food service

[calimac]

1. Beware, beware, the ides of sauce. Indian simmer sauces are a standard item in our pantry. They usually come in jars. Half a jar in a covered saucepan with chopped veggies, then add cooked pasta and sometimes a little leftover chicken near the finish, and it's a meal. The only catch is, sometimes they're spicier than B. likes. My latest discovery is a brand, Kitchens of India, where even a "mild" label on the jar will not save you from ultra-spicy. Even their tikka masala - an inherently wimpy Anglo concoction, the chop suey of Indian food - was too spicy. Using just a third of the jar and diluting it with water didn't work, as it sometimes does. Next try, a few days later: cutting it with tomato sauce. Still too spicy. Finally, rummaging around in the fridge produced a successful recipe. Two parts sauce. Three parts mayonnaise. And one part milk. That, at last, brought it down to the merely brightly tasty.

2. For a Sunday early afternoon backyard bbq, I found myself tasked with bringing drinks. This would be a score of people mostly older than myself, so loading up on soda pop* didn't seem quite the thing. I headed for what the very large local Safeway calls the "specialty drinks" aisle. I bought a lot of medium-sized bottles of that uncolored but fruit-flavored water, some Starbucks chilled coffee of some kind (I know little of the ways of coffee), some Snapple, and, because I couldn't resist it, two different professional golfer brands of lemonade. Arnold Palmer lemonade is evenly mixed with ice tea, and Jack Nicklaus lemonade has mango in it. I prefer Jack's. I found I didn't much care for the uncolored water; it tastes too sweet for me, even though it doesn't seem to have any sweetenings in it. Lemonade, on the other hand, does not.

*Some people say "soda" and some people say "pop", but I say "soda pop".

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Many of those fruit waters actually have stevia or other artificial sweeteners in them but it takes careful perusal of the labels to ferret this out. I prefer the Crystal Geyser fizzy waters which really are unsweetened.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Aspartame. Blech. I should have looked more closely.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Back when I drank lemonade, my preferred version was Minutemaid frozen, with the juice of about three extra lemons squeezed in to make it sour enough. I really can't imagine mixing it with iced tea, but then I don't find tea particularly appealing.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

I'm reminded of a Pakistani place here in Milwaukee where we asked for "mild" and got such flaming mouthfuls that all three of us left our meals unfinished. To this day, I don't know if they only cater to folks who like it HOT++++ or more, or whether they were trying to make sure those damned non-Muslims never dared enter the establishment again. (If the latter, it certainly worked.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've had some similar experience, although the one I'm most reminded of didn't involved spiciness at all. It was a basic American steakhouse whose waiter, manager, et al, stoutly insisted that our steaks were not nauseatingly oversalted, although all three of us who were actually eating the things found that they were. We'd eaten there often before with no problems, but never went back again. This was years ago; strangely, unlike other, better restaurants, it's still there.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Our local Bangladeshi restaurant will offer to turn the heat down (or up) if people prefer, although in my case the chef knows he can turn up the spicing and tries out new and spicy concoctions on us as free extra dishes from time to time. They're also quite happy to have both Muslims and non Muslims in- the meat's all halal.

I have to admit for a liking for Parsee dishes which are mostly vegetarian and mega spicy.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There is one vegetarian dish from those cuisines I truly love, and that is palak paneer. It's usually not very spicy, but I've had it so.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I will drink the rest of the flavored waters. I like them. The Arnold Palmer is all yours. I do not like lemonade.