Addendum to Thursday

A brief description of the Indian food I weaseled out of explaining:
My roommate and I decided that stuffing ourselves with swill, drinking beer and ganking some n00bs on Halo3 would be a great way to celebrate my Japan check finally coming in. To this end, we collectively ordered a great deal food from our favorite, more-or-less local, Indian delivery joint.

Up first were a few samosas. We get the vegetarian samosas because it makes the vegetarian roommate happy and because they're just plain better than the chicken ones. The delivery joint was nice enough to give us two cups of each of the chutneys, so there was no need to be shy while slathering the deep-fried dumplings with spicy green cilantro goodness or heaping up the very odorous and spicy onions in the mysterious red sauce.

For those of you not familiar with Indian food, I am deeply sorry. I would recommend doing an internet search for the closest Indian restaurant and then going there right away. Ideally you will find a buffet and be free to explore things you will not know the name of nor be able to explain their deliciousness to your other sheltered friends. If you cannot find a buffet, order vegetable pakora, vegetable samosas, several naan, chana masala, saag paneer, lamb vindaloo, chicken korma, some basmati rice and a lassi to drink plus gulab jamon for desert. You may want to take the forementioned sheltered friends because that is enough food for 5 or 6 people. Go on, git. It's ok, I'll wait.

During your recent epic dinner experience, you probably noticed the three sauces they brought to your table. There was a brown one, a red one and a green one. The brown one that tastes like rasins is tamarind chutney. This used to be my favorite condoment in the world for about 4 months in college. I am now over it, but occaisional use on naan or pakora is still very rewarding. The red one is very obviously onion chutney. It is sometimes the spiciest of the three, although the green cilantro chutney can be very spicy, and sometimes there is a white coconut chutney that can be deceptively spicy to our Western sensibilites where white things are usually bland like white bread, milk and Al Gore.

As for our actual order, we had: vegetable pakora, a mix of vegetables battered and fried in oddly-shaped lumps, perfect for chutney abuse; naan, a soft, fluffy yogurt-based bread that is traditionally used like an eddible shovel while consuming curries; chapathi, another indian bread similar to naan but unleavened so it makes for a denser yet more pliable shovel; papadam, sort of like a giant tortilla chip made from chick pea flour; poori, yet another Indian bread, this one deep-fried (Imagine a chalupa shell inflated like a balloon into this eddible football/frisbee hybrid sport food. I apologize if your imagination just broke.); chana masala, chickpeas with onion, tomato and a lot of cumin; keema kurma, ground lamb in a creamy almond sauce; chicken vindaloo, a very spicy curry with an amazingly convoluted cultural history that you can learn about here; and some chick pea soup that comes complimentary every time we order from this restaurant which happens to be quite good but which I don't know the name of because I never actually order it.

I don't know if that counts as a run-on sentence, per se, but I'm gonna leave it there. It was a great dinner.