Wine Market - Fall & New Menus

I can tell you all about the Bacon-Wrapped Medjool Dates and the Veal Cheek Agnolotti. I can do this because, well, you're not surprised I ordered them as we sat on a Saturday night just sipping wine and grazing, are you?

We were still full (sorta...just sorta) from Greek Fest (and when you see that post, dear lord Fetz doesn't even begin to describe it).

But Suzu and AS decided since we had turned in to Wine Market, and I put the turn signal on and waited at least a second and a half to see if there were objections, we should have a bottle of Black Ankle's 2006 Crumbling Rock. Maryland wine peeps. Cab Franc/Merlot/Cab/Pettit Verdot blend. And really tasty. These folks got it more than right. Check the bottle price (mid-50s) and you'll probably say there's no way you'd pay that much for a Maryland wine, right? Do it. Thank me later.It's not "Maryland wine you'd pay a bit more for than usual." It's a damn fine bottle of wine at the right price point, AND it's from Maryland. We sipped for a good long while amazed at the viscosity (it took a good minute for legs to break down from the line of wine left from glass tilt). And then it was gone, and we were sad, and Kelly brought us the wine menu back, and all was right in the universe one more time.

Next bottle was the Atteca, a 100% Garnacha from Calatayud (say it fast Kelli, say it 10 times fast!). Yeah, I don't know where that is either, but it was a large Spanish red that turns out will be sipped this evening when I make it over to Pops for Sunday Family Supper. Gumbo tonight, Mmmmm. In any event, and almost in any "case," the Atteca led to the first order of food, because why wouldn't it.

Needed something. Ordered dates. There you have it. For the low-low price of $7 you're enjoying applewood smoked bacon wrapped medjool dates with toasted walnut fonduta, arugula, walnut vinaigrette, and shaved gala apple. AS put it very well. There is not a flavor or texture on that that plate that isn't there for a reason. If you can stop yourself short enough to take just a minute (and it'll be hard) to make sure you get one bite with a little bit of everything; you'll be a happy date-eatin' fool. Sweet and salty, creamy and crisp, bright and deep. It was all there.

Pause for the tangent that ends up being the theme. It's fall, though you wouldn't know it today. The air is cooler and crisp, the nights bring muted cries of "oh I wish I'd brought my scarf/gloves/sweater/other warm thing." The new items we tried last night were fall. They were dates and veal cheek, bacon and red kuri squash, they were braised and they were warpped and grilled, and they were swimming with luscious, heavy red wine that made your heart warm right along with your belly.

That was certainly the case with the agnolotti, which was paired through whim, chance, and good fortune with 2003 Brunello di Montalcino. You will want the $9 braised veal cheek agnolotti with golden raisins, red kuri squash, blood orange suprémes, and smoked oil. If you don't, call me, I'll fly with you and take them off your hands.

Funny that AS had been complaining earlier in the day about the pasta on Al Italia. And really, it's your national airline. Your national food should probably NOT SUCK on your national airline.

Little pillows of meat said Kelli, and god bless her for it, they were. perfectly cooked, toothy pasta pockets with braised veal cheeks that had melted. The flavors were smoky and rich and warm. You would want this in front of your fireplace. You would consider breaking in to my place to sit in front of the fireplace there. If you shared your agnolotti, I may agree to not press charges.

I saw the new scallop and snapper menu items...and we almost went for overdrive on the Saturday food-excursion. But just catching a glimpse was enough this time. Scallops, speck risotto, cranberry mostarda, sauted red kuri squash. Indeed, you are powerful as the emperor has foreseen. And there was talk of pork shanks (mostly because there was talk of lamb shanks earlier, but they were sold out of that special) and the pork shanks are served with curry noodles, and pulled brussel's sprouts (which is probably damn good and will likely need to get in my belly).

Instead, AS needed dessert, in the form of cheeses. And I will tell you it was a banner night. A banner night that had this guy try (no, I really wasn't a stinky cheese guy AT ALL), and not be offended by, and then try again, and then grab a piece of the toast points and smear more, a Spanish sheep's milk blue cheese.

