Spice & KissesDifficulty level: easy (can be made post-call)
It’s that time of year again… when even a few minutes at the stove can leave you drenched in sweat… and the tomatoes are overrunning my kitchen (admittedly not a bad problem to have).
Hello August!
The AC situation in our home has improved since last summer, so cooking doesn’t leave me as overheated as it used to, but I’m still not super-excited about stirring a pot on the stove top for long periods of time. Enter gazpacho.
Even though I filed this recipe from my mother under South Indian, I also tagged it as fusion. Mostly, this is because I often substitute in quinoa in place of the more traditional white rice, as demonstrated by the photos. However I would like to point out that Thakkali Sadam itself, even when using rice, is an old example of fusion cuisine to begin with. Two key ingredients for tomato rice—tomatoes and chili—both originally hail from the New World. This dish didn’t exist in India before the time of Columbus. Which goes to show that the food we call fusion today may be called traditional a century from now. Imagine Italy without tomatoes, Ireland without potatoes, South and Southeast Asia without chili peppers. (I can’t.). Cuisine, and culture, both evolve constantly.
When I lived in downtown Baltimore, a French café across the street from my apartment served one of my favorite salads ever: grilled chicken, fresh mango, tomatoes, and avocado served on a bed of Boston globe lettuce. The combination of ingredients was simple yet genius. Despite missing this salad very much after leaving Baltimore, I never tried recreating it myself until I read a recent issue of Milk Street. Their recipe for “Senegalese Avocado and Mango Salad” zeros in on the flavor champions from my favored salad—sweet mango, creamy avocado, juicy tomatoes—and combines it with a tart, spicy, salty dressing. Instant fruit salad crack…because, yeah, without the lettuce and chicken, this is basically a savory fruit salad.