Chana Masaledar, officially [and really]

I'm handing you the official recipe and my variation. I'm not eating out tonight unless somebody invites me over.

• 6 oz chickpeas, soaked overnight || 2 cans. Drain 'em.
  
• 4 – 5 tbsp. vegetable oil || no, no no...use ghee. Or regular butter, in a pinch.
  
• quarter tsp. whole cumin seeds || a half-thumb
  
• 1 medium size onion, peeled and chopped || medium, large, whatever. Don't chop it too finely.
  
• one – one and a half tsp. garam masala || a thumb, and you better be using homemade garam masala!
  
• 1 tsp. ground coriander || half-thumb to thumb, freshly ground seeds
  
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced || oh no, at least four. Don't be a pussy.
  
• piece of fresh ginger, about half an inch square, peeled and grated || thumb-to-knuckle, and really, who has a ginger grater? Chop it extra-small.
  
• 1 tbsp. tomato puree || or a couple of chopped tomatoes. Whatever.
  
• 1.5 tsp. salt || great big grainy kosher sea salt, if you have it. And why don't you?
  
• 1.4 tsp. cayenne || Oh fergawdsake. Toss in two or three dried chiles. See note on "garlic" re: pussy-ness.
  
• 1 tsp. ground amchoor OR 1 tbsp. lemon juice || no, no, no. There's no OR. Why don't you have amchoor? Sigh. In a pinch, use lemon zest, not juice.
  

Serve with

• 1 firm tomato, washed and quartered
  
• medium onion, peeled, and cut into coarse slivers || I go for green onions here. Easier to get ready, and by now dinner's probably running late and you're running out of beer
  
• 4 fresh hot green chiles || Serranos. Jalapenos. Slice 'em thin.
  
• good handful of fresh cilantro, chopped
  
• chunks of lemon
  

Cook the chickpeas. Put them aside. Heat the fat, add the cumin....add the onion. Pause. Pause again (you're browning the onions, silly.) Lower the heat: add garam masala, coriander, garlic, ginger. Pause. Add tomato. Pause. Add everything else: chickpeas, salt, chiles, amchoor. Cook for half an hour; stir it every once in a while so it doesn't burn. Invite me over while you're setting the table, and crack me open a beer. Serve the chana with all the extra vegetables; every bite can be different....

Tonight: Soleil Westwood

Soleil is a bistro in Westwood, slightly south of UCLA. The LAW and I are going on a double-date with the Fusenet-Boyz: dinner, then the Laurie Anderson concert at Royce Hall. I'm jacked about the concert--the food is just extra fun for the evening.

Soleil's menu looks so French it's Fransh, as Tater might say--y'know, escargot, pâté maison, meat with sauce. I used to eat escargot with the Finn, but that was part of her mission to "civilize" me 20-odd years ago. My sense of snails is tempered now by the multitude of them that swarm over and under the candytuft in the back yard. I make the LAW deal with them--so much for butchness. Les escargots dans mon jardin sont vraiment terrifiants!

And what can I say about pâté? I have a longstanding aversion to organ meat. I don't even like my own guts. And yet, after a number of fine pâtés de campagne in France, I've embraced my shameful desire for the innards of little feathered beasties. Still, after traipsing about in food cities like Portland and New Orleans in the last month, I feel the need to recover a sense of my, hmmmm, "ludic Buddhism." While that means that I can take delight in my physical body and the fun things one can do with it, I shouldn't eat other animals.

However, as Sarah Turnbull says in Almost French: "France has this effect on foreigners. It turns your eating habits and food principles upside down so that before long you're rhapsodizing about the delicate silkiness of foie gras entier without a thought for the fat content, let alone the poor goose or duck who was force-fed through a tube down its throat. The damage is irreparable--there's no turning back to muesli after flaky pastries filled with ribbons of dark chocolate" (257). I don't know if that's true, since the LAW still maintains a healthy interest in muesli after a number of flaky-pastry tours of France, but I do know that my opinion of pâté changed somewhere outside of Rabastens (that's the walled city, below).

But that's French pâté. The last pâté I had was a generous serving at Chez Loma (on Coronado Island), and there was just this whiff of, I dunno, wet dog to it that put me off. So. No more squished-innards-on-crackers until Paris.

I officially love Portland.

I was so turned on by the wild salmon hash at Mother's Bistro & Bar (in Portland, OR) that I decided to write about it--I'm much in favor of using language to get at what turns us on, after all. I was tired of my own bellybutton over at Shehun's House of Why, and I thought it might be time to focus. And, so, welcome to the new blog, complete with the cast of characters (and then some) from the old blog. I have so many foodie friends with varying levels of expertise that I should have material for weeks and weeks. Tater's knowledge of coffee alone would keep us occupied through spring '08.

Thursday, April 27: The LAW and I walked through drizzly downtown Portland to get to Mother's, a place she'd tracked down on some online eating guide. I'd just wanted to go there because I'd seen an advertisement in the promotional crap in the hotel. The ad boasted a rather, hmmm, severe-looking woman reminiscent of my Great-Aunt Pencie, who I only met once, on a Thanksgiving, and who spent part of the day spitting nonchalantly into the kitchen sink. More on that later. Maybe. Or wait, no, that's enough on Pencie. Anyway, in the Mother's ad, the woman was saying, "Give me dumplings or give me death." I'll tell you, after several weeks of trying to eat with my health in mind, death-dumplings were mighty appealing.

What was it about the hash? I'll admit that I figured the hash would be like the gooey corned-beef-hash paste that you get in cans, only with salmon. I ordered it anyway (I don't mind the paste so much, since it reminds me of camping in the Canadian Rockies in '86 with the Finn--my taste in food tends to be heavily influenced by memory and tendresse). Actually, however, Mother's potatoes and salmon chunks were discrete, marble-sized, in a very light cream glaze and sprinkled with leeks. I ate the hash, along with two eggs (over medium, thanks very much), and drank a lot of strong coffee that, really, you can only get in the Pacific Northwest. And then, the next day, I came back for more. And two days later, I went back with a new group and had a third serving. As Tater might say, it was foodgasmic.