(My sister has currently dropped her keyboard and may have to fight with the dog to get the mouse back, that is the level of psychic shock reverberating across the interwebs at this very moment.)

But it was goooooood. It was creamy, then salty, and there was a tang at the finish but the tang was a part of the cheese and not some billy club beating you over the head for daring to believe there was anything else to taste here.

And we talked about food, and politics, and restaurants, and watched other folks come to the bar and wait for their table and move on; or we watched them sit at the bar and order and eat and wonder if we should have ordered what they ordered; and a procession of men with elbow patches on sport coats and glasses that are clunky, and retro, and hip chatted amiably with smiling young women who were glad to be done with a week and able to order just one more 3 oz. pour of that Pinot they like so much (it's probably the St. Innocent).

There wasn't a distinct end to the night, we just couldn't order anymore. We had chatted, and sipped, and dined for a day, and with one final 3 oz. our ourselves, Suzu the Chianti, AS the Zinfandel, and I the Petit Syrah, it was all over but for the picking up two bottles on the way out the door.

An Omnivore's Defense of Defense

I will speak in hyperbole. It will be both witty and poingnant in its ability to convey my thoughts to you. Unless you're this guy, or this guy, in which case you will believe I am some cheese-eating, French-wine loving, surrender-monkey. And I am all of those things...except a surrender-monkey. And in any case its actually BECAUSE I am a cheese-eating, French-wine drinking dork that I put these thoughts out there for the little blogospehere-y types to read and consider.

Here's the hyperbole: People are starting to get as wound up as the Romans about books expressing the opinion that factory farms have serious and increasingly negative impacts on our food system and our health and that food created without laboratories is inherently more nutritious than its lab-coat, nutrient-injected, genetically-altered cousins.

Parse with me, because I wrote that last graph fairly carefully. There are some folks engaged in industrial agriculture and involved in farming today who are reacting very negatively to Michael Pollan's writing. They are proponents of industrial agriculture methods that have increased yields and reduced the price tag of a host of agricultural products for the 'Merican consumer. And they are reacting as if Pollan a) puts himself out as the be-all, end-all expert on agriculture; b) tells his readers that his science is irrefutable; c) proposes that every industrial farmer STOP what they are doing right now; and d) has convinced every American consumer to wage war on the American farmer.

I'll take his books in reverse order for the purpose of this exercise because the end result is primary, but the attacks are aimed squarely at the earlier book. Pollan's aim and authority as he sees it are spelled out fairly clearly before he even gets out of the introduction of "In Defense of Food."

My aim in this book is to help us reclaim our health and happiness as eaters. To do this requires an exercise that might at first blush seem unnecessary, if not absurd: to offer a defense of food and the eating thereof. That food and eating stand in need of a defense might seem counter-intuitive at a time when "over-nutrition" is emerging as a more serious threat to public health than under-nutrition. But I contend that most of what we're consuming today is no longer, strictly speaking, food at all, and how we're consuming it - in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone - is not really eating, at least not in the sense that civilization has long understood the term.

As for authority:

You may well, and rightly, wonder who am I to tell you how to eat? Here I am advising you to reject the advice of science and industry - and then blithely go on to offer my own advice. So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

There's the what and the why of "In Defense of Food." And Pollan admits that the ability to eat in the manner he suggests in "In Defense of Food" was not possible until very recently because of the power of the industrial food economy spelled out in "Omnivore's Dilemma."

I doubt the last third of this book could have been written forty years ago, if only because there would have been no way to eat the way i propose without going back to the land and growing all your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot. There was really only one kind of food on the national menu, and that was whatever industry and nutritionism happened to be serving. Not anymore. Eaters have real choices now, and those choices have real consequences,  for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture - all of which, as we will see, are inextricably linked. That anyone should need to write a book advising people to "eat food" could be taken as a measure of our alienation and confusion. Or we could choose to see it in a more positive light and count ourselves fortunate indeed that there is once again real food for us to eat."

