Diners, Drive-ins and Posers

You know, I really love the Food Network show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. I love everything about it. The show reminds me of the wonderful articles Jane and Michael Stern used to write for Gourmet before their space was severely edited and their intricate tale-telling was reduced to blurb form. DD & D puts a spotlight on local food oddities like lobster chow mein and proprietors' eccentricities like tater tot pizza. Yep, I love the show...except for the host. Guy Fieri may be a great chef but as a host he just grates. His persona teems with the usual SoCal dribs and drabs. Bleached hair with roots? Check. Tattoos? Check. Sunglasses worn on the back of his neck? Oh, please. Check. I find the way he chats with the owners and chefs off-putting and insincere. It's a strange mix of surfer dude talk, catchphrases of the day and buddying up to chefs and owners. I actually find myself hitting mute whenever Guy speaks, then hitting unmute when the chef speaks. It's that bad. Please, Food Network, hire someone sincere for the job! It's too good of a concept to waste.

Fusionista Food: East Indian Tacos

Mixing Mexican and Indian food sounds really strange and is most likely a huge disaster. I, on the other hand, didn't even know I was doing it until it had already been done. Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid wrote the cookbook Mangoes and Curry Leaves: Travels Throughout the Subcontinent. Their writing style includes photographs, travel stories and delicious, unusual recipes. Cookbooks can be hard to trust if the first recipe doesn't work. In their previous book, Seductions of Rice, I tried a recipe for Tofu with Tomatoes and Cilantro. I was skeptical but it tasted wonderful.

Once I received their cookbook for Christmas, I chose my first recipe, Mint-Cilantro Beef Patties, collected spices and scouted out the nearest Indian grocery, which turned out to be Namaste Plaza in Belmont. There, I bought mint, cilantro and cucumbers and stared hard at the flours before realizing atta (durum) flour could only be bought in 20 pound sacks. So instead I picked up an aluminum foil-wrapped package of roti made by a lady in Santa Clara. I went to other extremes instead: I ground my own chuck for the patties, making the mix a 90:10 ratio of meat to fat. So I shaped and grilled the patties, heated the chapatis and brushed them with ghee, made a vegetable plate of chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, mint, cilantro and limes, and stirred up a quick garlic and salt raita. Then my husband started piling everything into the chapati, and I started to laugh. Spicy, herbal and hot beef wrapped in chewy, wheaty chapati with vegetables, herbs, creamy sauce and a spritz of lime is nothing if not a cultural and culinary collision of the most delicious sort.

Cumin-Coriander Beef Patties (From Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid)

About 1 pound best-quality lean ground beef
1/2 cup finely chopped or grated onion or shallots
1 teaspoon minced ginger or ginger ground to a paste (optional)
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 plain (full- or reduced-fat) yogurt
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
1/4 to 1/2 packed chopped coriander leaves or 1/4 cup minced mint leaves
Peanut oil or vegetable oil

Mix beef, onion (which I didn't use), ginger (which I also omitted), spices, yogurt, vinegar and herbs. For this recipe I used 1/4 cup chopped coriander and 1/4 cup chopped mint. Knead the mixture together well to obtain a smooth, well-blended texture. I shaped the mixture into 16 smaller oblong patties rather than 8 larger patties. I then grilled the patties on a well-oiled cast iron grill pan till both sides had deep black grill marks and were cooked through.

A Ukrainian-Saskatchewan Christmas

My mother-in-law never tasted a vegetable that wasn't cooked in cream until she was married. She lived on a regular working farm, with chickens, cows, a big garden and grainfields. She also ate her eggs cooked in cream. This was no thin pasteurized cream in little cartons from Safeway. This was farm cream, yellow and thick, with an even thicker layer of solid cream sitting on top. She mused, "We ate what we had! No wonder all of my uncles died of heart disease in their mid-fifties." Marian cooks the best comfort food I've ever had. I don't like Gourmet Christmases. I don't like potatoes mashed with weird things and beef cooked with strange mushrooms at this time of year. No, what I want at Christmastime is exactly what I've eaten for every Christmas for the past 32 years. I want perogies, cheese-and-potato filled dumplings. Marian makes three or four kinds: plain, with onions and butter, cooked in cream sauce and with mushroom dill cream sauce. Plus, Marian makes turkey and ham and stuffing and cabbage rolls and lasagna (for something new) and mashed potatoes and cheese mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and green beans and peas and a fruit platter and a vegetable platter and a cheese platter and Jell-o salad. It's a crazy-making whirl of food, one that prompts people to take two plates at a time in an effort to cram as much food as possible into one sitting. Last year, she made holubtsi, Ukrainian for little pigeons, which can also refer to cabbage rolls, but in this case meant tiny bits of bread dough rolled up in beet leaves, baked and then cooked in a cream sauce. It's a heart-stopper, but utterly delicious. Then come desserts: pumpkin cream, angel food and what ladies in Rouleau call a "dainty platter". You basically take a giant platter and fill it full of homemade baking. This included the all-purpose "squares", which is any kind of dessert you can cook and serve in bar form. Saves a busy farm wife a load of time when guests come over. Again, the dainty platter is a cornucopia of sweets and guilt, including brownies, shortbread, poppyseed rolls, cherry cheesecake tarts, cherry tarts and cinnamon rolls. These last items are called scuffles. Not sure why. The year Marian had shoulder surgery she held back and only made nine kinds of sweets. Unfortunately, everyone's turned into a diabetic and were forced to hold back on everything except the green beans. But not me. Not yet.