Rice Rationing

While we're on the subject of rice, MSNBC reports:

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - Sam’s Club, the membership warehouse division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is limiting how much rice customers can buy because of what it calls “recent supply and demand trends,” the company said Wednesday

The broader chain of Wal-Mart stores has no plans to limit food purchases, however.

Sam’s Club said it will limit customers to four bags at a time of Jasmine, Basmati and long grain white rice. Rice prices have been hitting record highs recently on worries about tight supplies as part of broader global inflation in food costs.

Howls of outrage from the local "Passage To India" and "Lucky Pot Chinese" establishments were not included in this article. Probably because:

The warehouse chain caters heavily to small businesses, including restaurants. Spokeswoman Kristy Reed said she could not comment on whether the problem was caused by short supplies or by customers stocking up in anticipation of higher prices.

So gentle readers, the next time your Indian curry night cookout is ruined by lack of basmati, you know who's hoarding the grain.

The whole affair is sadly reminiscent of the Great Dal Shortage of 2006 when:

The Indian government's decision to ban the export of dal (lentils) has hit Indian Americans hard.

The ban, imposed in June, has resulted in the commodity getting scarce in Indian grocery stores in the US, with prices almost doubling at some places.

"The minute (the ban) was announced, wholesalers put up the price," Jalil Hay, owner of an Indian grocery store in Stockton, California, told India New England , an ethnic newspaper. "(Prices) have almost doubled and tripled."

Ouch! Forget the recession, the lack of dal-bhaat (rice/lentils) is the one-two punch that's likely to hurt us Indian Americans the most.


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- April 23, 2008 4:02 PM // Diaspora , Food

Ciabatta Malpoa

What do you do you if you have a bunch of Ciabatta bread from Costco lying at the bottom of the refrigerator occupying valuable space? Sadly, I am the only one who took a liking to this product in its original state and I vastly overestimated my appetite for it. Luckily, my mother-in-law devised a plan: convert it to a Bengali sweet called malpoa. The results were delightful and I asked her for the recipe.

It's quite simple:

  • soak bread in milk to soften
  • fry in vegetable oil for crispness
  • dip in sugar syrup - but not too much, just enough for the sugar to seep in
  • set aside to cool

Ciabatta Malpoa

Apparently, a variant of this recipe is also known as Bombay Toast.

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- March 8, 2008 7:28 PM // Bangla , Food

Desi Grocery Could Save Veronica Mars

Some of you might be familiar with Veronica Mars, the chick detective show that, after struggling for a couple of seasons, was finally dispatched to the great TV in the sky. However, dedicated fans, following the lead of another recently axed yet resurrected show, Jericho, have launched a campaign to bring their show back. In this, they've found a very unlikely ally indeed: an Indian grocery store based in Houston. Key here is the fact that a) TheIndianFoodStore has an online storefront and b) features British imports including candies. Yep, the idea is for fans to buy Mars bars from here and have them fedex'ed to the CW headquarters ASAP. The initial surge caught the store by surprise, but, to their credit, they adjusted quickly in true web 2.0 style. More info from their freshly launched "Bars From Mars" campaign:


I'll be honest, we've never watched the show before but WOW, we are impressed! Your enthusiasm and support for the show has awed us all! I have been in contact with some of you in the past day or two and I realized how powerful this has become! Apparently, CBS's Jericho had a similar campaign and it worked! I'm fired up to make this work too!

If you are curious, we are a small family business located in Houston, TX that just recently started our online operations. We have been importing from India and England for several years now and primarily distribute to retail stores and grocery stores around the country. We have yet to become profitable in this aspect of our operation, but this publicity will certainly help! More importantly, I am so happy that I am involved in this, especially since I have been able to communicate with so many fans directly. Once things settle down a little, I'll be sure to watch all of the shows in the past seasons!

As we attempt to inform you with updates on the Amazon website, we are calling all distributors we know around the country trying to buy Mars Bars. (We had to raise the prices $.20 just to reflect this, so we apologize for this!). I've created this blog to get fans to post their comments and give us suggestions on how we can improve this. We've only got until Monday to make this work since it will take some time for FedEx to arrive to their facility! (By the way, can anyone get a video of the FedEx driver pulling into the CW facility so we can show all the fans?)

And in a later update, they inform us they are now considering Snickers Almond Bars:

Someone in the comment section gave us a suggestion that Snickers Almond Bars are the same as Mars Bars and they prominently display a "Mars" logo. If the majority agrees, we can try to arrange 4-5 thousand bars of that and send it along with this big shipment. Of course, these are more readily available (and cheaper!) than the Mars Bars. So, if everyone can give us a show of support for this, we can look into it and get it (hopefully!) arranged. Once the Mars bars run out, we will lower the price, of course, to reflect the lower cost.

Fast turnaround indeed! I was never a big fan of the show myself but my best wishes to the enterprising fans, the producers and to the little desi store that could.

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- June 7, 2007 7:51 PM // Food , TV

Banff

We recently returned from a trip from Banff, Calgary. The scenery is gorgeous and amply illustrated elsewhere. What I wanted to document for posterity was the fabulous chocolate fondue we had at the Fairmont Lake Louise. Sliced bananas, strawberries, whipped cream, apples, pineapples and fresh cubed banana bread together with rich molten chocolate. Heaven indeed!

Chocolate Fondue

This way to sunshine. If only it were that easy :-)

This way to sunshine

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- May 25, 2007 7:28 PM // Food , Travel

All You Can Eat Ayurveda?

A good friend of ours, Lalitha Vaidyanathan, has been hard at work trying to bring the concept of Ayurvedic food to San Francisco. Specifically, she's focusing on franchising Annalakshmi, a chain of vegetarian restaurants with a twist. From The Karmic Kitchen in the San Francisco Weekly:

Imagine walking into an upscale Indian restaurant, its menu filled with delectable-sounding choices like Malabar avocado and coconut soup (made with plain yogurt, cumin, and lemon juice and served with fresh cilantro chutney and whole wheat chapatis) and drinks like the Saffron Sandalwood Fizz (lime juice and pure water, cooled overnight by the light of the moon). You sit down with friends and enjoy a delicious, ayurvedic vegetarian meal, served with a smile. Then you finish, feeling satisfied, and signal for the bill -- but none comes. This scenario is not merely a fantasy: At Annalakshmi, you decide what to order and how much to pay.

Inspired by Swami Shantanand -- a Hindu monk from Rishikesh, India, who came to Southeast Asia in the early 1970s -- the small international restaurant chain operates with an uncommon trust in humanity: that people will pay what is fair because we are inherently good and because it is in our own best karmic interests to give. Although its concept may sound too idealistic to stand a chance, Annalakshmi has been in business for 19 years, and has thriving outposts in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and India. And now it's geared up to open its first eatery in the United States -- in an as-yet-undetermined spot in San Francisco.

Behind the scenes is a 35-year-old Marina District woman named Lalitha Vaidyanathan, who, late last year, quit her job as a co-founder and vice president at SquareTrade, a company that facilitates fair online sales, to pursue the restaurant's local development full time. "I always felt like Annalakshmi has so much to offer people beyond just food," she explains. "It really provides a whole new way of seeing the world and its possibilities. I felt that San Francisco would be a perfect place to open one. Why not? I figure if it's meant to happen it will. I have complete trust in whatever's meant to be."

Hear hear! For those of us fortunate enough to taste the teasers Lalitha prepares in her kitchen, all I can say is she may well make permanent vegetarians out of us yet! Until then, here's to Annalakshmi, a place where you can balance your doshas (not dosas) as well as your pocketbook.

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- May 30, 2005 11:13 PM // Food