I’m not sure how you would eat the goopy part of over easy – or even over medium – eggs without something to consolidate it. Otherwise you just end up with yellow stains all over the plate. I mean, there’s a reason eggs Benedict has an English Muffin as the foundation.
To answer the OP, I’ve been edging my way into Korean food for a bit. I’m finding it like Japanese – a local variant of the Chinese mother cuisine. My brother is a big fan of pho but I finally persuaded him to try ramen, saying pho is nice but I prefer the latter. I think he had the impression instant ramen was what the real stuff was like. We ate at a restaurant that had six different types and he could see my point.
One of my favorite breakfasts is a sandwich with toasted English muffin, over-easy egg (salt and pepper), bacon, mayo and sriracha. Wonderfully messy and delicious.
As for a dish I hadn’t tried or even heard of until recently, I’ll nominate birria, a Mexican stew made of meat and chili peppers. It’s supposed to be made from goat, but I made mine with beef short ribs. It’s a dish that has apparently been “discovered” and is now the darling of the food cart world.
You could make tandoori chicken yourself. I’ve done so, more than once, and I’m a complete idiot. I’ve started with something like Sharwood’s prepared spice mix (a dry mixture of spices) but you could certainly work entirely from scratch. As I remember, you mix the dry spices with yogurt and lemon juice, marinate skinned chicken legs and then roast them.
In your situation, you just can’t risk it. I can only offer the following:
The tandoori masala spice mixture used for various Indian chicken dishes is invariably, every time, a dry mix of known spices absent of any kind of vegetable whatsoever. What you could, conceivably, run into is a chef having a boutique recipe for the marinade that adds tomato puree to the marinade itself – so instead of yoghurt + dry spice mix, the hypothetical marinade would be yoghurt + tomato puree + dry spice mix. I’ve never heard of it or tasted it that way … but I could never say “never”. It would be surprising and unusual, but again, could never say “never”.
I did a little research about “palak paneer” and “saag paneer” after your posts, because I didn’t actually know that tomato (puree) is a common ingredient in palak paneer. In the saag paneer recipes I looked at, tomato puree shows up in a decided minority of recipes – but that would be too common for you to take a chance at in a restaurant setting.
Plain basmati rice in a restaurant will come in one of two ways: either totally, honestly PLAIN – just water and rice … or else the rice will have a few crushed cardamom pods in it. Unless a chef was going way outside the typical, you’d never see mystery flecks in it or see anything shaken on top of it.
There’s some more that you could eat at an Indian restaurant safely. Mint and coconut chutneys to dip naan into. The sweet rice pudding kheer, a popular dessert, is totally safe (if raisins are OK).
There is a type of stewed dish called “korma” – chicken korma is a popular one in Indian restaurants. Korma sauce is traditionally made with ground cashews, yogurt, and spices and is a pale creamy color or sometimes yellow depending on the spices used. Some chefs will add tomato (assumedly puree) to their korma, but when they do this it’s obvious – the color changes to a vibrant orange-red. If someone ever offers you a korma dish, pass on it if you see even the faintest hint of orange.
We often cook from “an invitation to Indian cooking”, by Madhur Jaffrey. I recommend it highly. The recipes are described clearly and the intructions are clear. She gives alternate ingredients when something is hard to get in the US.
Ceviche and beef heart are the dishes at the Peruvian restaurant I go to most often.
Me, too! And I adore ton katsu – I love the sauce. Japanese curry is my second favorite in my hierarchy of curries: Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Burmese, Indian. Not a huge fan of Indian food. It’s o.k. but a lot of the sauces have a muddiness to them…again, I like clean flavors like in Japanese food. Man, I’d curl up and die if I couldn’t eat Japanese food anymore.
I’m not a big fan of escargot. They’re OK, but not something I go out of my way for.
When in France my host family’s father raised his own snails. He did them with a simple butter-garlic-parsley topping in the oven, served with crispy-crusted baguettes. It was great but, honestly, to me snails don’t taste much different than molluscs/clams/other things of that sort. Not something I would seek out…
… BUT if I was a great fan of them I would most certainly cook them at home.
Well, that’s one kind. I use Kikkoman katsu sauce, as that’s what I find at the grocery around here. No idea what the Japanese places use, or if they make their own (usually something like ketchup, worcestershire, mirin, sugar, soy sauce.) That Bull-Dog Sauce looks particularly good – I’ll have to put it in my cart.
If I understand correctly they came here at least partly because of the quality of our water, fed by Sierra Nevada snow melt. Although now given the current drought, coming to California for the water arguably seems like it might have been a bit shortsighted.
