Guess what’s on the stove right now? I don’t find it bland at all. It’s a nice gravy heavy on curry powder and full of sweet and savory flavors. I find it positively flavorful compared to most Japanese dishes, which are pretty clean and simple. (Which is great. I absolutely love Japanese food, but I find it weird to characterize Japanese curry as bland vis a vis other Japanese dishes. Compared to an Indian-style curry? Sure, it’s bland. Compared to delicately seasoned Japanese food? Not at all.)
Oh yes, the spice level is much lower. I have a medium-hot curry on the stove now, and it packs a little bit of a punch. The hot is probably about a medium to me, and the extra hot is in between medium and hot. I often add some hot pepper to it at the table. But spiciness aside, I just love that curry powder flavor – it’s not necessary for me for it to be spicy. The Chinese curries I’ve had from takeouts are similar, and I similarly like them. It’s like someone dumped curry powder into your usual American-Chinese take out base sauce. Nothing like an Indian curry, but lovely in its own right. But I prefer the Japanese curry for all the extra stuff that’s in the cubes, like apple, honey, cheese (!? really!), Peanut butter (yup, in the Vermont brand.) It’s a weird hodge podge of flavors that work well together.
Yeah, and in New Orleans you have crawfish boils, where crawfish is boiled with potatoes, sausage, corn, maybe some onions, perhaps some lemons, and heaps of Cajun or Creole seasoning. In Door County, Wisconsin, you have a fish boil, with potatoes, often onions, and whitefish. It’s a much more … tepid affair compared to a crawfish boil. Salt is usually the only seasoning used in order to preserve the taste of the whitefish.
It’s a pretty common theme. But the one with corned beef and cabbage leaves a lot to be desired. Boiled cabbage isn’t the best preparation for cabbage, and corned beef is much better cooked another way. (Like I prefer baked corned beef and braised cabbage and mashed potatoes as a way of preparing those three ingredients for dinner. Too much corned beef flavor is leeched away into the water in the boiling process, but the leftover water does make for a good liquid to cook, say, beans in.)
It’s a specific, if variable, thing - esquites. Tasty, but can be a little much at times depending on the level of condiment to corn which varies from establishment to establishment .
Ice cream has come in a bewildering variety of flavors over the centuries. I believe Thomas Jefferson served oyster ice cream to guests at what was then called the Executive Mansion. I’d like to give that a try—I love oysters!
I am elevating my corn experience this summer. As a side note, I’ve used mayo instead of butter on a grilled cheese sandwich, and it was almost as good as butter. So I’m going full-in on @silenus’s recipe.
You won’t be sorry. Elotes and esquites are a delight. Around here, one of our malls (remember those?) had a vendor in the food court that only sold esquites. And there’s plenty of roadside and sidewalk vendors that sell them throughout the summer (though they typically just advertise them as elotes.)
There are two issues with respect to pronouncing the name of the 50th state:
first, does the “w” sound like “w” in “wine” or the “v” in “very”? This is apparently somewhat regional and as you move across the islands you hear more local people saying it one way or the other. Announcers on the local NPR affiliate skew toward “HaVai’i” but you hear “HaWai’i” too.
second, the okina: it is considered a consonant in the Hawaiian language. It’s a glottal stop. Think of the abrupt distinction you make in between the syllables of “uh-oh!” Or, if you are saying “i.e.” out loud: you don’t say it as a diphthong (iiiiieeeee) you say the two letters distinctly. That’s how you say Hawai’i. The switch from the “ai” sound to the “I” sound is clear and abrupt.
Bear in mind the okina in entirety unvovalized, while the Hebrew glottal stop aleph can be quite audible.
Somewhere in between is my Midwestern “t” at the end of words that we don’t bother touching the tongue to our pallets: “what?” coming out as “wha-(eh?)”
As I go to England quite often, I would say that Full English Breakfast is the one of the few dishes from the British Ilse that have contributed to World Cuisine. It can be a thing of beauty and just what you are looking for after a night out or an eventful day in front of you.
How ever it is a dish that can be made so badly and out for shit ingredients that it is not worth the calories.
The dish of shame in Denmark is actually our national dish. It is panfried porkbelly with boiled potatos with a white sauce with parsley in it. Old fashion, salty and boring…