India, Thailand, Mexico, and China all have a great diversity of food, it is not all spicy and there are great regional differences.
India can roughly be divided in 6 cuisine regions.
Of these, Goa cooking in the West Indian region serves the spiciest meals.
Portuguese influence, a distinctive difference between Spanish cuisine and the neighbour is that the Portuguese love hot peppers in their dishes, Piri Piri is just the most well known example. Eating in Portugal can be flaming hot.
It were the Portuguese who brought chillies to Western India. (Portuguese city names in Goa : Vasco da Gama aka Vasco, Mormugao, Margao, Varca, Goa Velha, Taleigao, Assagao, Chorao Island, etc
Food in the North of India leans more towards Persian/Mughal cuisine (dairy products, koriander, use of nuts).
Eastern Indian cuisine is highly influenced by Chinese and Tibetan cooking.
South India is known for everything fried, papadams, donuts, pancakes.
A more detailed list of various cuisines within India would be :
- Assam
- Awadhi
- Bengali
- Brahmin
- Coorg
- Chettinad
- Goa
- Gujarat
- Hyderabadi
- Kashmiri
- Kerala
- Konkani
- Meghalaya
- Malvani
- Manipur
- Mizoram
- Moplah
- Mughlai
- Nagaland
- Sikkim
- Syrian
- Parsi
- Punjabi
- Rajasthani
- Orija
I knew that they are different, sorry for mixing them in the same sentence.Saffron is also 100x times more expensive.The turmeric made from roots is the anti inflammatory food that protects the internal guts, stomach and the joints from rheumatism.It seems that it can be helpful when recovering from radiation therapy too.Yogurt is directly acting upon the food PH as you feel it instantly in your mouth.I don't know if Safron has similar properties.Don't confuse turmeric (a rhizome like ginger) with saffron, which are dried stamens of a crocus flower, yes both yellow but completely different. Funnily enough I was in Grenada, "the Spice Island of the Caribbean", in March and they also call turmeric saffron, but they are wrong.
That sounds overly dramatic and does not fit with my own experiences at all.
Besides restaurant food, most of which is british rather than indian, I got my indian food originally from the indian family of an ex. Nobody had a particular order in which they ate their ingredients though.
Goa is the one I am most familiar with as my SIL is from there. (nee deSouza) Vancouver is lucky to have a collection of persons from all parts of the country so the variety of food is quite good.
When I've been broke (see: grad school), I did a lot more vegetarian or almost-vegetarian. I'd also stock up on whatever were the loss-leaders around the holidays and freeze what I didn't immediately cook. It's amazing how much a little bit of meat can go a long ways flavor wise, and really enrich things like lentils and beans. It didn't hurt that I lived pretty close to a major Mexican grocery store, too, which had all kinds of bruised/beat up veggies for an absolute song. Bone-heavy meat was also available and affordable, where braising is your friend. Preaching to the choir, but it's really not much more work to cut out the clearly ugly stuff and feed the compost worms.
Admittedly growing up in a family that valued food, I have never really liked pre-packaged foods, but the thing that really gets me is the excess of packaging that goes with it. It's even worse now that recycling is so much more restricted in this neck of the woods.
I was trying to teach my older niece some knife skills and my older brother (her dad) just about passed out (it's painful to watch him cook). Fortunately, neither she nor her sister are picky.
P.S. I need to build my repertoire for the regions of the world which are presently being discussed.
I cant argue on that...it was just my experience.Everyone has it's own body...There were more things that gone wrong while i was in that indian place, a lot of stress implied too so i can't blame only on the food, but i personally don't really feel well with heavily spiced food...
You left out Andhra. When I was in Bengaluru I saw many restaurants with big signs advertising "Genuine Andhra Dishes!". Which is pretty funny because the didn't have dishes, the food was served on a piece of banana leaf. No cutlery either, just a finger howl to clean your hand. Delicious food, rice and brown stuff and yellow stuff and some sort of pickles, all pretty spicy.
Would Tamil be considered a cuisine, or should it be more regionalized? And do we say Chennai or Madras?
There would also be Jain versions of several of these. When we were in Mumbai my wife ordered vindaloo (not authentic Goa pork version but the lamb version that is less a religious problem) and I could not eat a single bite. I had the same problem when a friend (a stewardess from Pakistan) made me a Bangladesh version of fish vindaloo a long time ago.
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Our Costco has switched to a brand with dramatically less sodium, similar packaging. I cut it up too and put in in lots of things.
I don't even need the internet! I have almost zero excuses!
A friend of mine presented me a few birthdays ago with a "joy of cooking"-esque book for southern Indian cooking. I'm sure it doesn't even scratch the surface of what's out there, but hopefully introduces themes and new ways of thinking about food/flavors.
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We are lucky here to have large enough ethnic communities that the markets can set up to basically serve only them. The best for Indian though (IME) was Chicago.
That's a nice way of putting it -- yeah, it's really really Caucasian here.
We have a decent-sized Indian presence on accounts of Intel's numerous campus(es). A number of my Indian coworkers (life sciences) are here on accounts of their husbands being at Intel. While a couple of them claim to be terrible cooks, my next-cubicle neighbor is a great cook. I've threatened to make her take me grocery shopping at some point (I should make good on it)
+lots
Given India is large and has a population of over 10^9 with each region having its own particular styles referring to 'Indian food' seems to be very wrong in this day and age. Especially comparing restaurant food in the west with the real thing. In UK over 90% of 'Indian' restaurants are run by Bangladeshis and they produce food for the English palette that is in most cases unrecognisable from its namesakes.
I cannot comment on Thai, mexican and Chinese cuisine as never sampled the real deal (actually when I DID go to mexico as guests of the govt telecomms agency I caught something nasty and missed dinner).