Brown Motion

As large network programming goes I am not a fan,  and cannot remember much of any particular show that I clicked with since coming to America two decades ago. Every person follows something they individually crave or have a deep affection for and seek out a life to live vicariously through the media they watch. In our case both the wife and I love to eat and explore flavors - we live to eat - and try to appreciate the varied lifestyles of the people that inhabit this oblate hardware we call Earth.  To that point we have been fortunate to visit some remote parts of this planet from the southern fringes of Australia and New Zealand to the northern latitudes of Alaska and some parts in between. Food of course comes in many forms sometimes living and mostly dead (assuming it had parents) and can be manipulated in terms of texture and the final flavor profile before it hits your plate and your palate. Growing up with a largely vegetarian diet in a country where a cow is s...

As I ate some wonderful Gulab Jam (fried flour dough balls in simple syrup laced with Saffron) today I thought of some interesting and complex foods that I have had the fortune to enjoy growing up in the western state of Maharashtra in India. Each place has its tradition and food is big part of it.  Maharashtra itself has a lot of variety moving inland from the coastal plains with its abundant rice production along with what the sea offers (used to offer much more like any place on the planet) over the Sahyadri mountains and into the warm heartland farm country (or what used to be anyway). What grows locally is best had within miles of where it is produced.  That reveals the true taste of the ingredients and the art and science that went into making it. Here then are top X items that I thought of this evening over the bowl of Gulab Jams... Kharvas - to a westerner this dish is impossible to imagine - some sort of cheese perhaps is the closest analogy th...