Curry Night

At our house, Tuesday is takeout night. It's the one day of the week I never, ever cook dinner, requiring as I do some allotted time for laundry, accounting, vacuuming, and other household chores. My reward for all this domestic toil is that, on his way home from work, Sir stops by the family's favorite curry house and picks up our evening meal. It is an eminently sensible routine and the resulting weekly banquet is much anticipated by all. Lost is so much more thrilling when we watch it with an Indian feast spread out upon the coffee table before us!

We are all big fans of what I like to call 'overseas curry'. We've dined at the Indian Cavalry Club in Edinburgh; Sheik's Cuisine in Pocklington, East Yorkshire; Devi in Tokyo; Jewel of India in New York City; and La Bombay in Rennes. We've enjoyed Bengal fish stew in Cape Town and ostrich curry in the Little Karoo. Sir even visited a tiffin joint in Bangalore, once, although that doesn't count because the restaurant was actually in India. Now we are loyal devotees of Spice India in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which just goes to show you can always do one better.

We cannot pretend to be very knowledgeable about the subtlety and nuances of Indian food. I vaguely know, because one of my cookbooks tells me so, that there are great geographical, religious, and cultural influences at work on different culinary traditions throughout the country. I am aware that there's Moghul cuisine, rich and sauce-laden, in the north and, further south, mainly vegetarian Brahmin dishes - with lots of variations in between. I have been told by Sources In The Know that foreign curry does not bear much relation to any of these noble traditions and that to talk about 'curry' at all is considered in many circles to be a culinary slur. I'm not too bothered by any of this nit-picking: we know what we like and our Indian restaurant is really, really good at what it does.

And here's the thing. When I first became a gluten-freedom fighter, and all my usual lunch and dinner places let me down and couldn't promise that there was anything on the menu untainted by cereal, Spice India never failed me. It's an honest place where actual cooking goes on in the kitchen: they know the ingredients in the food they put before the punters, unlike some franchise eateries I could mention that are utterly unable to assure trepidatious customers that the cheese on their potato skins has, in fact, no gluten in it.

Consider paneer so fresh it squeaks, baked with cloves in the tandoor or done up with spicy tomato and butter sauce; chicken tikka masala (the Kid Squid's favorite), creamy and rose-tinted; potatoes stewed with peas, onions, and hot hot chilis; goat with spinach and coriander; biryanis of all descriptions; and my favorite - zafrani pulao kashmiri, which is basmati rice steamed with saffron and milk, suffused with raisins, peas, pistachios, and canned fruit cocktail. I like it best when Chef pulls out all the stops and gets the deluxe cans with maraschino cherries in the mix - they add such insouciant flair to the final preparation. I kid you not - if I must ever choose my last meal, a huge steaming bowl of that aromatic, sweet, golden, jewel-studded rice is going to be it.

Oops - gotta go.

That's Sir on the phone, calling for our order!