That real food is in direct response to the past 50 years of food production methods and markets. Let's be clear, "Omnivore's Dilemma" takes a fairly unforgiving look at the factory farm, the feedlots, the history of "Grain-Fed Beef" from the policy and marketing views. "In Defense of Food" takes the same glaring look at the pseudo- and incomplete science that grew up around our margarine and our high-fiber, and our hubris that we could do it better than nature.

Most importantly for my response to the attacks on the books, on Pollan, and on anyone who would be foolish enough to agree with him, I happen to have made the economic and personal decision that Pollan is more right than they are. Please don't get all paranoid-delusional on me for promoting an idea that I believe makes both more economic sense for consumers in the long run and provides food that tastes better to me.

Now on to the stories that sparked this defense of Pollan's "Defense." The first, an article written by farmer Blake Hurst, is a substantive and thoughtful counterpoint to Pollan. He is that farmer selling that product to those consumers. And his perspective from the eye of the market is both clear and factual. He sells what consumers want to buy.

I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food. Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is.

But now we have to listen to self-appointed experts on airplanes frightening their seatmates about the profession I have practiced for more than 30 years. I’d had enough. I turned around and politely told the lecturer that he ought not believe everything he reads. He quieted and asked me what kind of farming I do. I told him, and when he asked if I used organic farming, I said no, and left it at that. I didn’t answer with the first thought that came to mind, which is simply this: I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand.

Blake, what I am telling you right now is not that you're doing it wrong, or that I need you to change your farming. I am telling you that this consumer has thought more about the impact his choices have on himself and the larger community and prefers to know his farmer, to know his food, and to buy more and more of it raised and harvested in a manner more consistent with a small farm model of Polyface than the CAFOs and corn-science-based farming that has come to dominate the market place.

And I have to take a bit of issue with your quick-hitting: "Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it is easier, and because it is cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons." Yes, they're defensible reasons for a farmer focusing on being successful in the industrial-agricultural economy. I think part of what Pollan does with Omnivore's Dilemma is to show that there are, in fact, other agricultural economies that exist.

You have an economic bottom line and meet it as you see fit with methods and through markets that make the most sense to you. But it is disingenuous at best to complain because Pollan wrote a book that made a lot of folks realize they had an economic choice too. I am making my economic choices; and they will include food produced by your methods less and less. That's not a personal attack on you, and it's not an attack on any farmer, it's an economic choice that by your logic I should be just as free to make as you are.

While almost all of my rebuttal to Hurst is based on our interpretations and opinions of the implication of Pollan on both the farmer and the consumer, there was one factual assertion Hurst made that I think bears a quick review.

Finally, consumers benefit from cheap food. If you think they don’t, just remember the headlines after food prices began increasing in 2007 and 2008, including the study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations announcing that 50 million additional people are now hungry because of increasing food prices. Only “industrial farming” can possibly meet the demands of an increasing population and increased demand for food as a result of growing incomes.

A few things. It would be more accurate to say that politicians and policy-makers benefit from consumers who have cheap food. It would also be more accurate to say that consumers who have not thought about the economic or health implications of their food purchases prefer food that costs less.

Finally, and most importantly, read here, here, and here. Claims that increasing yield-per-acre will solve world hunger are just too far from the truth to be useful to your argument against people acting in accordance with Pollan's prescriptions.

The second story in a budding series of "Please don't let this man talk to people who might not want to eat food that's been fed more anti-biotics than a Marne platoon deploying in sub-Saharan Africa" told the tale of David Wood, the Chairman of Harris Ranch Beef. Mr. Wood is contemplating withdrawing his pledge of $150,000 and his company's pledge of $500,000 for a new agricultural lab at his alma mater because they invited Michael Pollan to speak, by himself, at the school. Quel horreur? He gets to talk without a muzzle or a factory-farm-owning-alumnus-paid-for-and-approved-other-side-of-the-argument-presenting partner?

