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Showing posts with the label Food

Cultural fusion - chicken tikka masala and fortune cookies

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Chicken tikka masala and fortune cookies are iconic dishes that were invented away from the cultural origin. Chicken tastes amazing and cookies are wrapped with wisdom. The chicken tikka masala sauce and its prep meal are very popular and can be found in every supermarket. It is more likely, it is derived from butter chicken, a popular dish in northern India. The masala sauce was added to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy. In short, the use of spices and serving the gray, synthesis two diverse cultures but get along well together, using food as the bridge of different cultures. As the portraying the eastern culture, it is successful to promote the Indian culture. Fortune cookies are often served as a dessert in Chinese restaurants in the West, but they may or may not be Chinese in origin or maybe in Japan. The origin is debatable. The interesting part of fortune cookies is not the cookies themselves, just a kind of vanilla cookies. The con...

Food and music - the analogies between Indian music and food

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When I arrived in Birmingham, I was told that the Indian food here is very famous. Don't ask me why isn't British cuisine - I don't know. I cook a lot, it is enjoyable (and to my finance). Thinking of cooking and composition, they have a lot in common. The article "Why Hindustani Musicians are Good Cooks: Analogies between Music and Food in North India" by Adrian McNeil is a good explanation of that. The title is very self-explaining. According to McNeil, when you cook you have to identify the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary ingredients. For chicken tikka masala, a very famous Indian dish invented in the UK. I reference the BBC recipe, hope it is better than fried rice. Primary ingredients - Chicken, red peppers, onions, mango chutney, tomatoes Secondary ingredients - tikka masala paste, double cream, yogurt Tertiary ingredients - ginger, garlic, oil, butter In Indian music that McNeil suggests Primary - basic scale, mode. Secondary - vadi (the note of a rag re...