Scottish men think they are better cooks than women 132

I used to fret that the dishes I produced at home using an buttortment of recipe books never seemed to turn out like restaurant curries. When I talked about this to an Indian friend, he thought it was hilarious that I was trying to reproduce restaurant food and condemed most of it as as "Anglicised Bengali crap" (he's Punjabi, so I'm not sure whether he considers all Bengali food crap, or just the Anglicised stuff!)*. Then I started going to India fairly regularly and found that only in restaurants aimed exclusively at foreign tourists could I find any of the standard UK menu dishes, and very few even then - otherwise the dishes have varied enormously depending which region we were in. Oddly, the place where the food has most resembled UK restaurant curries has been Nepal (although I've not been to Bengal yet).

Best Indian meal I ever had was in Kerala, produced in a hut which just had a double gas ring and an electric rice cooker (but no electricity that day!) - little freshwater fish spiced & fried whole, some sort of pumpkin salad in a spiced yoghurt dressing, green beans fried with fresh coconut & whole spices, a green dal (mung beans?), curried pineapple, rice-flour rotis and tomato pickle, all eaten off a banana leaf and washed down with ginger tea. Very yummy, and the only vaguely similar dish I've ever had in the UK was beans poriyal from a place that does a few southern regional dishes.

*The same friend made an interesting comment when talking about his family. His father won't touch rice and chides my friend for doing so as he considers it only fit for women(!). Proper Punjabi men should only eat parathas, apparantly!

Kathie