Pollan, who teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, is an advocate for healthy, environmentally conscious methods of farming and production — including feeding cattle with grass, reducing the use of petroleum on farms and decreasing pollution.

Wood, a Cal Poly alumnus who described himself as a “significant donor,” sent a letter to Cal Poly President Warren Baker in late September expressing his displeasure with Pollan’s scheduled talk.

Your protestations, Mr. Wood, sound hollow from here. Of course you'll hit back with "That description of Pollan leaves out the economic impact of his pie-in-the-sky ideas about farming on the hard-working men and women who struggle every day to put food on your table." Yeah, I hear you, and there is an economic impact on anyone who agrees with what Pollan's writing. But you also ought to consider that Beef being 'what's for dinner' for the past 50 years has contributed, at least in part, to this:

Obesity causes more than 100,000 cases of cancer in the United States each year — and the number will likely rise as Americans get fatter, researchers said on Thursday.

Having too much body fat causes nearly half the cases of endometrial cancer — a type of cancer of the uterus — and a third of esophageal cancer cases, the American Institute for Cancer Research said.

For me, it's the economic reality that I have family history of heart disease and diabetes and that I can spend more now on food that hasn't been altered in ways that make my life more likely to include cholesterol-lowering pills and shots of insulin...or I can spend more on health insurance and medical bills for the later third of my life.

I have to say, for the most part, I will be paying more now because it just makes sense to me.

Academic integrity does not mean that there is a zero-sum game in 'opinions on stage at one time.' It means the academic institution is a place in which learning is cherished, and in which all ideas are permitted to be expressed. That does not mean that it is a place in which you should feel good about throwing your weight to insure students can't hear one perspective without immediately having the opposing viewpoint in the moment. If you respect your alma matter, you'd respect their ability to have an open discussion rather than threatening the future students who will now not have the lab they need to learn.

Credit where it is due and a quick call to have your own discussion about this somewhere. The good folks at Serious Eats pointed me to the articles I've been parsing and rebutting here, though I'll also say I recently finished both "Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food," so it's been on my mind.

What This All Means

Instead of debating the issues of academic freedom at Cal Poly and Washington State University and whether Pollan will ever be buddy-buddy with industrial corn and soy farmers, let's focus on the dialogue here.

It means that what started as a small movement of people, often characterized as "impractical elitists," has become important enough to garner widespread attention. Before, the state of our food system was considered the norm and those who wanted to change it were buttonholed as ideological or out-of-touch. Now that ag-corporations are sitting up, taking notice, and feeling the need to put pressure on universities, we should all take that as a sign that this movement is going somewhere.

I hope that conversation does happen. And based solely on my authority as a consumer, I hope more and more people reach the same conclusion I reached.

Green Bean & Potato Curry

Green Bean/Potato Curry
Originally uploaded by kitchen geeking

So two meals cooked by me. One day. Shocker of a the month for sure. Sorry for the photo, I left the camera in the office (which, yes, I KNOW is technically only two blocks away).

That 'stuff' on top of that rice was the product of my grocery trip earlier this week when I picked up the potato and said "I will cook you;" the green bean and said "You will grace my plate;" and then got home and realized the garam masala Momma D brought back from India would be the gluey, masala-y good ness that, along with some onion, garlic, ginger, chicken stock, milk, butter, salt, pepper, oil, and rice...would bind the two together like a geek and a "duct tape is the force" joke.

And for you folks that are a'feared of "curry," know two things...1) E texted when she saw the picture of dinner and said it would go great with Bud Light Clamato; and 2) watch this typing happen.

That's rice. And green beans. And potatoes. And garlic. And... And... GRAVY. (Sorry Chez, making the point for the greater good).

It's not some bizarre concoction. You really only have to get your head around two things. Garam Masala, which is kinda like the spice mix your grandma put together for the mulled cider, only savory instead of sweet. And ginger, which I BET you're not that scared of since you've had ginger/peach something in your life.

