have posted on social media a number of times over the years: Imtiaz Dharker’s “At the Lahore Karhai”. Dharker is a poet with a background/biography that drives a certain kind of South Asian nativist insane with rage: she was born in Pakistan, raised in the UK and now spends her time between the UK and India (as far as I know). She was a candidate for the poet laureateship of the UK in 2019 before withdrawing her name from consideration.
This poem is from one of her earlier collections, I Speak for the Devil published by Bloodaxe in the UK in 2001 and Penguin India in 2003. The poem itself is from 1999. I decided to begin this series with it not only because I do like it so much but also because its setting is a restaurant and an experience of conviviality that we are currently denied by the pandemic. I have no restaurant review for you but here is a restaurant poem.
Chhilka Moong Dal
While moog/moong dal in its split and peeled form is a staple Bengali dal—some would even say it’s the staple Bengali dal—the split but unpeeled version (chhilka=peel in Hindi) is one that was never cooked in our home when I was growing up and it’s not one I’ve encountered in the homes of relatives or Bengali friends either. I only started cooking with it a few years ago after a spur of the moment decision to purchase a large packet of it at the local desi store. I liked it right away: it makes for a dal that is far earthier and far less nutty than the split and peeled version and it’s one of my staples when I want to make a robust dal that goes with pretty much any vegetable side dish and which can be enjoyed with rice or rotis or just straight out of the bowl. It’s particularly nourishing in the winter and, as it turns out, during a pandemic. While I don’t have a set recipe that I always go to—unlike moog dal or chholar dal, where I slavishly follow the recipes my mother sent me years ago—of late I’ve been making it with a lot of caramelized onions, ginger and garlic. Plus tomato and some ground spices. Sometimes I make it mushier than at other times. It’s always good. Continue reading
Laphroaig 21, 1998 (The Whisky Exchange)
Earlier this month I reviewed a Glenburgie 21, 1998 bottled by the Whisky Exchange. Here now is another 21 yo whisky distilled in 1998 and bottled by the Whisky Exchange under their obscure “The Whisky Exchange” label, this one a Laphroaig. I think it may have been bottled for TWE’s 20th anniversary, though it’s not listed on the page they have for those releases. Then again, the Inchmurrin 9, 2010 I reviewed on Tuesday was definitely released for their 20th anniversary and it’s not on that page either despite still being available. Mysterious are the ways of the Whisky Exchange. Anyway, back to this Laphroaig. It was distilled in 1998; in 2010 it was re-racked into an oloroso sherry cask (ex-bourbon before that? maybe it says on the label). Given that nine years is longer than seemingly most whisky being released in Scotland right now—if it even has an age statement—I think it’s well past being regarded as a “finish”. As a 21 yo Laphroaig, and sherry-bothered at that, this went for a very pretty penny, I think. It’s now sold out, which will save me a lot of soul searching if I like it as much as the reviews I’ve read make me think I will. Let’s see. Continue reading
Anda Curry with Coconut Milk
I’ve previously posted a recipe for dimer dalna, a Bengali version of anda/egg curry—jesus christ, was it really five years ago? Anyway, anda curry is a broad genre in India with versions made all over the country with differing spice blends and consistencies in gravy the major differences. I almost always make it in the broad Bengali style but am also partial to a Kerala-style egg roast (roast in this context mostly means a dish with a dry’ish sauce). The recipe I have for you today is a bit of a regional mish-mash, but a delicious one. I actually started out making a Bengali-style alur-dom with the last of a bag of small potatoes; just as I’d gotten started the missus said that she’d boiled a bunch of eggs for the salads she was planning to eat for the next few days and that I could have six if I liked. I quickly pivoted to anda curry and then things got a little out of hand from there as I decided to add some fennel seed to the coriander and cumin I had already ground, and at the very end randomly dumped some coconut milk in there too. It came out very well though and there’s no reason you shouldn’t make it as well. Continue reading