In Our Kitchen

Appears in

Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent

Published 2005

About

We both started cooking Indian food when we were in our late teens and early twenties, several years before first traveling to South Asia. Naomi, as a student in London for a year, lived in a hostel in Bayswater, where she had a good introduction to the food of the Subcontinent through meals in small, inexpensive Indian and Pakistani restaurants. It was there that she tasted her first thali meal and encountered her first pork vindaloo.

I was living in Laramie, Wyoming, light-years away from even a whiff of ground coriander seeds and fresh curry leaf. But with my friends Mark and Barb, I discovered a restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, a hundred twenty miles away, serving Indian and Sri Lankan home cooking. It was called the Indo-Ceylonese, as I remember, and it was run by a family from Sri Lanka. The owner would bring each dish family-style to the table and announce its name as he put it down. For us, it was incredibly exotic, and an adventure: After eating there, we would replay our meal for weeks on end and look forward to the next.

'Brilliant app for foodies'

'Spotify of cookbooks'

Part of

The Great Subcontinent

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