But most folks from the part of the world I call home get that combination of sauce and starch with some sort of veg from garden or market. Honestly, throwin' a pan-fried pork chop on top of this and calling it Indian Chops n' Gravy on Rice would not offend me in the slightest. And there's pork chops with rice and gravy on truck stop menus all up and down I-81 in the Shenandoah...

You readers? You see the theme forming here? Yeah, from the Super Pollo and Ravi Kabob posts?

Here at Ravi I was struck by being able to same the same thing about the black-eyed pea. I've slow-cooked mine for years with a ham hock and garlic/onion. These guys were slow-cooking theirs with cardamom and coriander and the same garlic/onion mix. So much more that we have in common; because I have to believe that some Southern dude in fatigues and some Afghan dude away from home are both remembering long-simmered greens and stewed black-eyed peas. Not getting too far out there, just sayin' I bet it happens a lot.

And now here in my own kitchen?

So many similar comforts, textures, starch/sauce combinations. All over the world.

Fritata Riff in the Morning

Fritata Riff in the Morning
Originally uploaded by kitchen geeking

Bacon & Crispy Shallot w/ Plum Tomatoes and Fontinella/Gruyere.

Too Long

16 days? No posts? Well, folks, I have excuses and reasons. But none of them explain away the lack of typing. I was sick but I cooked then and still know how to make a mean macaroni n' cheese. I traveled but great food happens on the road and I loved the Diwali celebration at Mother India last weekend. I bought new books to read but they're all about food, farming, and history (of food). Really I've just been lazy about writing. So we have esoterica tonight...

Esoterica in Print Form

I will miss reading this from time to time but it got me thinking about both cooking magazines and about traditional media in general. When I started this cooking madness I subscribed to and read four cooking magazines. I still have the subscriptions, and I still love them, but I don't know that I'd miss them as much as I would have if they had stopped publishing several years ago. I haven't had cable at home for four months now and I still have a modicum of knowledge about pop culture. Even though we don't have Gourmet anymore (and I think it's crap that Gourmet and it's million subscribers are screwed and Conde-friggin-Nast goes on), but we'll still talk about fine food and cooking.

Esoterica in Restaurants

I hit up B. Bistro in Bolton Hill last week for Ms. S's birthday shindig and was not disappointed in the least. Great wines, great people, great charcuterie. A frisee salad with lardons, a perfectly poached egg, crumbled tangy blue cheese, and a mustard vinaigrette. That dish, more than any other we had that night, was a classic bistro dish. Paris-style. Perfect. Add to that to pork belly entrée surrounded by Cassoulet-style white beans and covered in wet whole-grain mustard; and you’d have a happy food blogger. There were some misses, like the beet salad that was over-oiled and the fried-green tomatoes that sogged a bit because they were the bed for a whole fish. Our server was a nice’un, but it took him a while to get sorted out on the pacing of ‘please sir, bring us more wine.’ Then again, perhaps that says more about us than him. He did have to put up with a table of serious food whores on a random Wednesday night shift.

Esoterica in Signing-Off Form

So I leave you with this thought for a rainy night on the water. If you saute two shallots and three cloves of garlic in olive oil, add about 3 cups of sliced cremini mushrooms, start about a half pound of pasta to boil, add some spinach to the saute, throw the almost done noodles into the saute pan with a few ladles of the pasta water, put it on a plate and put parmesan cheese on it...you'd have had dinner tonight too.

Fall Weekends - Soups and Eggs

A double-treat for you hear, since I've already done the Lentil Soup recipe way back in my FIRST post ever two years ago this weekend. Not only two meals in one post, but a theme. That's right, we're goin' Meta on Sunday mornin'. I went there. You have that crap song stuck in your head. We'll all survive. Follow...

I have a collection of wonderful food memories that I didn't realize would be so important to me when I lived them. Isn't that always the case with time and memory. But looking back, these were always the memories of family I have had, and I didn't until recently put together that the meal was the focus.

I know now that there are four or five events or periods in my life that are the foundation of the cooking bug.

Sifting the flour and salt and baking powder for Date Nut bread when I was six or seven and chopping the potatoes, celery, carrots, and onion for the lentil soup when I was a little older.

The year I spent living with Mike and Craig my junior year when we had a real kitchen and cooked real meals (including the most inebriated bratwurst/sauerkraut dinner ever prepared by a German Studies Senior Housefellow in Conn history).

The first time I ever cooked a holiday meal for anyone (Hot Roomie #1 and I cookin' for her rents and broder Thanksgiving 2003).

The first time I ate foie and cabeza at the taquerias of Anaheim.

The best of times in places that hold magic. Remembering Uncle Paul giving the grace and Aunt Juanita passing me the lemonade. Playing in grandpa's roll-top desk while meals watermelons were sliced and sun-tea brewed on the back porch.

You get the picture. I think about family and friends and connections and places. And I remember them with great detail. And I remember the food. Not in a trite way that is simply a catalog of meals. That happens in the modern twitter-world, and I'm a part of that. But so long and I know there's more to it than that, I don't mind living in both places simultaneously.

So I remember peeling and slicing carrots. And potatoes. I probably asked what bay leaf was a time or two. There was always that one grocery trip when Mom would say the words that unlocked Fall. Real fall. "I need to get some lentils." Because there was only one reason we ever had lentils in our house growing up. There are more now, but this was the only time I recall as a kid. It was time to get to making a pot of lentil soup. Dad loved it, it was one of those recipes that Mom could do in her sleep and was flexible enough in its preparation that the intervening son, daughter, cat, or other house crisis would not impede its progress.

It was better the next day for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, or all three. And there was almost never enough sausage bites in it. Like trying to make enough mashed potatoes for dinner on Saturday night so we could have potato pancakes for breakfast on Sunday. You just always had that last bowl of soup left that was essentially gravy and lentils with perhaps a stray chunk of carrot. I relish that bowl now, I was supremely disappointed in it as a surly 9-year-old.

I make it every year, usually twice a Fall/Winter. But it always seems to taste better the first time I make it in a new kitchen. Helps that I get to cook it in the Dutch Oven Mom bought for me for my birthday last year. Keeps the connection there.

And then there was Saturday breakfast. The first real glimpse of the weekend for the family. Friday night now, but then there were too many activities and tired-people at the end of the week and Friday was a 'out-to-eat night.' So we'd wake up on Saturday morning and, barring morning sports requirements and my parents 'I hated it then and realize its wisdom and benefit now' Play-a-Sport-a-Season rule, we'd have soft-boiled eggs on toast. Then this week the genius peeps over at Serious Eats wrote this marvel on eggs.

I've moved to poached as a favorite egg prep since those days, but there was a moment this morning when I was sitting at the old pine oblong table in the kitchen at the house on Citadel and there was a sauce pan of water still steaming and two eggs some rye toast on my plate. Mom and/or Dad sitting cracking there eggs with the back of a knife letting the yolk run over the bread and then scooping the white and adding a bit of pepper.

Recreated, I think because we both just remembered it so clearly, by Dad and I when I lived with him post-grad school. Saturday and Sunday mornings. Two bachelor roommates. Two eggs and some toast. Easy on the brain while you got your coffee on.

This time I baked the bread too. Joy of Cooking's quick white bread one-loaf recipe subbing the last cup of flour for whole wheat flour. I'm not sure I count myself a baker yet, but I'm getting the rhythm of the mix, knead, rise, knead, proof, roll, rise, bake.

I'll get that second-day bowl of soup with bread here in a minute before I head out to watch some football with a pal on his birthday. Might bake some mac n' cheese tonight to have options for the week at lunch.

I'm still facing a daunting list of chores to get through today after the trip to the b-day shindig, but at least I'm well fed in food and memory.

Ravi Kabob House

This post combines some of the best bits of always having food on the brain. A new restaurant that serves a strange and distant land's food and some of your favorite foodie peeps. First and foremost, we all wanted to go because CassiBob and I had never been and we've kinda gotten used to KarlJohn gettin' the lowdown on the righteous ethnic cuisine in the DC/NoVA tip. I've got the MD burbs and Bal'mer covered. Secondly, I have to admit to a not-surprising fascination with food grilled on sticks. And I wanted to see what was similar and what was different between Pakistani (which I've never had) and Indian and Afghan (lucky enough to have checked off those boxes on the foodie scorecard).

Ravi's just what it sounds like, a joint with all types of kabobs. From that part of the world where the Indians and Persians got their food on and the Europeans, Arabs, and Asians eventually traveled around. God bless spice trading in the Middle Ages for bringing all this food together.

Since we'd never been CassiBob and I each got an app. She went Samosa, I went Special Samosa. And DAMN was it special. The special was an open-face Samosa (potato, pea, standard fare) SMOTHERED with stewed chick peas, onion, a sweet/hot sauce, and cilantro...lots of cilantro. And blessedly it was large enough to share without hesitation. CassiBob thought the Samosa was okay, and I'm guessin' she might have had a higher individual opinion of it had my special not been right beside it.

For the entrees, we get into serious Meatopia. There are chicken marinated in yogurt (CassiBob), ground beef with spices (CassiBob), whole lamb chops grilled to perfection (ThisGuy), cubed beef and lamb on the spit, and daily specials cafeteria-style including a lamb and lentil dish (KarlJohn). Each dinner comes with two sides and the staff automatically recommends rice and chick peas and a hefty piece of bread (In the Indian joint, it'd be Naan. Not sure if there's a Pakistani food word that's different). CassiBob and KarlJohn went there. For a little more variety on the table, I tried the rice and some black-eyed peas. Each plate also accompanied by a small salad.

Take note. This was the best lamb chop I have ever eaten. It was perfectly charred on the outside and medium on the inside. You KNEW it was cooked with fire. And you loved every blessed, bone-knawing minute of it. Yes people, if you get meat served on a bone; pick it up. Don't you dare waste that food.

Tangent. Karl and I had that great conversation about the chick pea at Super Pollo. So versatile in so many different cuisines from Italian to Peruvian to Indian and Lebanese. What a great food. Here at Ravi I was struck by being able to same the same thing about the black-eyed pea. I've slow-cooked mine for years with a ham hock and garlic/onion. These guys were slow-cooking theirs with cardamom and coriander and the same garlic/onion mix. So much more that we have in common; because I have to believe that some Southern dude in fatigues and some Afghan dude away from home are both remembering long-simmered greens and stewed black-eyed peas. Not getting too far out there, just sayin' I bet it happens a lot.

Staff/Crowd. Look, I'll be honest here. I'm pretty 'merican in appearance. And I love it when I'm in a food joint from a galaxy far, far away and can tell. It tells me one thing: People who grew up eating this food out of there mother's kitchen think this is food on which it is worth spending money. And I have to say I feel lucky to walk into places like Ravi. The crowd was all happy, the food was flying out at a good clip into the waiting arms of a husband and wife, co-workers, and native friends catching up at their local joint that serves family-style bowls of several meals.

Staff could tell as soon as we walked in that we were new and helped out immensely. Dude sitting at the four-top waiting for his togo? Yeah, polite move-ask from the staff so we could grab the table. Behind the counter? Here, look over some menus. Yes, you order up here then we'll let you know when the food is ready. In this tray? That's the daily chicken special. Here's the lamb. Ready to order? Sure. Yes, the Ravi Speical? Of course. It's rare when I notice a rapid-fire ordering interaction that much, but this one worked very well. Perfectly timed 'everything okay' during the meal. Eye contact as we were heading out and a pleasant 'how was it?' because I think he really wanted to make sure it was good. Amen to that.